24

TEN YEARS EARLIER

Snapped wicker cuts into the meat of my palm.

My grip on the basket is so tight that beads of blood trail between my fingers, over my whitened knuckles, then drip onto the baubles and treasures.

Keeping my head low, I match father's brisk pace up the stairs with a hurried and clumsy stumble of my own.

Eyes wet, I can hardly make out the tension in father's back, the rage that stiffens the shoulders of his worn tunic, but I see clearly enough to note his hands balled into fists.

They haven't unclenched since he stole me away from Daxeel under the willow tree, and not one word spoken since. A long, uneasy walk home, even with Knife baring silent snarls at me every other step.

I pay the little rodent no mind.

I don't have so much as the fleeting urge to kick him down the stairs—and that's a common urge around Knife.

But I have no fight in me now.

Defeat and fear are what plague me, in the sag of my shoulders, the quiver of my bottom lip, the hitches of my watery breaths, and the heavy thuds of my feet dragging up the steps.

Father veers left and takes the gloomy corridor. His boots thud on the runner rug, firm and determined the whole way to my bedchamber.

I'm silent as I follow him inside.

I know better than to run and hide the basket of baubles from him, or to even sit myself on a chair for his coming lecture—the pure ice of his rage frosts over me, prickles my flesh into tiny bumps, and my feet act on instinct. One, two, three, they slide across the floor until my back connects with the wall.

Through the glaze of tears, I watch father stop an arm's reach away from me. His fists clench that bit more as his shoulders expand, and he draws in a long, deep breath, as though to steady himself, soothe the rage.

Then he speaks, and his voice is anything but ice, it's a low and dangerous sound that has me cringing; "Is that how he did it?"

I blink my watery eyes up at him, a blankness on my face.

Father turns on me. Each step he takes closer to me is punched with careful purpose. Then he reaches for the handle of the wicker basket.

Every instinct in me alights with panic. All at once, I ache to run away with the basket, snarl and hit out at father, weep at his feet to leave me with my baubles.

But I steel myself with everything I have to stay rigid on the spot.

His grip tightens. Mine doesn't loosen.

His gaze doesn't leave mine.

"Did he throw some pretty treasures at you," father's words are distant and precise, so unlike the leashed rage in his stormy eyes, "and that's all it took for you to lay on your back—" I flinch as he growls the rest of his words down at me "—and spread your legs?"

A hard yank, and he's torn the basket from my grip. The viciousness of his snarl is a warning, and it's what stops me from crying out as the wicker tears the flesh of my palm or that he steals my treasures.

I bow my head and curve my shoulders into my chest as if to make myself smaller. Torn hand fisted at my side, blood now spills through my clenched fingers freely. Other hand locked around the straps of my sandals, I watch my anxieties in my bare feet that fidget on the floorboards. My toes curl on wooden slabs so obviously cloth washed, not scrubbed and polished like they should be. I should see my reflection looking back at me, see the twist of my face as quiet sobs shudder through me.

But only when I look up from beneath wet lashes at father do I see him turn—and pitch the basket at the wall.

A cry yelps free from me.

Baubles and phials and ink pots, they all shatter to pieces in a burst of confetti. A silent cry warps my face as it all falls like glitter to the floor.

Father rounds on me again. "How long?"

My wide eyes land on the floor. Tears slick my lips as I try to speak through the hitching of my breaths, "I-It… two-two…"

"Two months?" The tension in him as he takes a step closer to me, I feel it shoving at me, raining down on me like fists. "Since the Eclipse began?"

I can't manage another word.

It's all I can do to just nod my grimaced face—

Then father shouts—roars—at me.

Unleashed, his rage has him towering over me and he bellows something savage in my face.

I scream under the attack, a side of father I've never faced, never known. My body is rigid, hands half lifted at my sides as though braced to push at his chest if he's to strike at me, and I back up and up and up until I'm absolutely squished against the wall.

"Two months," he bellows. "Two months of frolicking around with a darkling! How you shame me, child! How you shame yourself with your spoiled body!"

Cornered between the wardrobe and the wall, I whine something pitiful. All I can manage is a shake of my head, once, twice, before father's hand come smacking down on the wall beside my head.

His shout rattles my bones, "I found you with him, child. I know what you're doing with that beast!"

I wince. "We didn't, we didn't, we didn't…" I can't get my breaths out, it's all chopped and hitched and my bottom lip keeps fluttering into my mouth. "No, no, no—"

"You lie to me?" His shout booms through the bedchamber, the entire house, and I hope and I pray Pandora comes to my rescue. "He was found between your legs, you vile thing! His scent is all over you! You dare trick me?"

"Other things!" My cry hitches with a whine. "Not sex, not sex!"

Father's silence spurs me on.

My lip wobbles as I breath out, "We did… other th-th-things… but-but n-not th-tha-that."

I'm cringing against his energy, as though it's a beast who's cornered me in the wild, one ready to rip me to pieces.

I fear he might.

"Speak clearly, child," his bark shivers my cringed body. He strikes out—and I don't even cry as his palm strikes, hard, across my face so hard that my body is twisted and my other cheek presses against the wall.

Stunned, I just stare at that wall.

Tears hang off my lashes. I hardly notice them through the distant pain screaming on my cheek, like it stings, like it weeps, like it's been set alight.

Faintly, I'm aware of the blood trickling out of my nostril. It falls over my lips, the metallic taste strong on my tongue.

Not once, not once in my nineteen years of life has father ever struck me. Never shouted in my face or cornered me, never frightened me.

But he's not sorry.

Cheek turned to him, father doesn't back away. Instead, he adds in a snarl, "Do not play with your words as you let him play with you. Did you have sex with that darkling?"

"No." The answer chokes out of me.

"Did he touch you between your legs?"

With a snivel, I nod.

"With his hand… or with his mouth?"

"B-bo-both…"

Then his voice drops with a growl that stirs my bladder with threats, "Did you touch him?"

"In a kiss—"

I cry out as father snatches a fistful of my hair.

His firm grip sears my scalp like a blaze. But it's unyielding as he tears me away from the wall, ignores my cries, and drags me over to the copper washtub.

I don't get a moment to right myself, not before he—by the hair—pulls me off balance.

I go tumbling into the drained tub. And I land, hard.

My temple knocks off the copper edge, my leg twists beneath me, and my knee smacks off the bottom. A dizzy moment steals me as I try to push up. If it's the pain or the shock of it all, I don't know.

But it's smacked clean out of me when father's hand comes down on me again. His strike catches my cheekbone. The next comes down on my temple. The third—a fierce backhand to my jaw that bursts my lip on impact.

No fourth comes.

The skirt caught between my legs is damp, my bladder delivered on its promise. I'm stiff in the copper washtub, twisted at an odd angle, my bones screaming beneath my flesh. My eyes close against the reflective copper, I don't need to look to know blood spills from my mouth, trickles down my nose and stains my darkening eye.

Like beasts in the wild, if I'm quiet and still, he'll stop attacking.

And he does.

Father steps back and clicks his fingers. "The last dance of the season is two nights from now."

At his summons, the rush of little feet pitter patter into my bedchamber. Servants, ready for their commands.

But father speaks only to me as he says, "You will reject your darkling—publicly. You will shame him. Deliver a slight so terrible that he will never forgive you. And only then, if I am satisfied enough by your performance to perhaps forgive you one day, only then will I decide your punishment. Make it the best performance of your short, little life. If I'm not pleased, then the Grott is where I will vanish you for two years, and then we will see if I can stand to look at you again."

Bones and muscles are bolted together, as rigid as a fallen statue, except one movement that gives me away—the tremble of my bottom lip, the shudder that twists from terror… to heartbreak.

I loosen a shaking breath, feeling father's gaze spearing through me like swords. For a long moment, he just stands there, watching me, deciding my fate—waiting to see if he might change his mind and just send me off to the wicked horrors of the Grott tonight.

Finally, he barks at the servants but I'm far from forgotten, "Wash her! Scrub her clean until she bleeds. Then," he adds with a rumbling growl I cringe from, "feed her the boneworm and lock her in the basement until the morning of the farewell."

Nausea crawls up my throat.

Boneworm.

The nausea fast turns into a retch that bubbles and burns.

Father spares me a look, one filled with disgust and not a speck of pity, one that tells me he'd rather tear the flesh from my skin right now.

But then he turns his back on me. And he storms out of the bedchamber, leaving me to the cruelty of the servants.

Knife takes charge.

He scrubs my body the harshest with the bristled brush. I do bleed. Tiny pricks all over my arms and legs and back and chest, even the soles of my feet.

I don't fight it. To fight them would be to fight father.

So I endure it. With sobs and cries and winces, I suffer the full wash, the torture of it, then part my lips for Knife to stuff a tiny, thorny white worm down my throat.

I almost sick it up the moment it's wiggling its own way down my throat. But the barbed thorns fight me, and I only burp against its intrusion.

For two days and two nights, this boneworm will live in me. It'll crawl and writhe under my flesh, lay eggs on my bones, and whisper songs to itself that I'll be haunted by in my basement isolation.

And still, I suffer it all without a fight.

Because the Grott is worse.