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Chapter Fifty-Six
Aika
Mother’s voice resounds in my dreams.
‘You see that I have no choice but to correct your path.’Her hand tenderly cups my cheek.‘To keep you from the temptation of running off again.’
A match flares to life in a glass bottle, and her hand pulls away.
She touches the match against each of my feet. Over and over again, they catch fire. She laughs as I hold back my tears.
One useless daughter is enough.
Her face is carved from stone as she stares down at me.
I call out to Remy, but he shakes his head bitterly and walks away.
I try to call after him, to explain or lie or something, but no sound escapes my lips. Then, the sequence starts again, and again.
Until the gentle scent of jasmine comes in to drive it all away.
At last, I have peace.
* * *
I situp before my eyes are all the way open, already on alert in the unfamiliar room. A hand on my wrist stops me before I can draw my weapon.
“It’s all right. You’re safe. It’s just me.” Something in the way she says it makes me think it isn’t the first time.
Nodding, I pull my hand away and sink back to my pillow. Zaina retracts her hand as well, settling back on her side of the mattress where she must have slept last night.
We lay in silence for another few minutes. Our argument from earlier invades the air between us like the gas from one of Mother’s poisons, sucking the oxygen from the room.
I turn over on my side to face her, taking in the very real and very alive version of her that I never imagined seeing again. I’m grappling with what to say, with whether I should speak at all, when she breaks the silence.
“You’re right, you know. You were never going to be Rose.” Her quiet tone feels louder than it should in the dimly lit room.
Hearing her confirm what I’ve felt for years stabs sharper than the glass on the tender flesh of my feet, but she isn’t finished.
“I loved Rose, but she couldn’t survive Madame’s world, and you could. You have. But... I didn’t want you to have to.” She takes a breath. “It wasn’t that I hated you. It was that I didn’t want that lifefor you. Any of it. But wearefamily, Aika. You and me and Mel.” She trails off for a minute, her voice weaker when she speaks again. “That’s why I did all of this.”
The silence between us stretches out like a dense, impenetrable fog. I don’t quite know how to respond to her, so I eventually settle for asking a question.
“Are you ever going to tell me whatall of thisis?”
She takes another deep breath, and I can feel her hesitation before she speaks again. “I want to eliminate Madame. I want us all to be free of her.”
I wait for the shock to settle in, but it never does. On some subconscious level, I know that. What else could this have been about?
On the heels of that thought, another dawns on me, altogether less pleasant.
“And that’s why you didn’t tell me. You weren’t sure if I would take your side over hers.”
The uncertain look on Zaina’s face tells me I’ve guessed correctly. It’s almost comforting, though, to know it wasn’t because she didn’t care.
I can’t pretend not to understand on some level. With Mother, everything is murky. Even now, I’m not sure Zaina was wrong to doubt me.
Would I have taken her side?
