34. Ava
AVA
M y eyes opened in horror, locking on the shadowy face of the smaller guard standing over me.
A pale delicate hand emerged from the dark folds of the robe and threw back the hood, revealing her all-too-familiar face and pale eyes the color of Hydrangea macrophylla .
“Ebony?” My voice cracked, the word barely audible. “What are you doing here?”
The stone beneath me, which had moments before been warm and slick with my sweat, felt like ice again, stealing the heat from my body.
My muscles protested as I pushed myself up on trembling arms, but my mind raced faster than my body could keep up.
The heavy stone door that Ciaran must have disappeared behind had been shut tight, and the only sound now was my own rapid breathing.
The other guards and their guns were gone.
We were alone .
Was she here to help? My chest tightened. Was she investigating them too? Trying to infiltrate the Sochai to take them down from the inside?
“Why did you have to be such a stubborn girl, Ava?” Her voice cut through the silence like the edge of a blade, sharp and filled with something dark I couldn’t name.
I flinched. “What—what are you talking about?”
“I did everything I could to keep you away from this,” Ebony said, her pale eyes blazing. “From remembering. From meddling. From serving your goddamn head to them on a goddamn platter, Ava!”
Her words hit me like a slap, each one heavier than the last.
My heart pounded as I stared at her, the woman who had been the only mother I’d ever known. The woman who had taken me in, fed me, clothed me, loved me in her own way.
“No,” I whispered, shaking my head, trying to make sense of her words. “No, you can’t be part of the Sochai.”
I choked on the realization, my mind spinning in circles, desperate to find a reason—any reason—that explained why she was here.
They got to her. Of course, they did. The Sochai had found her and broken her. Tortured her. Manipulated her. She’d been brainwashed, coerced into this.
She tried to help me as much as she could, in her own way, but she was being controlled by them somehow…
As I stared into her face, a flicker of something from my darkest memories took hold. It clawed at the edges of my mind, dragging me back to that room, that sterile, white hell of my forced abortion .
That voice that had seemed so familiar. His voice.
“You dare second-guess my command? You are my fucking heir. You will do as I say. Now… take care of it .”
My breathing quickened as it clicked into place. The voice I had heard during my abortion—the one giving calm, authoritative commands—the voice that had haunted my dreams wasn’t just familiar. It was him .
Ebony’s father.
My mind reeled. Her father had been the monster behind all of this, the architect of so much pain. My stomach churned with the realization. But another thought came, sharp and desperate.
Ebony had been forced into this by him. Of course she had.
“Get dressed.” Ebony’s voice was clipped as she tossed my top and skirt at me.
The fabric hit my chest and slid to the floor, my shaking hands barely managing to catch them in time.
I fumbled to tug the pieces back on, my movements clumsy and frantic. The chill of the tomb still seeped into my bones, and my feet were bare, my shoes lost somewhere on the uneven floor.
“Now get out of here before they return,” Ebony hissed, her eyes darting to the door where the guards had disappeared. Her urgency felt raw, genuine, and for a moment, hope sparked in me.
Whatever they had on her, she’d been trying to protect me all along. She was still trying to protect me.
“No,” I whispered, my voice hoarse but urgent, my resolve stronger than the terror coursing through me. “They’ll kill him if we don’t get him out too. ”
Ebony’s scowl deepened, her face twisting into a mask of irritation. “This is your last chance, Ava. Otherwise, I won’t be able to help you anymore.”
“No.” My voice wavered, but my words were firm. “I’m not leaving without Ciaran.”
“Stubborn girl,” she muttered, her voice a blade of frustration.
“Ebony,” I croaked, my voice breaking. “What did they do to you? Did they threaten you? Please—”
Her laugh stopped me. Cold and humorless, it echoed in the chamber. “Threaten me?”
She stepped closer, her delicate features twisting with something dark, something foreign. “Do you really think I’m some poor victim, Ava?”
I froze as her words sank in.
“I wasn’t dragged into this. I wasn’t forced.” She leaned in, her breath cold against my skin. “This is my birthright.”
Her words struck me like a physical blow, stealing the air from my lungs. Birthright. The word reverberated in my mind, loud and damning.
My stomach dropped as realization crashed over me like a tidal wave. “You…”
She tilted her head, her lips curling into a slow, cruel smile. “ I am the High Lord.”
“No.” The word tore from my throat as I scrambled back, the edges of the altar digging into my back. “No, it can’t—it can’t be you.”
But it was. The High Lord wasn’t some faceless monster. It wasn’t an untouchable evil lurking in the shadows.
It was Ebony.
It all clicked into place, each revelation like a slap to my face, the numbness in my limbs burning away, replaced with a quickening of my pulse, a thunder in my ears.
Ebony was on the Board of the Darkmoor Alumni.
I remembered her standing in the photo she kept on her desk, the line of steely-faced men, her smile a beacon of charm in a sea of indifference. The only one with bare ankles beneath her sharp black pencil skirt.
She was the only woman on that board.
And for that, we’d ignored her. I’d ignored her.
She was the one who had insisted— insisted —I see Dr. Vale with his gaslighting and memory suppressors.
Her phone hadn’t been bugged when I called her from Mr. Buckley’s farmhouse. She had the call traced. She’d sent those men after me.
She was the only one, apart from Lisa and the twins, who had known where my new dorm room was the day I moved in.
And she was the one who had told the dean that Earl Grey was my favorite tea. That I’d supposedly gone sailing around Greece and Croatia. She was the one who had fed them details about me.
She had betrayed me.
The betrayal hit me harder than I thought possible, like a blade cutting through flesh and bone.
My heart lodged in my throat as my mind flashed back to just hours ago, to the moment I’d called her Ma for the first time, to the way I’d whispered, I love you.
And my heart broke for the loss of everything she had been to me—my protector, my guardian, my mother in every way that mattered .
My knees buckled, and I clutched the edge of the altar to steady myself, even as my mind screamed for escape.
“Did you ever love me?” The words slipped out before I could stop them, fragile and trembling in the thick silence.
Her gaze softened, her voice dropping so low it barely carried across the cold chamber.
“I did love you, Ava,” she murmured, almost wistful. “I mourned you when I thought they’d killed you.”
My breath hitched as the pieces began to slot together.
She hadn’t been upset about some stupid surgery when I’d returned from Paris. She’d been upset because she thought the man sent for me had killed me.
Ebony hesitated, her shoulders shifting as if the weight of memory pressed down on her.
“You were just a girl when you came across my table. When my father forced me to…” Her voice cracked, the pain in it so raw it sliced through the haze of my fury.
The memory hit me like a physical blow, the images bright and vivid behind my eyes.
The surgical light glaring above me.
Her father’s deep voice.
And her pale-blue eyes, staring down at me over the surgical mask. Her eyes.
It was Ebony. She was the doctor. She was the one who’d performed my abortion.
My body shuddered with revulsion, and I fought to hold myself together.
“And when Adam died mere weeks later,” she continued, her voice turning steadier, colder, “I begged my father to let me have you, to keep you from falling into another one of their dirty hands. ”
I wanted to scream, to rage at her, to demand why she would do any of this. Instead, I managed, “Then why become High Lord?”
Her face hardened, her chin lifting as though she were justifying herself to a cruel and unforgiving judge.
“You have no idea the work I’m doing,” she said, her voice sharp with conviction. “I’m cleaning up the Sochai. ”
Her posture straightened, a twisted kind of pride swelling in her tone, even as her quivering chin betrayed the weight of her delusion.
“My father let it rot, let it become a cesspool—a respectable guise for pedophiles and perverts. But I’m going to bring it into this century. The Sochai, with all its power and riches, will become a force for good instead of evil.”
I stared into her pale-blue eyes, eyes I had once trusted, once turned to for love and protection.
Now all I could see was the glint of madness in them, so sharp and bright it was undeniable. She believed what she was saying. She truly believed she was saving the Sochai.
I couldn’t stop the tremor that ran through me. This woman—my mother in all but blood—wasn’t just part of the monster. She was the monster.
And worse, she thought she was the hero.
“Liath, Sarah, Keela…” My voice cracked, the names catching in my throat as I stared at her pale, detached face. “Why are you killing the ‘daughters’ off? One by one?”
I swallowed hard, my chest tight with the unspoken question lingering in the air. And me?
Would she kill me too? Her only daughter?
“The lesser of two evils,” she said, her tone unnervingly even. Her words landed like a slap, their cold detachment sucking the air from my lungs. “The Society can do much good in this world—I wouldn’t expect you to understand even a fraction of its power, Ava—but it would all be ruined if our… unsavory past were to come to light.”
“‘Unsavory’?” I repeated, my voice sharp and brittle as glass.
It wasn’t a word for their atrocities, for the lives they destroyed, for the utter destruction of innocence.
Ebony offered no further response. Her expression was locked into a perfect mask of indifference. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving behind a pale, marble facade.
Gone was the flicker of emotion I’d seen earlier—the pain, the pride, the madness. Her eyes, once alive with conviction, were now dull and lifeless.
There was no trace of humanity left. She looked like a statue carved from the cold stone walls around us.
And I understood why. If she let herself feel , it would all come crashing down. If she allowed even a moment of reflection, she would see the warped wreckage of her beliefs, the mountain of sins she’d committed in the name of good.
Her soul was a house of cards. One gust of truth, and it would collapse. She couldn’t afford to pause. Couldn’t afford to look back.
As I stared at the woman before me, I knew what I had to do.
My fingers brushed against the ruby ring, the poisoned stone a deadly promise, ready to end this nightmare with a flick of my wrist.
But I couldn’t .
My chest tightened, my resolve fracturing beneath the weight of heartbreak.
She wasn’t the High Lord in this moment. She was still Ebony. Still the woman who had taken me in, who had saved me from the clutches of yet another Sochai ‘father.’
The woman I had once believed loved me like a daughter.
Instead, I reached up and slipped the blade from my hair, its sharp edge gleaming in the torchlight.
My grip tightened as I pointed it toward her. “You’re not going to get away with this.”
Ebony’s expression didn’t flicker, her voice resonating with the cold authority of the High Lord. “I thought you’d understand, Ava.”
Her hand disappeared into the folds of her robe. The metallic glint of a gun caught the corner of my vision, and instinct took over.
I moved faster than I thought possible, my training with Ty snapping into place.
Using a disarming technique he’d drilled into me a hundred times, I grabbed her wrist, twisted it sharply, and sent the gun clattering to the floor.
I spun her, yanked her against me, and pressed my blade against her neck before she could react, the sharp edge biting into her pale skin. “Where’s Ciaran?”
Ebony didn’t flinch, even with the blade at her throat. Her lips curled into a faint, chilling smile. “Yes, it’s about time they joined us.”
They?
She snapped her fingers, the sharp, jarring sound echoing through the chamber .
The screech of stone against stone followed, reverberating through the air like a scream, the noise grating against my senses like nails on a chalkboard.
Ciaran stumbled forward through the doorway, his expression wild and desperate as one of two hooded guards jabbed a gun between his shoulder blades.
His eyes locked on mine for a fleeting, tortured moment before we both turned at the sound of footsteps coming from the stairs at the entrance.
A shadow emerged, pushing through the gloom, his hands raised in surrender.
My breath hitched when the light caught his face, his familiar expression taut with restrained fury.
Ty .