Chapter Nine The Third Morning
Chapter Nine: The Third Morning
The screaming starts before the light changes.
I am sitting against the wall, back to the stone, when it comes through from the next cell. High, ragged. The sound of someone who held out for longer than they expected to and is no longer holding out.
I know the voice. I have known it my entire life.
My father has a very particular scream. I didn't know that until now.
I lean my head back against the stone and listen.
Not quite enough, I think. But it's something.
A few minutes later, under the fading echoes, I hear a woman's sobbing. Compressed, careful. The kind that is trying not to be heard.
My stepmother, who I have never seen lose control of herself in twenty-three years, is losing control of herself now.
I think about her, in the dark. She was never cruel.
She knew exactly what my father was, and she made her calculations accordingly. She kept her distance from me and my mother, gave us no extra trouble, because she understood that breaking useful pieces only brought consequences.
Not kindness. Arithmetic.
She was an intelligent woman in a situation where intelligence only worked within very narrow limits.
I was fifteen when my father brought us back.
The reason was Lilian, who at eighteen had identified her fated mate as a young Alpha heir with significant territorial holdings and what my father assessed as excellent strategic value.
Once my father saw the blood-alliance potential, he reconsidered whether his abandoned daughter might be useful too.
A backup piece. An insurance policy. Something to leverage if the primary gamble ran wrong.
My mother and I arrived at the estate on a grey afternoon. My stepmother met us at the door and gave us rooms in the east wing and never once made it personal.
She knew better than to touch her husband's investments.
The crying through the wall grows quieter. I close my eyes.
Then it's my turn.
The guards don't knock.
They haul me upright and down a corridor I haven't seen, through a door I hear before I see it. The particular echo of an interrogation room. Stone and metal, nothing soft to absorb sound.
I don't bother cataloguing what I feel about this. The body handles it separately from the mind.
Twenty lashes.
The person doing it is competent and — Gideon's arrangement, I guess— is not trying to destroy me. The spacing is deliberate. The angle is calculated.
Twenty lashes from someone who has been told to cause pain without causing damage, which is a specific skill set, and which is, in its way, more humiliating than the alternative.
The tenth one finds the scar tissue from the crash.
There is no describing what happens to pain when it lands on something already broken and not finished healing.
I don't make a sound. I have nothing left for sounds.
By the time they bring me back and the cell door closes, I am on my hands and knees on the stone floor.
The cold sweat has soaked through the prison clothes and the best I can do is breathe, slowly, one breath at a time, until the individual waves of it stop feeling like they will each be the last thing.
I think, on the floor: Arrangement. I'm not suffering at all.
The laugh that comes out sounds like something else.
***
On the third morning, footsteps that are too light to be guards.
I open my eyes.
Lilian is on the other side of the silver bars in a cloak, and I know that cloak the way I know the two small holes in my earlobes where earrings I no longer own used to sit.
I know its weight and its weave and the specific quality of its protective layer, which was designed to resist silver damage.
She is wearing it outside the silver-bar facility.
I am sitting inside the silver-bar facility, in prison clothes, with twenty lashes under the fabric.
She notices me noticing. Her expression changes. Softer. Apologetic. Almost pained.
"It's cold in here. Too much silver in the walls. Gideon said I should borrow your cloak while I visit."
She pushes a small glass vial through the gap between two bars. It catches the faint silver-light and holds it.
"He can't come today. He used up the visiting excuse when he brought you here." She pauses.
"So he sent me instead. As Luna." A small breath, the kind that is performing a sigh. "I'm here officially visiting my father. And my stepmother. And my" — the pause is precise — "elder sister."
I look at her. I look at the vial.
She bites her lip.
A tear appears at the corner of one eye, singular and controlled, and the performance of it is so technically accomplished that I almost appreciate it.
"I've heard what they do here. The methods." Her voice is soft with something she wants me to read as grief.
"If it becomes too much to bear — this can end it gently. You don't have to keep suffering."
The sound that comes out of my throat is low and rough and belongs in the category of laughing.
I push myself upright against the iron bed. My back announces itself. I ignore it.
"You came all this way because you're afraid I'll walk out."
Lilian's tear stops moving.
I watch her recalibrate.
"Afraid I'll survive," I say.
"Because if I do, you never get to be Gideon's Luna." I look at her. "You didn't want him when he was dying. And now you're here." I let that sit. "Regretting it?"
"You misunderstand." The soft voice again, the wounded voice. "Our father forced me to reject the bond. I didn't want to. I had no choice—"
"He told you he was arranging your marriage to the Alliance Chairman's son."
The soft voice stops.
"That was the trade. You walk away from Gideon, you get an introduction to the Chairman's heir." I look at her through the bars the way you look through glass at something displayed behind it.
"But the Chairman's son found his fated mate. The arrangement collapsed. You came back, and Gideon's territory had tripled, and suddenly the bond you rejected looked like a very different choice."
The cell is very quiet.
The tear is gone. Not wiped. Simply gone, as though it was never there. Because it wasn't. Not in the way tears usually are.
What remains on her face is a process of subtraction: the softness removed, the wound removed, the grief removed, each layer peeling back until what is left is something clean and cold and entirely without performance.
She looks at me the way she has, I realize, always looked at me. I just couldn't see it before through all the other layers.
"You wanted to take your mother and leave." Her voice has lost its texture. It is very flat and very clear.
"That was your goal. Your escape." A slight tilt of her chin. "Why shouldn't I have one? We just have different ways of getting out."
She looks at the vial on the cell floor, then back at me.
"You think he loved me? He doesn't love you. He never loved me either. He only loves himself." She says it the way you say something you stopped grieving a long time ago.
"We're the same, you and I. We both grew up knowing what we were worth to him. We just made different decisions about what to do with that information."
She doesn't pick the vial back up.
She turns, and the cloak moves with her, and I watch the dark velvet disappear around the corner of the corridor, and then the corridor is empty.
The silver bars put their light on the cell floor, and the vial sits where she left it like a period at the end of a sentence I didn't write.
I look at it for a long time.
Then I lie back down on the iron bed, and I face the ceiling, and I breathe.
She is not wrong, I think. She is not wrong about any of it.
She is just wrong about the part where we're the same.
I would never have done what she did. That is the difference. That has always been the difference.