Chapter Forty-Two

E vienne sat alone in the gloom with the wrongness that was the Sangroche. Every time she breathed, pain seared through her palm where the massive silver spike was shoved into her hand. It dripped blood slowly down the sides of the spike into a tiny collection dish with a delicate dropper coming out the bottom.Emptiness consumed her mind with its vicious darkness.

Her hand was strapped in tightly to the arm of a chair that seemed to have been designed for this purpose exactly. The whole rest of her body was strapped in too for that matter; she couldn’t move an inch.

Every few minutes, a drop of her blood would release from the dropper and slide down a tiny silver channel and onto the Sangroche. It would hit the seething stone with a hiss and a flare of black shadow before it disappeared quickly into the shifting, matte surface.Numbness was better than the phantom voices that called to her from its glowing red depths, tiny remnants of all the lives bound up inside it.

She stared at the mechanism slowly draining the life from her, bolstering the magic of this atrocity. She felt exhausted, drained, weak. She stared and stared, her soul opening into a void. In the darkness of her inner world, her thoughts started drifting.

Failure. Unwanted, unloved. Useless. Stupid. Of course it would end this way. How could she have thought otherwise? She was only a success because she had followed all the rules; of course it would all crumble the moment she stepped out of line, pursued something she thought was right. Of course she would make a mess of it.

Her parents had known she wasn’t worth their time. Now she knew Dominique, too, had never really cared for her. That was a coarse grain of salt in the wound of Evienne’s self-loathing.

She already thought herself stupid for not seeing sooner how unhealthy their relationship had been; for letting herself be controlled and spoken down to. She felt immense guilt for the years she had lost to Dominique—so much remorse it would suffocate her if she gave it more than half a thought.

Learning that it had all been a farce? That she had gone through that darkness for no true reason, that it had been a lie from the start? Evienne felt hot tears sliding down her face, dampening her neck.

Aldith, one of her oldest friends, had wanted her to succeed, but only enough to be useful to her. She had put Dominique, her friend, her lover, her wife, on her tail to keep her close, to keep her from shining too bright. Aldith had never wanted anything good for Evienne, had never trusted her. She just saw her as a resource, something to be used.

Evienne had tried and tried to make people love her, to be enough for them. She did everything she could for them, emptied herself for them, and it was never enough. She wasn’t enough.

And her mate—her beautiful, strong, noble mate. She had only just found him, only just opened herself up to the possibility of a future with him. And now he was gone from her, likely dead, because he got entangled with these people she had thought loved her.

She didn’t deserve to be Orion’s mate. She couldn’t do anything right or true or good, couldn’t be anything more than a disappointment. She wasn’t worth the space she took up.

Her breaths came in shallow waves, her tears tracing salty stinging lines down her cheeks. She couldn’t sob, couldn’t move, couldn’t take her eyes off the slow dripping of her blood.

She didn’t know how long she sat and stared. How had it come to this? She wished they would kill her quickly and get it over with instead of this slow, agonizing draining of her lifeblood. Why did they need her anyway if she was so useless?

It started small—a spark of doubt in her seemingly endless dark. If she was so useless, why would they need her for this? The spark flared. If her blood was so potent it could power this centuries-old magical abomination, was she really so useless?Deep in her soul, she knew the answer.

She had been chosen as a Contrapensa—chosen by her mentor, who knew her well, and by others who only knew of her character. Not by luck or some random divine mandate. No, she had been chosen because of who she was .

That’s what Hestia had said. It was because of who she was , who she chose to be, every day. The person she had hammered and forged herself into, through pain and mistakes and misery and joy and laughter and hope.

All of those people she had emptied herself for, had practically begged to love her; they were the ones not worth a second thought. She had herself, and she had her Còmhanam, who had shown her what it means to be truly accepted for what and who you are.

Maybe she wasn’t worthless at all. Maybe they wouldn’t need her if she wasn’t the most powerful thing they could get their hands on. Evienne decided that for herself, for everything she had survived, she would hone her rage into a blade and slice away all the doubt that had held her back. She was a force of nature, and she would free herself—and the people of Beitar along with her.