Chapter 1
Genesis
THE REQUIEM | Present
My head is splitting open. It feels like someone took a hammer and cracked it right down the middle. I groan before I even open my eyes. Everything is heavy. My lashes, my limbs, and the air. My throat burns as if I have swallowed smoke.
I blink and the ceiling above me swims in and out of focus. Cream-coloured, carved edges, and a chandelier that glitters. I blink harder, trying to force it to stay still, but it keeps wobbling, as if I’m surfacing between the dead and the living.
I don’t know this place.
My heart stutters.
I push myself up fast. The room tilts and spins again, and I’m falling, hands scrambling at empty air until my palms slap the cold floor.
Vision tunnels, head throbs as images slam into me.
I was running through the forest. Branches cutting my skin. My lungs burning. And hands grabbing me. How I wish it was my brutal husband instead of his brother.
It’s too late to regret now. I tried to escape him. Instead, I traded one prison for another.
Panic slices my ribs from the inside as I suck in a deep breath.
Wherever Corvin has brought me, I have to get out of here.
I try to stand, but the dizziness eats me alive, pulling me down and down till my vision tunnels again, dark at the edges and bright in the middle. I crawl toward what seems like a door.
Nails digging into the soft rug and my breath is a mess. I can’t slow it down. My insides are burning.
Where am I? Where did they take me? Does Zagreus know his brother abducted me? Or more precisely, I ran and handed myself over to his brother on a silver platter.
Whatever it is, it’s too late now.
Just as I grab the bed and try to stand, the door swings open.
And I freeze.
A woman stands there, blurred at the edge of my vision, holding a tray with a bowl. Her eyes go wide when she sees me collapsed on the floor.
“Miss Visconti!” she gasps, sets the tray down in a hurry, and rushes toward me. Her hands are warm when they grab my shoulders, trying to lift me.
“Careful, careful, child.”
“No.” My voice is cracked and barely there. I push at her weakly. “Stop, don’t… don’t touch me.”
Everything comes out in a single, shattered breath.
She hushes me softly. “Please, you need to lie down.”
“I don’t care!” I twist in her hold, fighting even though I feel like shit. “Where am I?!”
She helps me into a sitting position anyway, arranging the pillows behind me. My vision keeps dipping in and out of clarity. The walls look too bright and the windows are too tall. Everything feels so foreign.
My pulse won’t calm.
She picks up a small bottle from the tray. “You need medicine. This will help your headache.”
“No.” I slap her hand. “I’m not taking anything, tell me where I am.”
Her shoulders fall with a tired sigh.
“Miss Visconti, please, it’s for your own sake…” she murmurs, but her voice trails off as she looks toward the doorway behind her. I don’t understand why until a voice answers for her.
A voice that should not exist in this world.
“You’ve always been quite a troublemaker.”
My entire body goes cold. My spine locks and my heart forgets what it’s supposed to do.
That voice, no, this voice. It’s not possible. It cannot be real.
I look at the door and there, smiling like she had never died, her brown eyes as sharp as the day I remember, stands the woman I’d never expected to see again.
My Mother.
Alive!
Whole.
Breathing. Her hair brushed back neatly, her dress soft and pale blue, her eyes warm in a way I remember only in dreams, and in nightmares.
My mouth falls open, but no sound comes out.
It can’t be her. It can’t be.
I watched her die. I watched her die.
My fingers curl into the sheets, trembling, and my lungs burn for air I can’t pull in.
“M-Mama?” The word escapes me in a bare whisper; I can’t recognize my voice.
She takes one slow step inside, and I flinch as if struck. My pulse roars in my ears. This cannot be happening.
“No…” I choke. “No, no, you died, you are dead… you can’t…”
Her eyes soften.
“Stina,” she breathes, the name I haven’t heard in years. “I’m right here, my child.”
And my entire world tilts, and then collapses.