I only stop when I’m at the cliffside. Gasping for air, I curl my arms around my middle as the world threatens to tilt.
“I can’t believe you came back.”
My spine stiffens at the words.
Slowly turning, I find myself staring down the devil herself. Marisela.
My stepmother walks next to me and looks out over the crashing waves.
“I’d hoped you’d died,” she says airily.
“Ditto,” I say darkly.
A flash of a smile appears on her face before disappearing. “Yes, how strange to have such similar hopes and now to be in a helpful position for each other.”
“Helpful?”
My skin crawls. Goosebumps rising up.
Would she throw me over the edge onto the jagged, deadly rocks below? I wouldn’t put it past her. Hell, I was thinking of doing it.
Could I be like Kaison? I knew what she was. I knew the evil inside her. It could be so simple—just throw her over the edge and be done with my demon.
“Yes,” she goes on as if murdering each other isn’t imminent. “We need back into the good graces of the Midnight court, and you need to make it to your wedding. I believe we can have a mutually beneficial understanding. One that will lead us all toresuming a life as one big happy family.” The smile she gives me is one I’ve seen far too many times. She lied to me for years, but I spent nearly as many learning to see past them to the ugly truth inside her.
“You mean the life where you help the King edge me out so your dearest darling daughter can take my place?”
Marisela’s face tightens.
That’s right you ol’ bitch, you can’t get anything past me anymore. I know what you are.
“Well, I can’t say I tried.” She tuts insincerely. “But since you also can see where this is headed, don’t you think it’s best you just leave now?” The threat lingers just below the surface.
I want to scream, pull her hair, cut her up into tiny little ribbons the way she did to me for years.
I thought she loved me. The way she brushed my hair in front of my father. The way she pretended to be concerned about my fitting in with the other children. The way she told me I was just like my dad in a way that made me warm to my toes.
My father died and the rug was pulled out from under me, and I never stopped falling. Not for years. Not until Goldie, Rap, Red, and the Poison Apple.
“I’m not going anywhere. I’m here to get justice for my father, and I won’t leave until I get it.”
Her smile flickers as one eye twitches. “You think your father was some saint? You think he was a good man? I may have married him to get on the fairy court, but I’m not the monster. He was.”
She can’t be fucking serious.
“You’re as deluded as you are greedy.”
“You wouldn’t know,” she hisses, her mask of decorum dropping like an anvil. “Not his precious Cinder who he doted on. Not his darling daughter who was better than everyone else. No, he never laid a hand on you. He never left bruises on yourprecious skin. He never left you a bloody pulp. It wasn’t even the adultery that bothered me, at least that way he was taking it out on some other whore rather than me.”
“You’re insane.” Whatever happened to Marisela in my absence, it really turned her brains to scrambled eggs to come up with these ridiculous victim stories.
“Insane? No. You think I only married your father to get close to the court? I have no qualms admitting I sought prestige, but he had his own agenda. Your father wanted so desperately to be one of us. He didn’t want to remain a familiar, he wanted the King to turn him into one of us, a Midnight fairy.”
“That’s impossible,” I scoff. “No one is turned vampire. You have to be born that way.”
She sniffs. “Maybe, maybe not.”
Oh dear fae lords.
