Bonus Epilogue
Cat
“So, what are you going to do now you’re free?” I asked, my eyes on the cobbled street ahead of us, but my attention fixed on the woman who walked beside me. Deceptively short, with a hidden fire I could sense. A rage that burned and burned. And burned.
Killing Violence gave her justice for him imprisoning her, experimenting with her magic, twisting it into a weapon he used against us in the chess game. But there was more. Other crimes she wanted revenge for. Other wrongs she wouldn’t rest until she righted.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said casually—too casually—as she strode down the cobbles with her hands in the pockets of her dark emerald coat.
Her hair fell around her face, severe black on one side, ash-silver on the other, no roots in sight despite her being trapped at Violence’s mercy for gods knew how long.
A different sort of death mask to mine, but one nonetheless.
“Maybe I’ll take up landscape painting.”
A laugh burst from me. “You’re going to hunt down the people who wronged you.”
Dark eyes snapped to me in surprise, a question on her lips that she answered herself with a roll of her eyes. “Judgement. That magic’s freaky, just so you know.”
My smile grew. “Oh, I know.”
Wary confusion crossed her heart-shaped face when I held out a scrap of paper.
“My number,” I explained.
“Look, girl, you’re hot, but you just got married to five different men and I’m not ready for that level of commitment—”
I punched her shoulder, the movement strangely easy.
Not forced or awkward. Moth and I weren’t friends, but we were two women who’d been thrust into this world, forced to become something deadly and dark to survive it.
We were powerful, and rare, an endangered species.
It made us allies at the very least. More than anyone, more even than her mother, I could understand what she’d been through.
“In case you need to talk,” I huffed. “Our experiences were different, but… I know what it’s like. The rage, the pain, the torture. The mind games. So if you need to talk…” I nodded to the paper in her hand. “You know who to call.”
“Thanks,” she murmured, tucking it into her coat pocket.
“I owe you, you know? If it wasn’t for you, I’d still be locked away, getting my magic shocked out of me, dying a little every day.
” Humour faded, her expression subdued, serious.
When she glanced at me, her eyes were as sharp as black diamonds and just as hard.
“He did everything he could to break me. I think he thought he’d get all my magic if he killed me, but I refused to die.
I kept holding on, lying to myself that someone would come, something would save me.
All total shit, obviously, but—you did come.
And you did save me.” She shrugged, her shoulders suddenly narrow, frail.
“I’m nowhere near fixed, but I am free, and that’s only because of you.
So I owe you. Whatever you need, whenever you need it, just let me know. ”
A smile sharpened her features as she added, “We can raise a little hell together.”
On impulse I threw an arm over her shoulders—thin, like I’d thought, evidence of how badly she’d been mistreated—and hugged her into my side. “And if you need help taking down those four stepbrothers of yours, just let me know.”
Moth laughed, defiant and loud. The kind of laugh that could only come from the dark, never from sunshine or moonlight. “You know, I might take you up on that. I’m going to make their lives miserable. I’m going to make them wish they’d never been born.”
I squeezed her shoulder. “I knew I liked you.”
Keep reading for the first chapter in my new Lunatic Academy series!
The end.