bChapter /bb208 /b

    Eryx POV

    55%

    Myugh still hangs in the cellse, slow to fade, but sour in my mouth. The bars cast thin shadows across the floor, across my legs, across the chains that bite my wrists and aknles. I can still feel the spark that tried to leap from my palm, the way the magic crawled up my arm like a living thing. It wants out. I want it out. They are scared of me, and I guess they should ollibe. /li/ol

    Footsteps thud up the stairs, lighter at first, then faster as my mother flees. The door above closes with a dull thump, and now, silence drops. The damp creeps back in. I taste rust and stone and my own anger, thick as blood.

    My father doesn’t move right away, of course not, he’s stubborn. He stands a pace off the bars, shoulders square with his jaw locked. The guards hold their ces along the wall, eyes on me, hands on steel and spell–woven rope. Everyone waits

    to see which version of me they will get.

    “Do you really not care about anything?” my father asks atst.

    I tip my head and smile slow enough to show teeth. “Care is a trick,” I say. “Care is how you make yourself soft. Soft gets carved open.” I’m not weak, not anymore, I’m powerful, more powerful than he understands. All I need is one slip and I’m

    free.

    He steps closer and stops just short of the bars. The torchlight picks up the old scars on his knuckles, the ones I used to trace with my thumb when I was small and wanted to hear stories about the battles he never wanted to tell. His eyes never

    leave mine.

    “Do you care about April?” he asks, voice low, even.

    Heat lifts under my skin like a fever. The answer I should give is buried under the answer that rises first, ck and easy. I let that one out, because it hurts him, because it proves to all of us what I am bing.

    “I’ll watch her burn,” I say, and I say it softly, like a secret. “I’ll sit right here and listen to the screaming, and I will not

    blink.”

    One of the guards swears under his breath. They look mortified, good, because I’m done being their good little fucking boy. My father’s jaw tightens but his gaze doesn’t flinch. He knows what this is, he knows who is feeding it, but he doesn’t look away from the rot in front of him.

    “How about this,” he says, taking one more step, close enough now that I can see the gray at his temples. “What if she is with someone else. What if she is in another man’s bed. What if she is already imed.”

    Something in my chest gives a bsmall/b, clean snap. It should be pain. It should be rage that is mine and not borrowed. It should be. The darkness catches it first and chews it to pulp.

    “Good,” I say, and Iugh bagain/b, light as ash. “Let him have the ruined thing. Let him choke on it. Why would I care if her body is used by someone else? I’d give her back to her family, to the ones who hate her if I could.”

    My father doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t try to threaten me, instead, he leans closer, slow, like he is approaching a skittish animal that will bite through bone.

    b1/3 /b

    09:31 Sat, 30 Aug

    “What about your child,” he says. “You know that April is pregnant.”

    55%

    +23

    The word catches like a hook in my ribs. For one breath, everything inside me stops. The chains seem to loosen, though they don’t move. My palms open without meaning to, as if I could hold the sound that rises in the sudden quiet. It is not a sound. It is a tug. A small, certain weight under my chest, low and steady, a drum I didn’t know I was listening for until it beats once, then again.

    I close my eyes, and the cell tilts. The damp vanishes. Sun spills across a different room, that room where we spent a morning whispering things that didn’t survive the afternoon. Herugh. The way she tucked her chin when she lied about being fine. Fingers in my hair. The smell of rain on old brick. Words that I never got to say again outloud. The ghost of a future I was too young to hold and too sure to doubt.

    Mine.

    My eyes fly open. Air rasps in and feels like a de. The tug pulses again, faint, smaller than anything I have ever tried to protect, and for a heartbeat I’m not chained, I’m not rotten, and I’m not full of someone else’s shadows. I’m a man with a

    mate and a child, and there is nothing in the world I would not burn to keep them breathing.

    Then the coldes back.

    It pours through the cracks I left open, thick and gleaming, and it coats the tug until I can’t feel the beat, only the ache. The sneer finds my mouth on its own. My fingers curl until the cuffs bite and wet warmth slicks my wrists.

    “Liar,” I say

    first, because I need it to be a lie. “You want me soft. You want me stupid. You want me begging.”

    You felt it,” my father says. He does not move, does not lift a hand, does not look away. “Don’t lie to yourself. You felt it.”

    The word mine tries to climb up my throat. The darkness stands on it and grinds it back down. I lick blood from my lip and

    let the worst answer win.

    “I hope it dies,” I say.

    The guards flinch like I hit them. My father’s eyes shut for a single blink. When he opens them, the fury is there, but so is something that will not go. It looks like pity to me. I want to break his face for it. I don’t need his damn pity, he’s thinking

    I’m weak, that I’m broken.

    I’m not, I’m strong, I’m me. I’m not the puppet he built, or the small boy my mother read to. I’m breaking free of their crap, I’m bing something I want to be, something stronger, maybe it’s darker, but it’s better.

    “You will not mean that when you are clean,” he says.

    “I mean it nowi,/i” I say, “Now is all there is. Stop wasting your breath. There is no one in this world I would save, I would burn everyone I know to the ground then dance in their ashes and cheer.”

    He leans his forearms to the bars, close enough that I could lean in and bite his cheek if I wanted. He knows that. He stays

    where he is.

    “Fight through this,” he says, the words t, each one set down like stone. “I am not asking you to be a hero. I am asking you to be a father.”

    “I am asking you to leave,” I say. “You want me to fight, then stop talking. Your voice makes it worse.”

    09:31 Sat, 30 Augu