It took everything I had to scoot up against the headboard. Gráinne sat in a chair next to the bed, eating from a plate perched on her lap. She watched me with intense and curious eyes. Nothing creepy about that. “How long have you been watching me sleep?” I asked, reaching for my plate and fork. I registered the ever-present teapot next to my bed and a generous carafe of ice water.
“You clutch your hands like you’re hiding a secret in them. What are you hiding in your hands?” she asked.
I held up my hands. “A fork?” That actually brought a smile to her face. Gráinne had a pretty smile. It made her look less disturbed. It made me want to coax another out of her.
Suddenly, the smile slid off her face. “You’ve been deeply hurt,” she said. “I can see it.”
“How can you see it?” I asked, stuffing three bites of syrup-laden pancake into my mouth. “I’m silver, like you. No colors to read.”
“Your sadness rolls off of you like storms. You’ll learn to read silver. It’s diamonds of many facets.”
I hadn’t learned how to read the subtleties of silver, but I was sure she was right about my stormy sadness. Just the smell of the maple syrup had driven a spike into my heart. It was too painful to think about our first date in the forest when I was foolish and giddy and dabbing syrup behind my ears to be more irresistible to Finn. I was irresistible to him, but only because he was Arrazi and needed my Scintilla spark to live.
Finn had said, “I never believed someone like you existed.” I remembered how his aura had looked like a live thing when he played music at the coffee shop, how it blasted white before I fainted. Griffin had been there. Not a coincidence. I recalled Clancy congratulating Finn on luring me here while we ate beef stew. My mind flashed to Finn saying, “I want to possess you. I’m with you, and everything in me wants to take.”
To think I’d tried to protect him from the truth. He knew. He knew more about me than I did. “My heart hurts.”
“As does mine.”
It was the most coherent conversation we’d had yet. Would I end up like her from the constant near-death they’d inflict on me? Each minute there chafing at my sanity?
“How long have you been here?” I asked. My question shimmered like a delicate bubble in the palm of my hand. The wrong answer would pop it.
Gráinne pointed to the floor. Hundreds and hundreds of tiny moons were carved into the floorboards up and down the length of the room. So many. All the breath whooshed out of me. The bubble shattered. “Have you tried to get out?” I whispered.
“Everything. Running. Begging. Promises. Bribery. I’ve even tried to love him.”
“How could you—”
“This…him…it’s all I’ve had for so long. I lost everything.” She picked at her food. “A heart desperately searches for something to love—”
“Mine won’t.” It was a stubborn vow. But I meant it. With all of my broken heart.
Gráinne shook her head emphatically. A strand of her long hair brushed through her syrup. “No, no. If you’re too good at blocking the bad, then the good is sure to get caught in that net.”
“Why can’t we block them from taking from us? Can’t we escape?”
Her eyes went up to the skylight. “I don’t have the keys to the kingdom.” She smacked herself in the head. Hard. “I was close.” And then again. I put my plate on the table and grabbed her hands.
“Don’t.”
She looked up at me, startled, like she was surprised I was still in the room, surprised I had my fingers curled around her brittle wrists. “I buried everything. Stop with your questions. You tap tap in my head. The answers are gone.”
I dropped her hands. Panic rose up in me. I had so much to say, so much to rail against, that I was speechless. My head shook back and forth, but I couldn’t rattle the words loose.
I couldn’t think of a worse fate than to be locked up forever.
I thought youth was the shackle. Now every freedom I would’ve inherited with age had been snatched from me. Look how much of Gráinne’s life had been stolen. I’d end up like her, mumbling nonsense to myself, sucking maple syrup from my frayed hair, making pictures of flowers with shards of glass and blood. My life was a broken cup. From this moment on, it would hold nothing else.
I ran to the wooden door and threw my fists into it. I kicked. I screamed at the top of my lungs. Flung my body against the wood so hard my teeth rattled. I couldn’t be trapped here forever. I couldn’t. Tears streamed down my cheeks. I sobbed in great gasping chokes as if fingers clutched around my neck, and I slid to the floor, my hands clawing the wood on my way down, leaving a trail of tiny splinters in my stinging palms and beneath my nails.
Suddenly, a soothing cocoon of arms wrapped around me as I sat in a spent heap on the floor. Gráinne put her hand gently on my forehead and pulled my head back to rest on her shoulder. Her legs curved with surprising strength around my thighs, supporting me. Her hand rested over my heart as her body rocked me slowly forward and back. “Shhhh, child. Shhhh. Quiet now.”
I cried until I was a wrung out, a limp doll in her arms. We sat together on the floor, rocking while she hummed a quiet, soothing tune. I melted against her, giving myself over to someone who, for the moment, was stronger than me. My ragged breathing eventually became more even. My anger dissolved in a fusion of our melted silver auras. Gráinne was so brave, in her own fragile state, to run into the hurricane and hold it tight.
I looked down at her hand, warm against my heart, holding me to hers. The daintiest slice of a wedding ring shone on her ring finger. It was worn nearly smooth from being rubbed over many years. The design was still visible though: a simple and delicate silver band of clover encircling her finger. Exactly like the marking on my finger.
A wisp of breath escaped me. Every breath beyond that was painful.
I turned slowly to look at her, taking in the heart shape of her small face, the thin mouth that turned up at the corners even when she wasn’t smiling. The broken windows of her eyes. Her hands smoothed my hair back from my damp skin and wiped my tears tenderly.
Motherly.
Oh God.
Please, be her. Please, do not.
He had two of us, but I didn’t realize until now, he had my mother. He’d had her all this time.
My heart thrashed on the ground like an injured bird. For the second time in that place, I wanted two opposite things to be true at once. Elation and despair crowded for space in me. I’d succeeded beyond hope. I’d found my mother. Alive, but not all the way through. Something inside her had died so long ago. I saw myself in her face. It didn’t comfort me. It caved me in.
She was me, in captivity, years from now.
I curled into her chest and found more tears—old tears and new. Each one a blade.
“Ah, now, dear. Hush.” She lifted my face and smiled broadly. “Today we get to see the sun.”
Forty-Five
I wasn’t sure why I didn’t tell her who I was—who she was to me. Something to do with a heavy secret being on the shoulders of the one who’s strong enough to carry it. Finn had said that to me. Yeah, he’d know something about secrets.
Would it mend her heart even a little to know I was with her? Or break her completely knowing I shared her fate? If I were a mother, I’d rather imagine my child growing up happy and free, even if she could never be with me. Not this fate. Never this.