CHAPTER 50
I can’t feel anything with my fake hand, but that was my choice. I wanted a reminder of why I did what I did, what made me crawl out of that river to come home. And that’s why I won’t pity you. Because if you’d had something to live for, you’d still be eating carrots.
—HILLAIRE WALDSTEN, TO A DEAD RABBIT IN THE GARDEN
I walk the whole way back to my suite, my shoes squelching through soggy grass and puddles that soak my ankles in mud.
My clothes are drenched in rain, but inside, my heart feels dry and withered, locked so tightly I can’t feel it beat.
I force one foot in front of the other, counting each step like penance, murmuring Dad’s words under my breath again and again: Waldstens don’t quit.
The fact that I assaulted my new professor barely crosses my mind. Jerome is just another splatter on a windshield already dark with bodies. He didn’t report me or cancel our meeting for tomorrow, but maybe he will. Maybe I’ll be expelled before I even open my door.
But when I reach my suite, the real loss is waiting, exactly where it hurts.
I stand in the middle of the salon, dripping all over the floor, replaying every second in my head, desperate for a clue that explains it.
Edmund didn’t love Charles; he hated him.
So why was sadness the only thing I saw in his face?
Why did he look at me as if he were grieving?
It’s the one piece too jagged to swallow, because the rest of it—Edmund’s calm cruelty, even his revenge—I understand.
I know Charlotte said not to betray Edmund.
I know she said he doesn’t know how to forgive, but she didn’t see what I saw.
She didn’t feel what I felt when he kissed me in that elevator, lifting me into his arms as if he meant to keep me forever.
How does someone hold you like that, then hand you poison and say, “Prove you love me too?”
I don’t understand.
I activate my Bond to message Charlotte, then stop as a cluster of new alerts floods my home screen. The civil credits losses appear first, fines for informal speech and for speaking without a formal introduction to Professor Jerome. And beneath them:
REQUEST TO OFFICIALLY DISSOLVE FORMAL AGREEMENT BETWEEN MR. EDMUND PREW AND MISS LOREDANA WALDSTEN.
I stare in shock, my pulse pounding in my ears.
Even after everything, after I hurled the wire daffodil at Edmund and tore open the secret he guards most, he still isn’t removing me from his entourage himself.
If he did, he’d have to prove I broke our agreement—which I did, even if I never intended to.
The case would go to court, and even with the best lawyer in the Civilized World, I’d lose.
I’d be executed, and my family would be dragged through the mud, forever dishonored and shamed.
Instead, Edmund is giving me the chance to end our contract myself by mutual erasure. A mercy that cuts fresh anyway.
I stare at the badge, still glowing on my Bond’s home screen, the mark that says I belong to Edmund Prew’s entourage. My chest clenches as I press ‘Accept.’
FORMAL AGREEMENT VOID. STATUS: TERMINATED.
The badge flickers, then vanishes.
I lower myself shakily onto the bed. The sheets soak up the rainwater from my clothes, but I feel nothing beyond the dark void in my chest where Edmund used to be.
I can’t cry or scream. Even speaking feels like it could split me in two.
Still, I force myself to text Charlotte. “I need to be alone tonight.”
She replies instantly: “I know, Lore. I understand. But let me come over tomorrow morning.”
“I won’t be here. I have to meet a new professor at nine.”
“I’ll come with you. And please don’t say no.”
“Okay,” I reply, and that one word feels like it’s holding the wreckage together.
Then I let everything sit. I let the pain fester in the corners of my mind as I connect my Bond to the Florence Engine and roll onto my back.
The projection blinks to life overhead, showing an endless forest of spindly, naked trees, their black-bone branches so frail they look ready to snap under a sigh.
I close my eyes and pretend I can slip into the images, sink through the branches, and disappear, just for tonight.
I can’t imagine tomorrow, next week, or next year.
Maybe I won’t come back at all. Let Edmund Prew have Grandmaster University.
Let others gossip about the Green who quit because she couldn’t survive her Blue.
Maybe it’s true. Maybe I don’t care anymore.
Or maybe I’m just talking shit that I’ll be embarrassed about tomorrow, but right now I want to rage.
To stew. To sit here, feeling pitiful, wronged, and broken, and let it comfort me.
I’m knee-deep in that bitter daydream—torching everything, erasing myself from the story—when my Bond buzzes with an incoming call from Vivian.
That’s it. One name, and every emotion I’ve been holding back erupts so fiercely that the call almost goes to voicemail before I can answer.
When I finally accept, the screen shows Vivian and Hillaire in the middle of a bickering match in Vivian’s bedroom, their voices so loud I’m surprised I can’t hear them from here, without a phone call.
Hillaire stands on the bed, her feet planted wide apart and her arms crossed over her chest, glaring down at Vivian with beady eyes.
Vivian stands front and center, half-turned so I can see the full sweep of her dress.
She’s wearing Coquette—my Coquette. The diamond-green gown, silk the color of deep bottle glass, clings to her like paint, with its sequins sparkling like tiny, captive stars.
Vivian lifts her hair, drops it, spins again, and the fabric gleams brighter with each toss. It knocks the breath out of me.
“It shows too much cleavage,” Hillaire declares.
“I think it’s tasteful,” Vivian says, striking a slow, sultry pose in the mirror behind her. “Just the right amount of mystery.”
“The right amount for every man at your rehearsal dinner—including Father—to know what you look like naked.”
Vivian scoffs, then pivots toward me. “Tell her, Lore. Tell her she’s wrong.”
Hillaire scowls and shifts to the edge of the bed as if to storm off, until her gaze lands on me.
“What’s wrong with you?” she asks flatly.
Before I can respond, Vivian’s smile fades. Her eyes widen as she moves closer to the phone and inspects me more closely.
“Lore,” she whispers. “Are you okay?”
I open my mouth, searching for the right words, but nothing elegant comes out.
“I… miss you guys.”
Vivian’s lips tremble with guilt before she presses them together, as if recalling every call she ignored, every message she left unanswered, and every silence she forced me to choke on alone. Hillaire, meanwhile, remains stone-faced, her sharp features half-shadowed by her platinum bob.
“That’s why you’re this upset?” Vivian asks, her voice gentler now.
“Yes… and no. I had a bad day.”
“Tell us about it,” she says. “We’re here, Lore. Just talk.”
I don’t want to talk. I don’t want to peel the scab off, piece by piece, until the wound bleeds again.
What I want is to tell my sisters that I needed them, that if they’d been here sooner, maybe I wouldn’t have made the cowardly choices I did.
Maybe they’d have forced me to tell Edmund the truth before everything fell apart.
Now it’s too late. They can’t fix it. No one can.
But they’re my sisters. And they asked.
So I tell them everything, from Charles trying to kill me in the locker room to touching down at the Roaring Rails Station to the moment Edmund walked away in the rain.
The only piece of the truth I guard is how deep my feelings for him went, how deep they still are, spreading through me like a sickness.
I tell them only that Edmund was my friend.
Vivian listens with a mask of shock and fear, while Hillaire remains stone-faced, standing above it all like a judge I can’t read.
When I finish, Vivian breaks first, her voice thin with disbelief.
“Oh, Lore… I’m so sorry. I knew there had to be more.
I knew you wouldn’t have walked away from fencing without a reason, but this?
Being attacked, having to kill Charles… and then this deal with Edmund Prew.
” She swallows hard and wipes away tears.
“You did what you had to do. I don’t judge you for any of it.
But Lore… they’re not like us. Harry says it too.
Blues can’t be trusted, even when they pretend to care.
And they can’t help it either. It’s how they’re made. ”
At the mention of Harrison’s name, Hillaire stiffens. She steps off the bed, right in front of Vivian, and looks straight at me.
“Why are you letting this happen to yourself?”
“Hilly,” Vivian snaps, her fingers digging into Hillaire’s arm.
Even though the question stings, I keep a straight face. With Hillaire, it’s always like this: I never understand her until I do.
“Why are you letting this happen to yourself?” Hillaire repeats.
“Because I… I don’t know how to survive here. Not anymore.”
“Survive?” Hillaire spits the word as if it offends her. Then, though her face remains stiff, her eyes fill with tears, gathering so steadily they don’t tremble. “You think that’s what saved me? Wanting to survive? You think that’s what dragged me out of that river?”
Vivian gasps, her hand flying to her mouth. My pulse pounds once, then stops.
The river. The boat. The storm. Two years ago, when Hillaire was only twelve, Vivian and I pressured her to go out on the water in front of the mansion, even though the sky was snarling.
After five minutes, the boat capsized, tossing us into the raging current.
Vivian and I clawed through the reeds toward the bank, screaming Hillaire’s name and fearing the worst. Hours later, we found her trudging along the shore, half-drowned and half-dead, clutching the blood-slick stump where her hand used to be.
She never told us how it happened, never even spoke of it until now.
I sit frozen, feeling cracked wide open, waiting.
“The current carried me downstream all the way to our tree fort,” Hillaire says.
Her voice is flat, but every word cuts. “I remember thinking the trees were bending the wrong way in the wind. Then the water pushed me under a pile of logs jammed against the bank. One spun and pinned my wrist under a rock. I couldn’t lift my head.
Couldn’t push up. After that, the forest went quiet.
The only thing I could hear was bubbles popping near my eyes, and I thought: Fine. Let it be water… Then I felt my coin.”
Vivian and I exchange a sickened glance. Vivian is as stiff as a corpse, the diamonds on her dress shimmering against skin gone pale. I look back at Hillaire, trembling with dread because I know what’s coming next.
“The blade in my coin wasn’t sharp enough for bone,” Hillaire says.
“So first I had to break my wrist between the logs. I didn’t like how easy it was.
Then I started cutting at what was left.
My blood looked yellow in the water, like it wasn’t even mine.
Like maybe something dead was floating in there with me.
By the time the bones let go, I couldn’t see much anymore…
couldn’t hear the forest either. The current tore me loose, and I thought about sinking then, just letting it push me to the bottom.
But when I floated up for air, I saw our fort through the trees.
The roof—from that angle, it looked crooked. ”
She pauses, wiping her eyes with a rough swipe. “That’s what made me start kicking again. Crawling through the mud onto the rocks. Because I didn’t just want to survive, Loredana… I wanted to come home. To you. To Vivian. To Mother and Father. I wanted to live.”
Vivian presses her hand to her mouth, her breath hitching in quiet, uneven pulls.
“Oh, Hilly—” She edges closer, torn, aware of how Hillaire hates being touched, but she can’t stop herself.
She leans in, wraps her arms around Hillaire’s neck, and holds on as if she doesn’t care that she’s wrinkling her dress.
Hillaire stiffens but allows it, resting her robotic hand against Vivian’s back.
Then her eyes lift, finding mine over Vivian’s trembling shoulder. “Ask yourself what you’re doing here, Loredana. What you’re living for. If the answer’s nothing, then I can’t help you. You might as well be dead already.”
I hold her stare, letting it cut through my fear, guilt, and heartbreak, all the way down to the part of me where the answer lives.
It’s them. It’s always been them. Hillaire.
Vivian. Dad. Mom. Charlotte. The people I’d run through fire to reach, even when I forget it.
Even when I lose myself in things I shouldn’t want.
For half a second, I nearly ruin it. I almost tell Hillaire I’m sorry for that storm, for the boat, for the hand she’ll never feel again.
But I know her. She didn’t keep that story locked in her throat all these years because she wanted pity.
If she wanted an apology, she would’ve forced it out of Vivian and me the moment she dragged herself home, dripping river water and blood onto the front portico.
She saved it for now, intentionally, because she needed us to see her the way she sees herself.
“I understand, Hillaire,” I say. “I won’t waste it.”
She nods and wipes her eyes again, still holding Vivian close. None of us speaks another word.
When the call ends, I stay on my bed, my fingers curled in the sheets, watching the faint glow of my Bond fade to black.
I haven’t given much thought to what I’m living for.
I’ve been too busy surviving, obeying rules with little concern for whether they’re fair.
But as I consider the question now, I realize that Hillaire is right.
Anyone can claw through day after day to make it to the next.
But truly living means choosing something worth fighting for and holding fast, even when the river pulls you under.
I need to find that reason, my own piece of the world to stand on, something that doesn’t shift with someone else’s footsteps. To do that, I have to get over him. Edmund.
My heart laughs loudly and mockingly at the thought. Throw him away, it says, and you’ll throw me away, too.
So be it. If I’m going to live out the answer to Hillaire’s question, everything has to change. My path. My choices. My fear of punishment.
I roll onto my back, the Florence Engine still projecting images of trees overhead.
As sleep pulls at my eyes, the trees begin to stir, rustling and shifting across my bed.
Branches shudder. Bark thickens. Roots drive down, then rise through the darkness, one by one, creaking upward, tall, broad, and strong.
A forest waking up.