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“I remember her,” the real dragon mused. “I didn’t realize trying to empathize with her current emotional state would cause such a volcanic reaction.”

“Miss Duffy.” The echo spoke quietly, but their voice carried all the same. “You will conduct yourself with more composure, or you will become intimately familiar with what it means to be held in contempt of this court. You are entering a plea of not guilty?”

“Da—Yes.” It seemed that telling Theresa Duffy to contain herself, however, was inviting that anger to merely boil under a pot lid. “Abigail Rhyder is a lying c—” She stopped herself again and banged her fists against the railing. “She lied. She lied to us. She knew what she was doing and she fucking lied to us—I’m sorry, Your Honor, I’m sorry. I have never been this angry at anyone in my entire life.” She looked around the courtroom pleadingly. “I respect that you have secrets to keep, if I was one of you, I wouldn’t want me to know about us either. But I need you to understand I did not ask for this. I met Abigail in a special interest group for witches at UCL. I didn’t even practice, I just thought it might be a way to find a more alternative group of friends on campus. She approached me, okay?” The metaphorical lid was beginning to shake as the bubbles beneath began to rise more violently. “She asked me some vague bullshit about if I’d be interested in seeing something real. My family is from Basingstoke, so I thought she meant drugs, if I’m honest, and it was university, so yeah, I’m game to experiment. Instead, she shows me you lot. What the hell am I supposed to do with that?”

“Is this reaching a point, Miss Duffy?” Fiore’s echo asked.

“Yeah, it has a point. The point is I was never supposed to be here. I was never supposed to be one of you. I was gonna have a wild four years and then like…settle down with some loaded fuck who could keep me comfortable when I got old. But Abigail comes in, changes everything—shows me my whole life is a lie, magic is real, and I have the ability to wield it if I want to. After that? I would have believed her if she said the moon was made of fucking cheese. So yeah, I may have been an accessory, but not a willing one. She straight-up lied to us. I know she did. And I was stupid enough to believe her!” Theresa kicked the railing. “She said it was karmic! That he’d only get what he deserved!”

Chapter 37 Saga

“Do you still believe John Hingley got what he deserved?” Saga had returned to her seat after a breath or two. Calm. That was the key to talking to her mother, and it would be the only way she’d get anything out of Abigail.

“Sundering brings a clarity that does not require me to believe anything,” Abigail said simply. “I am not John’s judge. How can I say what he did or did not deserve? At the time, I felt I was justified. I am considerably altered since then.”

Unnervingly altered was more like. The more time Saga spent speaking with this woman, the more she wondered how ethical something like sundering could be. The pictures of her mother and even the woman captured in the trial’s recording had seemed passionate and brimming with love for her family. And now both she and Abigail were barely more than functional shells. They had no true likes or dislikes, only disdain for that which they no longer could understand. They went from one task to another without desire or ambition. “So you don’t feel you were treated unfairly in your trial?”

“I broke the law, and I was punished according to the governing around those laws. What would be unfair?”

“What about what happened with your coven?” Saga prodded. “They were bound but not sundered. Did that ever bother you?”

“No. Betsey told me a few months after my incarceration. It might have bothered me before the sundering. I was irrational and headstrong. But I had lied to them, and their crimes were committed without their full knowledge of my intent. It would make sense their sentences would be different.”

“Betsey Paris visited you at Blackthorn?” asked Reza.

“A few times,” Abigail confirmed in her same disinterested tone. “She apologized over and over. There was a lot of crying.” Her lip curled like she’d just smelled dung. “She wanted me to tell her I forgave her. I told her to stop wasting her time and mine.”

It was the closest thing Saga had seen to expressing a genuine emotion. “Because you didn’t forgive her?”

“Because forgiveness is a concept invented to placate ego. I cannot give her something that is not real. She needed to seek her validation elsewhere. She would not find it in me.”

Saga wasn’t certain anyone would find anything in Abigail anymore. Was she like this simply because she was sundered? Or because she was sundered and then imprisoned, thus receiving no real external input from the world? Saga’s own mother was often trying and certainly unable to deal with emotion, but… She still wasn’t this. Perhaps there were support groups for families affected by a member being sundered. She would have to ask Leigh. “Did anyone else come to visit you in your time here? Theresa or Patricia, maybe?”

“No, neither of them,” said Abigail. “The only visitor, other than you two, was Velouette Radu.”

Saga exchanged another look with Reza and tried to hold on to her calm exterior. She didn’t need the interview halting again with Abigail pointing out how distracting her dramatic expressions were. “When did Velouette visit you?”

“A few times, usually by herself.”

Enough times to convince her to surrender her ownership on the vault key. “What did you talk about?”

“She told me zână were guardians of children, that they could not only see a child in the womb, but bless them.”

The words hit Saga cold. “Why… Abigail, were you pregnant?”

“John didn’t like condoms. He was foolish and shortsighted that way.”

“Saga, what’s—”

Saga pushed Reza’s comforting hand away as she stood. “What happened to that baby? Did you deliver?”

“Velouette let the medical team know, and they delivered the baby. I don’t know what happened after that.” She seemed even less concerned about it.

“I do.” How had she not seen it sooner?

John Hingley’s red hair, while easily passed down to children, was still only present in approximately 8 percent of all of Northern Europe’s population. Children were an approximation of their parents, but Abigail’s blue eyes were unmistakable. She had even seen both mother and child wear the same heart-shaped necklace—the locket! The only reason Mercy Radu had been at Karnaby House was for her birthday party. Iona hadn’t been there to see Velouette at all, but someone else entirely.

Saga stood again, gathering her coat in her arms. “I need you to wrap this up and then call for backup. As soon as you can, get to the magistrate’s chambers. I have to run.”