Chapter 42 If You’re Not Scared of Me, What’s This Prison For?
If You’re Not Scared of Me,
What’s This Prison For?
Desdemona
M
y eyes blink open. The room is dark, twisting and turning around me. My temples are pounding. Instinctively, I reach for my head. I swear I’d been hit—but there’s no injury.
I must’ve died.
I twist to my side and immediately regret it. My stomach curls, and my head hammers. I push onto my back again, looking at the headmistress, sitting alone in her cell.
“Cynthia,” I whisper, my voice weak.
“She can’t hear you,” a voice hums, distantly familiar. I look forward and spot the form in front of me—Queen Leiana.
What in the worlds does she want with me?
I sit up taller, lifting my chin as I remind her, “And you can’t kill me.”
She’s the one who hit me in the head with the rock. I reach for the wound again, but it’s still not there.
“Darling,” the queen drawls, “you should want to die.”
Then she does something that truly shocks me—she kneels before me on the grimy dungeon floor, clutching my chin between her fingers.
“And I will have your head.”
She releases my chin and tips her head back. My chest hollows, the sensation spreading to my feet. My blood churns.
Then it moves out of me. Threads of red light dance before my eyes, entering the queen’s body as she tips her head further back.
My arms droop at my sides, heavy enough to feel like they might pull out of their sockets. This is different from all the pain Mial and Lucian put me through. The queen will show me no mercy.
My heart jerks. I want to reach for it—I always do—but I can’t move. It buckles, not exploding, but caught in an invisible grip. Fingers sink slowly into the muscle. My body folds. Nothing can stop this.
I hit the floor face-first, my cheekbone smashing against the cold cobblestone. It feels like it shatters. Pain moves through my face, into the top of my lip and the bottom of my eye. I can’t see as my empty stomach heaves. Acid rises up my throat. But I can’t move.
The queen croaks.
Gravel presses into my cheek. I try to move. To sit up. The rock scrapes against my skin. A drip of blood. I feel it. I try to raise my hand, to touch the blood. I can’t manage. But my core tightens. Magic.
Do I have it?
Lines of red escape my eyes. It pours out of my mouth, my ears, stealing my line of thought. It’s like the marrow is being sucked from my bones, the blood from my heart, the song from my throat. Everywhere I exist, she steals me.
It’s worse than being bled dry. It’s worse than my heart exploding. This is my soul. It’s shriveling.
The queen is taking all of me.
But she begins to choke, her coughs echoing through the dungeon. With all my strength, I glance up.
The queen flexes her hands and brings them to her throat, trying to catch her breath.
I’m broken. Almost dead. But she can’t finish it.
With the cold floor against my cheek, I smile as gravel falls into my mouth, pinching my cheeks. I try to pucker my lips and spit it out, but I don’t have the energy. My tongue moves lazily, trying to push the rocks to the corner of my mouth.
I can hardly manage even that.
But Queen Leiana stops stealing my soul. Her breath is still heavy as she walks, a slight limp to her step. She swings the cell door closed.
I groan, my one open eyelid heavy as lead.
?
When I open my eyes again, the headmistress is close to the bars, her face almost brushing them.
Pain thrums in my hands, rising up my wrists. I groan.
“I wasn’t sure I would see you again,” the headmistress says with a smile. “I didn’t give you the honors last time.” Her head tips down, as if there is a crown on mine. “It’s a privilege to have met you, Desdemona Althenia… or as I once said, Marquees.”
A tear drops, salty on my lips, and I take a deep, broken breath. More tears fall on my tongue, tasting like sustenance.
“Leiana’s afraid of you,” the headmistress says.
“Why?” I lick my cracked lips. Bits of skin flake off on my tongue. I swallow, and my stomach groans.
The headmistress raises an eyebrow.
I touch a finger to the cut on my face. The blood is already dry, but she smiles like I’m on the right track.
I don’t have fire here. But I have blood.
“What Leiana is doing isn’t balanced,” the headmistress says. “She’s blocking divine will—the will that brought you into existence.”
Divine will. Gods she sounds like the stupid hallucinations. I narrow my eyes.
“Can’t you feel the power in your veins?” the headmistress asks with a small smile.
I realize I’ve never seen her without red lipstick or dark hair. Now her hair is gray, and her teeth are yellow, almost decayed. How long has she been down here? I swear I saw her a month ago.
With a sigh, I say, “I feel it.”
“That is your key,” she says.
But… my key to what? Lucian is dead. Nobody remembers me. What if the queen could find a way to kill me—would that be so bad?
Then, the headmistress says, as if reading my mind, “Lucian isn’t dead.”
She’s lying. Trying to get me to free us both. I saw him die. But the simple hope fractures my heart. It’s not possible. I watched him die. I killed him.
“How do you know?” I ask anyway.
The headmistress shrugs, her eyes nearly green in this light, not their usual blue. This has to be a hallucination—right? There’s a strange light around her—a green aura, with a bit of purple.
“He offered me his favor,” she says. “I can reach him wherever he goes.”
“You’re lying.”
A shrug. “I have nothing to gain.”
“I can get you out. You could be lying for freedom,” I say.
“Free yourself,” the headmistress says. “But leave me behind if you must.”
It can’t be possible. This must be another one of her games. Do I have the strength to trust my skepticism? If Lucian could be alive—if I didn’t kill him—I have to do something.
“How is Lucian alive?” I whisper, my mouth dry. With the magic of the silvers blocked by the bars between us, I slowly feel my strength returning. Power swirls beneath me—like the headmistress said.
But not fire. It’s only blood.
“That’s not for me to disclose—” the headmistress coughs. Hacks, really. I lean back, like it’s contagious and she could kill me. But we both know she can’t.
My heart picks up, and I stare at my hands.
My hands—the enemy or the bloody savior or whatever else I want to tell myself. It all means nothing, anyway. Enemies, saviors, believing I’m one or the other. I’m nothing.
I’m a killer.
And if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that killers make it out alive. Being the worst version of myself has always kept me safe. Absolute power corrupts absolutely, but corruption means survival. This power could save me from this cell. It could save Lucian.
Between her hacking, the headmistress meets my gaze. “When Leiana comes back.”
This could be survival.
Victory.
“But she’ll weaken me. Like she did—”
“You will weaken her more than she will weaken you. She cannot hold all of your life force. It is limitless, dear.” The headmistress smiles, her teeth cracked and yellow, rotting in her mouth.
?
When Queen Leiana enters the dungeon again, I sit exactly where she left me, my head hanging, breath shuddering as though breathing is agony.
She glides to the bars—no wasted steps, no sound—and glances through the cell.
The moment her attention shifts past me, I reach inward for her blood.
It answers with pain, a burning that eats me alive, gnawing through muscle and marrow.
But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that pain is a door.
I have to push past it.
The queen’s eyes narrow a fraction.
I fumble through the maze of her organs. It’s harder than it should be. My vision wavers. Her body feels wrong—slippery, like her blood is rejecting me. I latch onto the first organ I touch. Pain spreads through my lower stomach, as if I were digging through my own flesh.
It shouldn’t feel like this.
Panting and trembling, I rise to my feet, meeting her gaze. Her lips curve—not a smile, but an assessment.
“Don’t be foolish, darling.” She speaks her words like they’re enough to suffocate me. It’s the voice of someone who’s never lost.
But her hands twitch at her sides—pain or power?
Conceding, or attacking?
Her shadows surge, and I prepare to run.
But they don’t come for me. They wrap around the queen like armor, sealing her in a sheath of darkness.
She doesn’t realize I’m already inside her.
I step closer, curling my fingers into my palm.
The pressure builds, rising up my spine like molten metal.
My throat constricts. Her blood snarls against mine, like poison.
The queen tips her chin up, composed as a statue. But sweat beads at her temples. Why isn’t she fighting back?
I pull. Her eyes widen in shock, mouth agape, as the organ ruptures, reverberating through me like an explosion. I scream, collapsing as if I’ve torn myself apart. It wasn’t even her heart I ruptured. But the residual pain of hurting her feels worse than death itself.
Across the cell, Queen Leiana crumples, the shadows falling, crashing to the floor and rippling out like water.
She lies unconscious, her stomach still rising and falling.
I groan, pain throbbing through my hands.
I glance down—dark red veins creep under my skin.
They spread, hungry, up my arm—all the way under my sleeves.
The silvers that originally did this were Lucian’s.
What if the queen had something of his, too?
My vision swims as I push myself toward the headmistress’s cell. I don’t touch the bars, even though I would love something to lean against.
“Where is he?” I ask.
The headmistress smiles, her teeth lacquered red. “What a sight you are.”
“Where’s Lucian?”
Her eyes narrow before she closes them completely. I press my hands into the floor, leaning back as much as I can manage, but the headmistress does nothing more. Is she ignoring me?
Then, green light pulses around her body again, encompassing her.
Near silent, she says, “Below ground.”
“We are underground.”