And so familiar in the way he picked at my thoughts, indelicately scratching at each memory he fingered through.
I should have gone screaming into the night.
I should have done anything other than meet his eyes and feel.
All my pain.
ALL MY PAIN.
Wrapped in a pretty bow of desecration and disappointment.
That thing on the stick hated Vlad. Burned with the blackest bubbling oil of greasy animosity.
I might have hated Vladislov in that moment too, but I hated Darius far more. “I enjoyed lying with him in a way you could never inspire me to enjoy you.”
What was I saying? Never had I heard that level of spite in my voice. That dark seed only grew, expanding in my chest until I felt my sad fangs attempt to descend only to ache with the inability to be little more than nubs.
As if that sorry head thought to console me, it whispered in my mind, “Dear treasure.”
“I’m not your treasure.”
“Always. None, but I care for you. Think of what you are now because of me and the sacrifices I made in your name.”
Soft grass under my bare feet. Where had my shoes gone? Lost when Vlad pushed me to the planks. Fallen off when I popped out of thin air a few feet too high above the ground and thudded into the earth like a bird shot out of the sky.
Dress torn, wrinkled, sodden, stinking of what had made me seek home. Ugly inside and out. So many gemstones around my throat that it ached. Breath confined, heart racing, I stood as I was. As who I was.
A broken thing.
“Your lips, Pearl. Put them to mine.”
“No.” Resolute, that filthy word twisted my tongue into the most unfeminine of replies.
I had been designed to be meek. Otherwise, God would not love me. I had allowed males to do horrible things to me in the name of subservience.
And in that moment, held by the heat of blood-red eyes, I swore to myself that it would never happen again. “This sight comforts me, knowing you are trapped on a stick in my sun, boiling at midday and begging for scraps at midnight.”
“Come, pet.” That fiddling in my thoughts, that itch. “Embrace me. I can save you from them.”
Not that I had not noticed the growing shadows once the sun was no longer a concern, the Cathedral’s inhabitants began to gather and whisper, edging nearer where I stood in a breathtaking garden.
The denizens of the Cathedral had seen me. No sun lingered to keep them away. And I was unwelcome.
Openly threatened yet perfectly stalked.
They wished for me to run.
They thirsted for a chase.
Yet still I stood hissing to the head of my personal demon as it oozed feted matter down the pike. Damn the whispering shadows back to their hell! I had words to say to this beast.
“You tore my baby out of my body!”
And it had words to say to me as well, the tone having skirted from seduction to cruel laughter. “More than one.”
Bile in the back of my throat, visibly swallowing, I felt the distortion and the fact. “You’re lying.”
If thoughts could smile, Darius was grinning like he’d eaten my babies for sport. “I can take you to them. How they cry for their mommy.”
The mental flash of the monster tearing at the flesh of a newborn was jammed into my brain like a hot poker. Darius sucking their marrow as if it were fine wine.
Yet, it didn’t feel real.
Nor did the flashes of children flung into the night to defend themselves against the monsters alone.
He had the power to plant lies like seeds. To water those lies with the victim’s doubt.
And still it was his head on the pike and not mine.
And terrible as those memories were, I laughed.
I had been that beaten child. Those monsters had already devoured me. It was my bones bashed into uneven brick and mortar in an unforgiving world that needed to feed.
It was a parlor trick of using my past, changing the hue, and pretending it was another.
I laughed harder.
Choking back a giggle once my mind flooded with images of a little boy who looked every bit mine—same features, same tenacity. But his blue eyes held none of my fear as he fought. His were the sea in a storm.
Refusal to submit.
And I knew as I saw him that no matter what the monster tried to show me, the little boy was real.
It was almost as if I could feel his little ghostly fingers curl around mine. The perfect greeting of a sweet child to a discombobulated stranger.
It was too real to bear.
“Mommy,” the memory called out, as if we had known one another. There was the lie. Not the voice. No, that voice was very real. It was the word.
Mommy.
He did not know me. Just as Jade did not know me. Just as I had never known my mother.