Twenty-Two #2
From the darkness of the chair in the far corner, something shifted—not something, but someone, rising from the shadows, still half a ghost himself as he cleared his throat in a dry, swallow sound.
“You could have died out there, been tricked into enslavement, or worse, and we’d not have known.
Szule, my dear, were you not raised better than that? ”
The weakness of his father’s voice hit Cin first, not simply soft or uncertain, but tired and empty in a way Cin had not witnessed since his mother’s death. As though he’d given up: given up on Cin.
Cin’s throat twisted suddenly, a lump forming so thick and ugly he couldn’t swallow it down.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, and he was, truly—not for leaving, perhaps, but for something .
He felt sorry: for the lives his family lived, for the desolate state of their hearts, for his own existence within their pointless little world.
He wished things were different. For all of them, no matter how much he’d hated them for so long.
But for himself especially.
Louise scowled, pulling at her own fingers. “Not sorry enough yet.”
With that, she raised her hand.
Cin felt the jolt before he registered the slap, and he stumbled, just slightly, just enough to feel like a fool for it.
The sting spread across his cheek moments after, starting with a prickle and turning quickly to a burn.
His jaw ached. He breathed in, trying to right himself, not simply physically, but mentally.
Louise held her hand like touching Cin had laid a curse on it.
The whole room was watching him: Floy, their brow lifted, and Manfred, smug as he’d have been if he’d landed the slap himself, and Father, his gaze so vacant he seemed not be there at all.
Emma looked away, her cheeks nearly as red as Cin’s must have been.
“Now,” Louise said, pressing her shoulders back, her chin up. A serene expression cloaked her previous rage. “You will proceed to the kitchen for dinner, as all of us have yet to eat for the evening.”
“The fire—” Manfred protested, but Louise cut him off with a hard look that made Cin wonder if this wasn’t the first time someone had been slapped that night.
“There will be a fire in everyone’s hearth by the end of the night,” she said, soft but unwavering. “You can have patience.” She took one look around the room, at the staring eyes of her family, and clapped her hands. “Now!” she shouted, as though she’d given anyone a task to do but Cin.
As though the last twenty-four hours hadn’t made it clear that no one but Cin was capable of any reasonable household task anyway.
He took a step back, but drew a breath, and before he could stop himself, he said, “They could come help me in the kitchen. Maybe if they were taught—”
“Then what?” Louise snapped. “We suffer through their incompetence in the meantime? Do you want us to starve tonight?” She snorted. “You had your magic adventure; you’re done. There’s no reason you’ll need to go tromping through the woods again.”
Cin’s hand went to his chest—his perfect, flat chest. The magic that had gone on there seemed like anything but some “tromp through the woods”.
Anything but worthy of dismissal. Anything but this .
“Mother,” Cin started to say, and he didn’t know where the sentence was going—to beg, to plead, or to demand—but then it didn’t matter.
Louise hit him again.
This time, Cin lost his balance entirely.
The jolt, the pain—fresh on old—sent him stumbling to his hands and knees, his palms on the cold, hard wood of the parlor where its ruined rugs had been pulled back.
He inhaled, half sob, half something worse.
His fingers gripped at the floor, and the first two of his right hand dug in. The wood there was gritty. Dark. Ashen.
It must have been where Manfred had dropped the ember earlier. And now it was Cin whose skin it stained.
He could hear Louise hovering over him, her voice so low it seemed meant only for him.
“I should think now, of all times, you’d be inclined to listen more than you speak,” she hissed. “You have no marriage arrangements, no apprenticeships, no money, no skill outside this house. There is nowhere for you to go but here.”
Cin could not bear to lift his face toward her, lest he see something worse than his stepmother’s wrath—his father, standing silently behind her, confused and disappointed.
Louise was right. Cin had no job or income, no offers of marriage—save for Dorthe’s, and it did not feel right to bind her to himself merely to be free from his family.
But he had one thing she still knew nothing about.
He had the friendship of Prince Lorenz. And for one fiery second he almost spat that fact into her face.
But even if he stayed the prince’s friend, that relationship would eventually be eclipsed by Lorenz’s future partnership, his co-leader.
So Cin drew himself quietly to his feet, his head bowed, his eyes pressed closed to keep the misery from seeping out of them in liquid form. Tight and low he said, “I’ll get the food ready.”
His body strained with so much tension that he felt like one wrong move would snap him in half as he made his way back through the house.
He seemed to have stood in the center of the dark kitchen for a thousand heartbeats before his mind flew back to him at the sound of timid footsteps behind him.
For a second, his heart twisted—Father? But he knew it wasn’t before he even turned.
Emma stood before him, her body so slight in the beam of moonlight that spilled in through the single kitchen window behind her. She stared at Cin, and he thought her throat bobbed, her eyes almost glistening. Waiting for him to reach out to her ?
When Cin couldn’t muster up the nerve, his baby sister shrugged, her lips twisting.
“You have a little...” She bundled the edge of her sleeve over her hand and wiped at the slapped side of Cin’s face. A long smudge of darkness came off.
Cin shivered. So many years since he’d been the Cinder-child, covered in ash, made to do the same chores until he could show he was capable, responsible, only to have that responsibility trap him into them, and here he was, still stained in the soot of the hearths that kept him warm.
Still just Cinder-Szule.
He wanted to cry.
He wanted to watch his knife slip, unhindered, into flesh.
He wanted his only friend there with him as he did both.
He wanted...
He wanted .