“Remember, baby sister? Remember how I came in here and found you playing with a real fire in the fireplace? Remember how you fell in, thinking it wouldn’t hurt you, just like the holograph? Remember how I got burned while trying to rescue you?”
Blinking, Levana tried to take a step back, but her feet were rooted to the carpet. Not from fear or uncertainty—Channary was controlling her limbs now. She was too young, too weak to get away.
Horror crept down her spine, covering her skin in gooseflesh.
“S-sister,” she stammered. “We should put ice on your burns. Before … before they get any worse.”
But Channary’s expression was changing again. The fury was contorting into something cruel and sadistic, hungry and curious.
“Come here, baby sister,” she whispered, and despite the terror twisting inside Levana’s stomach, her feet obeyed. “I want to show you something.”
*
Levana couldn’t stop crying, no matter how hard she tried. The sobs were merciless and painful, coming so fast she felt faint from an inability to breathe as her lungs convulsed. She crumpled over her knees, rocking and trembling. She wanted to stop crying. So badly she wanted to stop crying, in no small part because she knew that Evret, in his own private chambers down the hall, could probably hear her. And at first she’d dreamed that he would take pity on her, that the sound of her tears would soften his heart and bring him to her side. That he would comfort her and hold her and finally, finally realize that he’d loved her all along.
But she’d been crying long enough now, with no sign of her husband, to know that it wasn’t going to happen. Just one more fantasy that wouldn’t come true. Just one more lie she’d constructed for herself to escape into, never realizing she was welding the bars of her own cage.
Finally, the tears began to slow, the pain began to dull.
When she could breathe again, and thought she could stand without collapsing, she took hold of a bedpost and hauled herself to her feet. Her legs were weak, but they held. Without the strength to reinstate her glamour, she tore off one of the sheer drapes that hung from the bed’s canopy and draped it over her head. She would look like a ghost wandering the palace halls, but that was fine. She felt like a ghost. No more than a figment of a girl.
Hugging the makeshift veil around her body, she stumbled out of her bedroom. Two guards were posted outside the royal chambers, at silent attention as she emerged. If they were surprised at the fabric draped over her head, their expressions gave nothing away, and they fell into a march at a respectful distance behind her.
Despite the care she took to conceal herself, she passed no one else as she wandered through the palace. Even the servants were asleep this late at night.
She didn’t know where she was going until, minutes later, she found herself standing outside her sister’s bedroom, or what had been her sister’s bedroom during her short reign as queen, nearly eight years ago. Levana could have taken these chambers as her own—larger and more lavish than the room she was currently in—but at the time she’d enjoyed the quaintness of her rooms shared with Evret and Winter. She’d liked the idea that she was a queen who did not need riches and luxuries, only the love of her family to surround her.
She wondered if the people of the court had been laughing behind her back all this time. Was she the only one who had never recognized just how false her marriage, her family, really was?
Leaving the guards in the hall, she opened her sister’s door. It wasn’t locked, and at first Levana expected to find it emptied of anything of value. Surely the servants knew that she never came here, that they could have their pick of all the fine treasures inside.
But as Levana stepped into the room and the lights flickered on, casting the room in a serene glow, it was exactly as she remembered it, even the very faint scent of her sister’s perfume. It was like walking into a museum, every piece encapsulated in time. Her sister’s hairbrush on the vanity, though the tines had been carefully picked clean. The unruffled bedcovers. There was even the little basinet with its cream-colored velvets and filigree of a tiny coronet on top, where baby Selene had slept, unbeknownst even to Levana. She’d assumed that the child stayed with a wet nurse or nanny during that first year, not in her mother’s own chambers.
It occurred to her, staring at that tiny, beautiful little bed, sweet and innocent and harmless, that she probably should have felt something. Remorse. Guilt. Horror at what she’d done all those years ago.
But there was nothing. She felt nothing but the breaking of her own heart inside her chest.
Tearing her gaze away, she spotted what she’d come for. Her sister’s mirror.