Текст книги "The poison daughter"

Автор книги: Sheila Masterson

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Текущая страница: 42 (всего у книги 48 страниц)

58HENRY

Ihave died many times, but I’ve never felt pain like I do now.

When Holly passed, I felt responsible, but I can’t imagine carrying this burden as Harlow does. I cannot fathom her grief, even as I can feel it swirling around her. I sweep her into my arms and walk back to sit on the bench.

With this one heartbreaking confession, every single thing about Harlow suddenly makes sense—the brutal, unforgiving violence toward abusers, the single-minded rage focused on Rafe Mattingly, and the barely veiled contempt for her parents.

I’ve lived my life on the edge of boiling over, but this kind of wrath feels cleansing, holy. I want to bathe the world in Rafe Mattingly’s blood—present Harlow his head like some macabre centerpiece.

When Kellan showed me Aidia’s grave last night, I was so angry at Harlow for using my own heartbreak against me. I felt like a fool, and I was stunned by her cruelty. But this is unimaginable.

I blame myself for Holly’s death in a relational way, but Harlow is so traumatized by her forced responsibility that she made herself forget it even happened.

I think of her in her rain-soaked nightgown, sleepwalking on the balcony railing, and it all makes so much sense now.

When I saw her scar and then again when I raised my hand in the boarding house and she flinched, I knew there was more to her. I wanted to know then, but I knew better than to outright ask another survivor where their fear came from.

She is more than a knife. More than a pawn to be played in someone else’s scheme for vengeance. Beneath the prickly exterior, Harlow is wounded in the most horrifying, humanizing way.

She blinks away the tears and meets my gaze, and her fear hits me in a wave. “Am I mad?”

Her voice is so small. This version of her is so incongruent with the woman who has been trying to find a creative way to kill me for weeks.

I shake my head, sliding my hands up to cup her face. “Love is a kind of madness, but you’re no more mad than the rest of us. You’re just heartbroken. Losing a sister is like being cut in two. If you can’t heal the fracture, it stays with you and it messes with your mind.”

I try to settle her by stroking her jaw with my thumbs, but she’s too agitated to sit still. In all the times I’ve spent with her, there have been so few moments where I could use my influence on her, and now her impenetrable defense makes so much more sense. The more emotionally closed off a person is, the less malleable they are to Polm’s blessing. Now she’s full of hooks and frayed ends. I could easily soothe her, but I think that she’s been soothing herself too long. Everything is too pent up, and it needs to come out.

“Grief is a strange thing,” I say. “I can’t tell you how many times I thought I saw Holly in a crowd.”

She shakes her head, her eyes manic. “But have you had full conversations with her? Have you sworn you could feel her hand in your hair? Have you been certain? Or did you immediately remember that she was gone?”

“You’re not mad,” I assure her.

“The well is making my father mad,” she says. “It’s not just not healing and revitalizing. It’s making him more volatile. I have been in those waters. What if I’m mad too?”

It was obvious that there was something she wasn’t saying before, but I’m thrown by this admission.

“Do you think he wants the Mountain Well?”

She throws her hands up and paces across the white stone. “I can’t begin to know his motivations, Henry. He’s going mad. I have only survived this long by knowing how to read him in the moment.”

I stand and grip her shoulders to steady her, and she blinks up at me with tear-stained cheeks. “Let’s worry about one thing at a time. Let’s get you out of here and we can skip dinner⁠—”

“What happened when you died?”

Her question knocks the wind out of me. Last time, I’d assumed it was meant to throw me, but now I can see it’s a question born of fear and grief. I want to find Rafe Mattingly and kill him in the slowest, most painful way possible. I’m suddenly glad I’m well-versed in dying. It’s given me a great inventory to pull from.

“That night when I fell in with the Breeder, I wasn’t asking you that to annoy you,” she says softly. “I think some subconscious part of me was asking because I wonder where I sent her. I think maybe part of me died that day, too.”

I’ve spent the last ten years trying to forget everything about my many deaths, just for the sake of my sanity. For the first time, I wish I could remember something that might bring her comfort.

“I’m sorry. I don’t remember. It was just pain, darkness, then pain and light and I was back.” I take a deep breath and shake my head. “I’m so sorry that he did that to you. He’ll never do it again.”

She looks over her shoulder, like Rafe might be waiting there for her. “You don’t understand—he could control you. He could make you do the same thing. You have no idea how it feels.” Fresh tears stream down her cheeks. I hate seeing this brave woman scared out of her mind.

“Harlow, I’ll be damned if I let him control me, and he can’t kill me.”

She searches my face. “Because of⁠—”

“Yes, because of what I am. Because my parents have thought of the many ways that people could use their Divine blessings to harm me. Because, despite what Carter said to you that night in the holding cells, he compelled me to kill myself. Unlike other methods of death, it seems when I meet one magical end, that magic can’t be used on me again.”

Harlow trembles—a mixture of fear and sorrow coming off of her in waves. “I’m so sorry.”

I squeeze her shoulder. “The difference was consent, Harlow. I asked him to do that as a favor to my parents, who were sick with grief. Rafe took something from you.”

She wipes her eyes and extricates herself from my grip. “I need to move. I can’t think clearly here.”

The wind stirs her hair as she glances at the memorial and turns back toward the patio.

There are so many more questions pressing at my mind, but I’m afraid to ask. I rush to catch up with her, afraid to say anything else until we’re out of her parents’ domain. They’re out all day at various gatherings at the high houses, but they will be back in a few hours and they’re expecting us to have dinner with them. All I want to do is get her as far from here as possible.

We emerge from the garden, and Harlow walks across the patio and rips the back door open. It slams against the wall with a loud bang, but she just storms inside.

I can barely keep up with her as she turns down hallways until we finally end up in what looks like a study. There’s a large, ornately carved fireplace with a roaring fire and a painting of Harrick and Liza hanging above it. On the far side of the room, the faint glow of sunstones on the side patio casts shadows over a large wooden desk topped with crystal water glasses, a glass lantern, a stack of ledgers, and several unopened letters. Beside the deck is what looks like a three-dimensional model of the city. The gates are all marked, as are the fallback points for each quadrant.

Harlow paces back and forth. “I just needed one room that didn’t make me think of her. We never spent any time in here. It’s my father’s study.”

I stare at the painting of her parents. “Why didn’t your parents stop Rafe?”

I don’t mean to say it, but it slips out. I’m not even trying to drive a wedge between her and her family anymore. This is already above and beyond just some power struggle between our families.

“They weren’t home,” she says absently.

I frown. “They didn’t have guards who were tasked to protect you? Gaven?”

She pauses and cocks her head to the side, like she’s trying to remember. Slowly, the concentration on her face gives way to shock.

“Could he have compelled them and the guards?” I ask.

I have my suspicions, but I want Harlow to get there on her own. She’s already been through so much in these few short minutes, and I’m worried more hard truths will shatter the woman I thought unbreakable.

Harlow rubs the back of her neck. “I don’t think so. Rafe is powerful, but that would be a lot of people to overcome very quickly, and even so, Gaven was chosen because he had an immunity to Divine magic—” She blinks up at me with wild eyes as the revelation hits her. “He would have been immune to the compulsion.”

“Is he ever so far from you that he wouldn’t have realized Rafe was in the house?”

She shakes her head. “I think he was worried I would kill Rafe and start a war between our families, so he was always very aware of our interactions.” She presses a hand to her chest. “Gaven knew. He let it happen.”

“Why?” I ask.

“Does anything happen in this house your parents don’t allow? I have to imagine violence against one or both of their daughters could only happen if⁠—”

I fall silent at the recognition in her eyes.

“If they allowed it,” she whispers.

Her face morphs from wide-eyed shock to confusion, then is drawn down by grief, until it finally settles on anger. “How could they? Why would they? Aidia gave them access to Rafe—a way to keep tabs. Why would they give it up?” She rubs her temples. “Why would they let him hurt both of us?”

Her whole body is trembling, breaking under the weight of her rage.

“Tell me where it hurts. Tell me and I’ll take it away,” I say.

She tears across the study and shoves me so hard I hit the wall behind me. She glares up at me, her palms pressed to my scarred chest, her face a mix of fury and grief.

I know this feeling—the powerlessness, the anger clawing its way out. This is what I want from her. I need her to know this—that I am a safe place to be angry.

“You can’t,” she gasps.

“I have to try.”

Harlow presses a palm to her heart and tries to still her quaking body. “This is where it hurts,” she rasps. “I used to know how to endure. I could do it because Aidia did it too. But they gave her to that monster and now she is gone and it’s all my fault.”

The light has gone out of her eyes. She turns and shoves everything off her father’s desk. The fine set of crystal glasses and ornate lantern shatter on the floor. With a great heave, she flips the desk onto its side, then picks up the fireplace poker and starts to hit the mantel. Glass shards explode from the vases and expensive-looking statues placed there, and when the poker gets stuck in the portrait of her parents, she shreds it.

She starts to batter the desk, all the rage and hurt coming out in vicious swings of the iron poker.

“I will not be a good little soldier. I will not be a weapon. I will not be quiet. I will not be them!” Her voice is raw. Her rage is a life force.

She pounds a fist against her chest. “This is where it hurts. Here. And everywhere else and it will never stop.”

She turns and swipes the poker across the desk. It catches in the wood and slips from her hands, clattering on the floor.

The floor is covered in broken glass and the remnants of expensive, fragile things, but Harlow isn’t finished. She looks around the room, wildly searching for anything else to destroy.

I see the war in her. I see a monster who doesn’t want to spread the hurt around. Just like I see the woman who knows how easily she could tip over that edge and become the thing she fears.

If I don’t slow her down, she’s going to hurt herself, either on the shards on the floor or the explosiveness of her anger. I grab her shoulder, and she spins on me with her fist raised in the air.

She stills, looking at her hand like she’s surprised.

Slowly, I reach up and take her fist in my hand. She lets me take it, but when I thread my fingers through hers, she grips tightly.

She squeezes until my bones creak, like she wants to press her pain into me—like violence is the only language that will make me understand. And I want to take it. I want to drink down all that poison if it will keep her from feeling like she’s dying.

Finally, she looks up at me. Her beautiful face is streaked with tears, her hair wild and half-undone, one shoulder of her dress ripped. She looks savage and so beautiful.

“You win,” she rasps. “I hate them.”

Guilt unravels in my stomach. I want to say that isn’t what I wanted—or that why I wanted it has changed. I wanted to use her anger against them, but knowing how they’ve wronged her now, I want them to suffer not just for what my family has endured, but for what Harlow has survived and lost.

Something tugs free at the center of me, like a hook behind my sternum, like a skip in the rhythm of my heart. I squeeze my eyes closed and press a hand to the strange ache. When I open my eyes again, the world is blurry, then bright.

I blink rapidly to focus, and when my vision snaps into place, it’s on Harlow’s eyes.

Harlow’s dark violet eyes.

I stumble back a step. The first color I’ve seen in ten years is the bold violet of Harlow’s eyes, and they are stunning.

In black and white, my wife is striking, but in full color, she is devastating—so angry and fiercely alive, it’s breathtaking. The flush of her cheeks, the red of her lips, the emerald of her dress. I never realized how much I missed color until I see all the colors of her.

Harlow Carrenwell is beautiful. And I’m in love with her.

No, no, no. This is not the time. When I claimed her, it was just a raw animal wanting. It was just the blessing and a need to feel like I could in some way tame her, but she was not supposed to stay mine. This is not how this plays out.

I keep blinking, trying to get the color to go away, but it just gets brighter and more vibrant.

“What?” she asks.

I’ve been staring at her for too long. The confession is on the tip of my tongue, but I have never loved someone like this. I didn’t know I had this in me—not once I came back to life the first time, and certainly not after the many subsequent times. I don’t know how to translate something so shocking into words.

“I see you.”

She frowns, and I tilt her chin up and kiss her. Finally, the tension in her body starts to melt away, and for one moment, she is mine.

The sound of voices and footsteps down the hallway startles us apart.

I glance at the destruction in the room. “We should get out.”

Harlow holds up a hand. “We can’t. Your plan was to overthrow them, right?”

It’s jarring to hear her say it so plainly. “Yes.”

“Then we can’t leave now or they’ll think there’s a break-in, and that means extra security. It will be impossible to get to them. You leave. I will play madwoman.”

“I’m not leaving you with them,” I say.

Harlow crosses her arms. “You are.”

“What if they lock you up?” I ask.

“They won’t.”

“Why?”

“Because they need me for the Dawn and they won’t risk upsetting you when you’re their witness. That said, they can’t know that you’re aware of the madness. So you really need to go.” She points to the window.

I want to argue. It goes against everything in me to leave her here after the day she’s had, but I know she’s right.

Just once, I’d like to be selfish and not think about the bigger picture. But it’s not just my people at stake. It’s hers, too.

“Do you think Kellan knew?” I ask.

“I intend to find out. Don’t count on me coming back to the boarding house until after dinner tonight.”

I take a step toward her. “I should be there.”

She shakes her head. “No. They will never be as open if you’re there. This is something I need to do on my own, but I swear you can help with Rafe. I’ll meet you back in our room for the Descent.”

The footsteps in the hall grow louder, and she darts across the study and locks the door. I climb out the window, thanking the Divine we’re on the first story.

She crosses the distance between us and leans out the window. Her face softens, and she clicks her tongue. “Don’t look at me like that, my wolf.”

“Like what?”

“Like you’re forgetting to hate me?”

“I could never forget,” I say. But it’s a lie.

It has been long forgotten. That’s why I can see the pink flush of her cheeks and the violet of her eyes.

Bleeding woods, no wonder Carter wouldn’t shut up about her eyes. I can’t stop staring at them.

A fist pounds on the door, and she nods toward the path behind me.

“Now go before they send people around the outside. And don’t be seen,” she says.

I turn and force myself to walk away when what I really want is to throw her over my shoulder and bring her with me. It’s tempting, but if I rob her of this chance to find out the truth, if I risk my own shot at vengeance, I would never forgive myself.

I take one last look back at my wife. She stands in the window, watching me retreat with the fire poker braced over her shoulder and her bright red lips twisted into a smirk.

I can’t believe I’ve done the one thing I thought impossible. I fell in love with my wife.

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59HARLOW

My parents are relaxed when they enter the dining room. My father has a whiskey in his hand and my mother sips her wine. I almost prefer this unassuming version of them. It’s good to know their guards are down.

If I had the gift of distance, I would think they make a handsome couple. My mother with her raven hair twisted away from her face and fastened into a chignon at the nape of her neck, balanced out by my father’s swiftly graying hair that’s combed into neat waves. Her pale silver dress glimmering in the candlelight, playing off the shimmering charcoal of the vest my father wears under his jacket.

Up close, I can clearly see the ugliness. The hungry look in their eyes and the cruelty in their smiles.

“Did you hear what Mary Varyss said about Rafe? That he’s a traitor to the living? And that group of unblessed protesting outside the North Hold gates—it’s already spreading like wildfire,” my mother says as she takes her seat and notices that Henry isn’t beside me. “Where is that husband of yours? I don’t know how he did it, but he must have said the perfect thing last night, and now the rumors about Rafe are everywhere.”

Just hearing his name makes my blood boil, but Rafe is a problem for tomorrow. Today I have more pressing things to deal with.

“Henry had something to attend to this evening, but I invited Kellan,” I say. “I know he’s so busy with the festival, but I’m hopeful he can make the time. Family is so important, don’t you think?”

My mother frowns, clearly noting my sarcasm, while my father rings the bell beside him to signal the servants.

A moment later, the dining room door swings open and the servants bring in the soup, placing a bowl in front of each of us and a cover over a fourth plate at the seat beside me.

I watch them hustle away, whispering excitedly to each other, but my parents don’t notice. They never pay attention to the unblessed servants because they think it’s beneath them to acknowledge the help. If they did, they might wonder why the servants were so excited. They might ask and discover that with Able out for the evening, and just the three of us here for dinner, I offered to bring out the rest of the staged dinner courses so the servants could enjoy the festival for once.

They were all too happy to have a night off.

I take a few spoonfuls of the soup and lean back in my chair to watch my parents eat. This hearty beef stew is my father’s favorite, and he shovels it into his mouth like he hasn’t eaten all day.

It’s so ordinary—the three of us here having dinner, the room lit by the fireplace and the shimmering glow of the glass chandelier overhead. I have sat at this table so many times before, but tonight it feels different.

“What do you have for us?” he asks, stirring his soup. “And where is Gaven?”

“Gaven is dead.”

Both of my parents freeze.

“How?” my father asks.

“A blade to the chest. Some political opponent of the Havenwoods.”

My father’s dark purple eyes light with interest. “Stefan Laurence?”

I should not be shocked by anything at this point, but somehow I am. “So you already knew what was happening at the fort?”

“Yes,” he says. “We’ve known for a few years that they were back up and running and the Laurence family shares our vision.”

“And yet you still took the risk of sending me there when you had someone powerful in place? You let me marry a man who hates our family, fuck him in front of all their high houses, and subject myself to the very real danger beyond our city walls for what, exactly?”

My father sighs and looks at the ceiling as if I’m a petulant teenager. “Harlow, at your age I shouldn’t need to tell you that we all have made sacrifices for this family.”

“Have we? Which sacrifices have you made?” In order to have something to lose, he would need to care about something, but the only thing he cares about is his power. That’s why he’s lied and killed to keep it.

“I sacrifice daily with my strength and magic. You think it’s easy to channel enough power to light miles of the wall every night?” he snaps.

My anger rises and I don’t bother to hide it in my pulsing aura. The golden light presses wide, and it feels good not to smother it.

After my revelation in the garden this afternoon, everything inside that had been bound for the past six months came unclenched. I was flooded with memories of the time after Aidia died. What had been a blank spot in my brain, a gray blur of days with nothing specific for months, is now filled in with horrifying color.

The first memory was unmitigated agony. I couldn’t even feel the extent of my emotional pain because my body was so broken afterward. It took days and hours of work by healers to recover, but I did. I saw hazy visions of Kellan sitting in the chair beside my bed, of my mother speaking with the healers in the doorway. It wasn’t until my father came to see me that I roused myself for war.

For weeks, I made myself into a force of nature, raged against the world, my parents, the Divine. I wanted to be a great, thundering tempest, but when the fog lifted from my eyes, I saw I was just a passing shower. I have no bluster. I only have grief and this sickness in my mind that won’t let me release it.

It occurred to me as I continued to destroy my father’s study with a fire poker—as I poisoned the guards who came to check on the destruction, as I tried to piece my world back together without my sister in it—that the only way to heal is to cut out the infection.

“That was not the deal we made,” I say, stirring my spoon in my bowl. “You said you would keep me informed. I said I would do this last thing and then I was done. That I would ask for something and you wouldn’t argue, that I would be given whatever it was.”

My father barks out a cold laugh. “You’re my daughter. You cannot possibly think I wouldn’t have a purpose for you.”

It always comes back to how I can be used.

When I was younger, I saw the way they looked at me when I did something they wanted, and I made the mistake of confusing need with love. If I could not have love, at least I could have their respect.

But trusting me to be their weapon and complimenting me for killing for them was not the same as love. No matter how I tried to shrink my wanting down to a size their scant affection could fill, they had nothing to offer.

I clung to Aidia because she was the last thread of love that stitched me to humanity. Without her, I could so easily be just like them, not caring about the collateral damage of my actions, happily using genuine affection to manipulate people.

Instead, I have taken their lessons to heart, and I used them to right the wrongs I could in our community.

I’ve learned from the best. My parents can be as dark and dreaded as they want. I will find a way to be more monstrous.

Now I understand that I can love my parents and still wish they had the ability to be better. Now I will love myself more by not giving them the chance to meet that potential.

My father wipes the corner of his mouth with his napkin. “Before the opportunity to marry you off to the Havenwood heir presented itself, we were in talks with Rafe.”

My mouth falls open.

“Well, he had to be dealt with,” my father says matter-of-factly. “But now that we have that so well in hand, I think we can consider other options.”

I turn my gaze on my mother. “Why do you continue to let him abuse us? What is worth spending your children like this?” I break down into bitter laughter. “I used to wonder how you lived with yourself while you listened to him beat us when we were so young.”

She frowns, and her usually flawless face shows its age for once. Six months must be the range on Aidia’s glamours.

My mother regards me with total confusion. “What are you talking about? What beatings?”

“The whippings, the torture to make us master our magic,” I say. “Will you pretend like you didn’t know what was going on in your own house? You watched him take us down to the Cove. You were our mother. You were supposed to protect us.”

These words are born of fury—a hurt so deep that I’ve never had the will to cast it out of my body.

I think of all the times I lay one cheek on the cold bathroom floor, the lacerations on my back burning with every subtle movement as I waited for my mother’s familiar gait coming down the hallway. I think of the way it always shocked me how it became easier not to cry the longer I waited. I thought it would be the opposite, but her neglect didn’t make me weak. It galvanized my will. It forced me to think.

It was only ever Aidia with her body weighed down by guilt who would find me, blow out an angry sigh, and go to work, her deft fingers mending what our father ruined with skill that a child should never have needed to master. I can hear her voice in my ear still. Poultice first for the infection. Then we will take you to the well in the morning.

My mother rolls her eyes. “You have always been so sensitive.”

“Sensitive?” My lips burn with poison and my aura is so wide, it scrapes the ceiling and the walls of the room. Thirty years of anger bubble up at once. I thought that I had worked some things out this afternoon, but it seems there is much more to tend to.

“Certainly your father was the disciplinarian,” my mother says in a soft, placating tone. “But that’s the job of every father—to ensure his children learn respect. Besides, he was trying to ensure you could wield your magic at will. How else would you have learned to protect yourself when you were so stubborn and willful?”

My father lifts a conciliating hand. “Harlow is right. There was a time or two when it got out of hand. I’m sorry for that. But can we get back to the task at hand and put an end to this drama?”

My mother’s eyes widen in shock for a moment before she immediately settles back into her usual upright posture and faint smile.

She takes a few more spoonfuls of soup.

“Mom—” My voice is so quiet, but she flinches as if I’m shouting. I have not called her that in years—not since the first time I screamed it and she didn’t come for me.

Her silence now is an echo of a thousand other silences—agonized quiet where I waited for her to speak up, to stop him, and she did nothing but turn away. Later, it would be as if it never happened, as if my back weren’t blistered, as if she’d never heard me screaming, as if she had no idea what had changed in our dynamic.

She balked at the rift between us—I was difficult and moody. I was sensitive. Acknowledging my pain meant owning her failure to prevent it—and that was something she’d never do. If she did, she’d be forced to go back through her other eight children and see the same mistake repeated—she’d have to look at their madness and feel culpable.

“Well,” she says, smoothing her hand down her dress, like she can shake off her guilt. “I thought you were just being dramatic. You and Aidia were always like that. I wish I had known that you needed me to step between you and your father.”

Her words leave me breathless.

I was seven years old, and I knew. That’s what mothers do. That’s what my clients who frantically hire me to kill their abusive husbands are doing. That’s what we understand to be the primal biological instinct of a mother—to stand between their child and danger.

I press on, fueled purely by my anger. “How could you know when you were too busy making yourself scarce when we were dragged down to the Cove?”

She looks straight through me, to the glass windows behind my head.

“Answer me this, Mother. If it were anyone else in the world hurting us, would there have been a question of if you should intervene and protect your children from a monster?”

Finally, she meets my eye, and I see it plainly. She is not strong enough to face what I have. Even when confronted with the truth, I cannot force her to see it because as long as she doesn’t, she’ll stay comfortable.

I resent that my very survival required that I understand my parents, but they have never once tried to understand me. This gives them a convenient way to be dismissive of everything I feel as an overreaction. It places all of the burden of managing our relationship on me. It means that they get to roll their eyes and act like I’m dramatic and ungrateful.

My hyper-awareness to keep myself and Aidia safe developed an under-awareness in them. If they could trace it back, they would find these same themes in our relationship. But if they did that, it would mean facing down the unimaginable pain they’ve caused using their children’s labor to secure their own comfort.

Everything I have done and everything I am is in spite of them, and yet, they will take the credit.

I can’t believe how my mother’s mind has written over reality with a narrative that makes her blameless. An ache swells in my chest. Her abandonment in the only moments I needed her always hurt, but this is different. She is trying to put ownership back on me, but even at such a young age, I knew the difference between simple discipline and abuse. There was no way to mitigate my father’s violence. No matter how Aidia and I tried for perfection, we could not behave our way around his moods, could not tiptoe past his rage or appeal to his madness. We were the only place for him to exorcise his demons.

Deep down, a kind part of me knows that my father likely endured similar violence at my grandfather’s hands, and while that explains why he thinks violence is a solution, it does not excuse him from understanding the cost.

I do not want to be another Carrenwell passing pain down the family tree. I don’t want my nieces and nephews to inherit this horror.