I kept my mouth shut. My fingers clenched in my lap.
“Tell me where you came from,” he said softly.
My lips parted, but nothing came out. A pressure was building in my skull, gentle at first, then sharper, like the scraping of fingernails behind my eyes.
I winced.
Oh gods. He was in my head.
“Stop,” I hissed, recoiling.
“I said I’d get the truth,” he murmured. “You can tell me. Or I can take it.”
A bead of sweat slipped down my temple. I closed my eyes, tried to push back, to block him out—but whatever wards he’d set on this place, they weren’t just holding my magic hostage. They wereamplifyinghis.
Behind him, Slade didn’t move. Didn’t blink. He was there if I tried to run, or fight, or scream.
Thorne tilted his head. “There’s something in you. Locked up tight. Who did that to you, girl? Who taught you to seal your own mind like a vault?”
I gritted my teeth. “Get. Out.”
He smiled, thin and cruel, but there was a reluctant darkness in his eyes. “You really think you’re strong enough to keep me out forever?”
The pain started as a whisper—then became a scream. I gritted my teeth, trying not to cry out. Thorne didn’t speak, didn’t move. He just watched me, one hand pressed to the side of his temple like he was listening to a voice only he could hear.
But it was my mind he was tuning into.
“You’re blocking me,” he murmured.
I let out a bitter laugh. “I wish I was.”
His brows furrowed. He pressed harder. I could feel him slipping through the last six years—junkyards and shelters, hunger and cold, Finn’s hand in mine. Over and over, like a record stuck on repeat.
“Where is it?” he muttered. “Where did you come from?”
“I don’t know!” I gasped, slamming my hand on the table. “You think Ilikenot knowing who I am?”
He didn’t answer, but I saw it—the twitch in his jaw. The flicker of frustration in his usually unreadable eyes. This wasn’t going the way he’d planned.
He backed off slightly, breath shallow now. His focus drifted, searching deeper. Past the alley. Past the slums. Deeper—
—and hit something.
A wall. Smooth. Impossibly dense. Cold like stone. A mind-forged barrier I hadn’t even known was there.
He swore under his breath and stumbled back a step, eyes wide.
“What did you do?” he hissed.
“I didn’t do anything,” I said, still shaking. “I don’trememberanything before I was sixteen. It’s just… gone.”
He looked at me like I was lying. Like I washidingsomething.
“I can’t get past it,” he said, more to himself than to me. “Who put it there?”
I swallowed hard, voice cracking. “You think I’d choose this?”
Thorne turned abruptly, pacing. Slade stiffened by the door, watching us both like a coiled spring.
