“I forgive you, Ash.” Lucinda kisses my temple, breaking me apart from the inside out. Then she turns to Pepper. “And you are going to have to realize you can’t control every outcome.”
“Lucy—”
“I know what I’m choosing. When it’s time.” Lucinda’s voice is steady. Certain. “Now both of you stop arguing with fate and start working with it.”
The edges of the room dissolve. Lucinda’s face blurs. Pepper’s hand reaches for me but passes through.
And just like that, I’m staring up at a night sky full of stars.
30
Kieran
“This is not a negotiation, Kestra.”
She rolls her eyes.
I am closer than I’ve ever been in my life to strangling my beloved baby sister. And she knows it. That’s why she’s smirking.
“Kieran, I’m a queen of Faerie. Stop acting like I’m a child to be, to be, to be—” She growls at me and tosses her hands in the air.
“You are being ridiculous!” I snarl back at her. “What are you going to do here? Huh?” I spin in a circle, arms outspread. “What, Kestra? Fuck Jadeve?”
I don’t see it coming.
One second I’m standing. The next there’s ice through my shoulder and bark against my spine and my sister’s face inches from mine.
I deserved that.
“That is not—” I exhale sharply and grip the spear wedged through my shoulder and into the tree behind me.
Kestra is in my face in the next breath. My beautiful, baby sister.
And it isn’t her face I see. It’s our mother’s, blurred together with Kestra’s until I can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
Her eyes crystallize. White stretching across the iris. When she blinks, it’s sideways. Then down. Like a lizard.
I’m looking at an Unseelie queen.
I’m looking at my baby sister.
Same person. That’s the part that terrifies me.
Little braids weave through her dark hair. Her skin white, her cheeks rosy. She’s Mab through and through.
And she’s pushing the spear deeper into me.
“How dare you,” she seethes.
She’s also still super short. And though she has me pinned by her power alone, I’m taller.
Now is not the time to point this out.
“Kestra, I didn’t?—”
“Mean anything by it?” She shrugs. “Bullshit.”
“You have spent way too much time with Ash.” I sigh, hearing Ash’s curses fall from her mouth.
