Darroc wanted to “talk” when we arrived. But I know what it was really about. He was testing me. He showed me pictures of Alina. Made me sit and look at them with him and listen to his stories, until I thought I might go insane.

I close my eyes, but my sister’s face is burned into the backs of my eyelids. And there, standing next to her, are my mom and dad. I said I didn’t care what happened to them in this reality, because I’m going to make a new one, but the truth is I’d care in any reality. I’ve just been blocking it.

I will not ask Darroc what happened to my parents after I was swept off to the Hall of All Days, and he doesn’t offer the information.

If he told me they were dead, too, I don’t know what I’d do.

I suspect this is another of his tests. I will pass it.

That’s my girl, Daddy encourages in my mind. Chin up; you can do it. I believe in you, baby. Sis-boom-bah! he says, and smiles. Even though he hadn’t wanted me to pursue cheerleading, he’d still driven me to tryouts, and when I’d made the first cut, he’d had one of his clients at Petit Patisserie bake me a special cake shaped like a pair of pink and purple pom-poms.

I double over like I’ve been kicked in the stomach, and my mouth wrenches wide on a sob that makes no sound because I inhale it at the last second.

Darroc is out there with the princes. I don’t dare betray grief. I don’t dare make a sound that they might hear.

Daddy was my greatest cheerleader, always telling me wise things I rarely listened to and never understood. I should have taken the time to understand. I should have spent more time focused on who I was inside and less on who I was outside. Hindsight, 20/20.

Tears run down my face. As I turn away from the mirror, my knees go out from under me and I collapse to the bathroom floor in a heap. I curl into a ball, silently heaving.

I’ve held it at bay as long as I can. Grief crashes over me, drowning me. Alina. Barrons. Mom and Dad, too? I can’t bear it. I can’t keep it all in.

I cram a fist in my mouth to stop my screams.

I can’t let anyone hear. He would know I’m not what I pretend to be. What I must be to fix my world.

There I sat on the couch with him, looking at my sister in all those pictures. And each one reminded me how, when we were little, in every single picture taken of us together, her arm was around me, protecting me, watching out for me.

She was happy in the pictures Darroc showed me. Dancing. Talking with friends. Sightseeing. He’d taken so many of her photo albums from her apartment. Left us with hardly any. As if the paltry few months he’d spent with her gave him more right to her possessions than me—who’d spent my whole life loving her!

I hadn’t been able to trace my fingers over her face in front of him because it would have betrayed emotion, weakness. I’d had to lavish all my attention on him. He’d watched me the entire time with those glittering copper eyes, absorbing every detail of my reaction.

I knew it would be a deadly mistake—and the last I ever made—to underestimate the ancient, brilliant mind behind those cold metallic eyes.

After what seemed like years of torture, he finally began to look tired, yawning, even rubbing his eyes.

I forget his body is human, subject to limits.

Eating Unseelie doesn’t keep you from needing sleep. Like caffeine or speed, it wires you hard but, when you crash, you crash just as hard. I suspect that’s a large part of the reason he never sleeps more than one night in the same place. It’s when he’s most vulnerable. I imagine it must chafe, to have a human body that needs sleep after having been Fae and not needing anything for eternity.

I decide that’s when I’ll kill him. When he’s sleeping. After I’ve gotten what I want. I’ll wake him and, while he’s still feeling humanly muddled, I’ll smile and drive my spear through his heart. And I’ll say, “This is for Alina and for Jericho.”

My fist isn’t keeping my sobs down.

They’re beginning to leak around it in soft moans. I’m lost in pain, fragments of memories crashing over me: Alina waving good-bye at the gate the day she left for Dublin; Mom and Dad tied to chairs, gagged and bound, waiting for a rescue that never came; Jericho Barrons, dead on the ground.

Every muscle in my body spasms and I can’t breathe. My chest feels hot, tight, crushed beneath a massive weight.

I fight to keep the sobs in. If I open my mouth to breathe, they’ll come out, but I’m waging a hopeless battle: Sob and breathe? Or don’t sob and suffocate?

My vision starts to dim. If I lose consciousness from holding my breath, at least one great cry will explode from me.