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Grace stood in the open doorway to the hallway behind me.

When she hadn’t been following me around Moenia, my cousin had avoided talking to me for the last three weeks, as if I were a renegade. As if she wanted to punish me, even though I still didn't know what her problem with me was. And as if that weren't enough, she was now seeing Vivienna. Regularly.

The perfect environment.

I knew she was listening to these girls gossiping about me, and I would be lying if I said it left me cold.

“What do you mean?” I replied, more tensely than I intended.

Grace looked me straight in the eye. “I heard you're going to be under surveillance.”

Surely it pleased her. And surely, she would play her part in it.

Grace was like her mother, and she was still under her overprotective influence. Except that Amara was a little more critical in her thinking, and one could see that she didn't agree with the Councils' decisions. That she struggled to obey blindly.

“Are you satisfied now?”

Grace didn’t reply, just kept looking at me, and I felt like a ghost she was staring through, unable to meet her gaze.

“I should have known,” she finally began. “Although you were the last person I would have expected it from.”

How did she manage to make me feel ashamed in her presence?

This was Grace, my cousin, a girl I had clung to in order to somehow survive here.

Now, however, I felt so small and insecure in her presence. Worthless and lost. As if she would always see me in my old fragile light, wanting to point out to me that I could be no one other than that Julie Blair who stood next to her and said yes and amen to everything.

She still saw me as that shy girl who would never go anywhere near a man, let alone sleep with one.

“I just thought you were smarter than that,” she replied with an indecipherable undertone.

For as long as I could remember, she had expected me to follow the rules. Now I had broken them, and Grace simply couldn’t cope with that. I had disrupted her usual order.

Her loss.

“I hope his father won't become a problem for us,” she eventually sighed, and for a paralyzing split second, I saw Amara in front of me.

“Don't worry. He's gone.”

With those words, I hastily closed the door in her face and turned around. Something the old Julie would never have done.

My room felt much smaller than before. It had always been the place I could escape to, but now it felt like a ridiculous prison that I hadn't been allowed to leave for three weeks, except to go downstairs, visit Moenia's underground floors, the parks and the giant Victorian greenhouses, or to see the Councils.

Starting tomorrow, that would change. I would be back at Vanderwood. And I had no idea what to expect there.

Swallowing hard, I realized that the Salma was already wearing off, because the memories of my last evening at Vanderwood hit me like a wrecking ball, tearing away more and more pieces of me. And every time I thought that evening had completely destroyed me, I discovered more crumbling walls inside me, torn away by the next flood of memories. Over and over again...

Memories. They were just memories. And yet they were so powerful.

With my lips pressed together, I somehow made it to my bed and sat down.

And then all the thoughts of the last weeks burst out of the holes that the wrecking ball had torn into my soul.

I barely noticed my half-grown puppy pressing his nose against my belly and snuggling up against me. I also ignored the dozens of ravens outside my window.

Quentin Tiberius. Professor of Molecular Biology and Mythology. A mad researcher. The man I had slept with. The father of my baby.

Before I could even realize what was happening, tears were running down my cheeks.