Just like she had.
We are not so different, she and I.
My attention settles on her throat. On the cursed choker. And even though my vision is blurring around the edges, I know she still needs a spell to be free of it. Because while my mother is dead and buried, hers is still after her.
And she’s much closer than she realizes.
Chapter 34
Adieu
CLAIRE
Gorrath suddenly shoved me behind him.
Weak from channeling so much power, I nearly lost my footing on the uneven stones. “What are you doing?”
“Protecting you.”
Footsteps raced up the stairs, and that familiar sense of dread sat in my stomach. The one that I couldn’t seem to release. After staring into Mellie’s eyes, into Devlinn’s eyes, there was nothing left that could break me. I’d seen the worst—smelled death—and I was not going to crumble now.
“I protect myself,” I told the demon.
He smirked. “Of course you do.”
A face appeared in the doorway that I’d known as well as my own, but I couldn’t believe it. She shouldn’t be here. She couldn’t. But… she was. Mama looked exactly as I remembered. Excepteverythinghad changed.
Her long white hair was braided tightly against her scalp, woven with thin leather cords. Runes were painted in ash across her forehead and down the bridge of her nose. Thesymbols I recognized. They were protection symbols. Against demonic influence. Against disease.
Against…me.
“You—” The word broke apart in my mouth. I was five years old again, huddled on the kitchen floor with my back pressed against the cupboard, cradling my right eye while spilled potion ate through the hem of my only skirt. The air had smelled like fresh lemongrass and thyme and the salty tang of my tears.
By the age of five, I knew I was wrong. Not just for making mistakes, but because I wasn’t the daughter she’d been promised.
Gorrath moved before I understood what was happening. One moment, he stood at my shoulder; the next, his arm was around her throat and his fist was buried in her braids, wrenching her head back so hard I heard the leather cords strain. His body pressed against her spine, all heat and fury.
I had spent years hoping to see warmth in her eyes. A shred of softness. A glimmer of something that might have meantlove. But there was no warmth then, and there certainly wasn’t any now. It was just unyielding hate. Now that I’d opened my heart to love, I could see what it had done to her. The way it had twisted her.
I hated—hated—that a small part of me wanted to save her. Even now. Even after everything that had happened. But I was experienced enough now to know Mama couldn’t be saved. I remembered the look in Mellie’s eyes, the one that felt so familiar to me, just before she killed Devlinn. Where her eyes held fear, Mama’s held only disdain.
“Now is the time for Bastien’s dagger,” Gorrath growled over her shoulder. “End her.”
The dagger? He wanted me to cut my own mother’s throat? To coat my hands in her blood? It was one thing to know shewas guilty of more than cruelty toward me, and another thing to carry out her punishment.
Everything I couldn’t say stuck in my throat and hardened there. My body refused to move. I was five again. Ten. Fifteen. My whole childhood replaying at once. Standing in doorways like a ghost, hoping to be invited into the living world.
“Go on,” Mama taunted. “Do as your demon master says. You filthy, evil little girl.”
The world narrowed to the space between us. My fingers twitched around the dagger. And a voice pushed back against her accusations. I wasn’t stupid. I wasn’t evil. And I wasn’t a girl. I was a woman wed with magick of my own. I knew things she’d never know.
If I didn’t end this now, she would keep infecting the world with her evil. My heart pounded so hard I thought it might split my ribs. I tried to step forward, but my feet would not obey. Some invisible tether wrapped around my spine and yanked me back into place.
“Do it,” Gorrath urged.
But I couldn’t.I couldn’t.
The truth bloomed in my chest like its own kind of rot. Not because I loved her. Not because she deserved mercy. But because she’d ensured I wouldn’t be able to hurt her. The barbs on my choker pierced my skin, and blinding pain turned everything around me white.
