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“Are you with child?”
Ana’s question shocked me, and I looked up to meet her gaze, which was soft and gentle.
“No,” I said quickly and paused, going cold. “I can’t be. I…”
I am going to die, I thought, though I knew there was a very real chance that I actually was pregnant, and if that was the truth, then I had just signed a death warrant for my child.
I stood, shaking.
“Ana, I can’t be pregnant.”
“You very well can be, Yesenia.”
“You do not understand—”
“I know you’ve said it before, that you are going to die—”
“I am. Dragos asked if he would conquer the world, and I foretold that his attempt would end in his demise,” I said. “He willmurderme, Ana.”
Her lips slammed together and her jaw tightened.
“Then you must flee,” she said, as if it were that simple.
I shook my head. I had seen the future, seen my death at the stake, but why had I not seenlife? My chest felt as though it were being ripped to shreds. I pressed my hands to my stomach and then hugged myself, tears streaming down my face.
“How did I not see this life?” I asked, my voice broken.
Ana rose and placed her hands on my shoulders. “You can change the course of the future, Yesenia. Perhaps you did so here.”
I wanted to believe her, and perhaps stupidly, her words gave me hope.
“I don’t know what to do,” I said.
“Adrian will figure it out,” Ana said. “But first, you must tell him.”
Ravena came back into focus. She stood opposite me, and it was the first time I’d ever seen any kind of expression on her face beyond hateful smugness.
I remembered the rest of that night. Adrian and I had fled to the cottage under the mountains where we would spend a final night together. It was the same place Adrian had buried the bones of High Coven. It was where we had been captured, where Adrian had been beaten and where Dragos had raped me.
“I never told him,” I whispered, staring at Ravena now. “I never told Adrian.”
This revelation was a knife to my heart. There was a part of me that wanted to wonder what might have happened had we lived. Would I have had a boy or a girl? Would I have been able to use those names I had chosen?
“That is what Dragos took from you,” Ravena said. “It is whatmendid to you because they feared you. Shall we give them something to truly fear?”
Ravena held out her hand, and while I had no real insight of what she wanted, I knew that I needed inside that portal if I was ever going to stop her.
I took her hand.
Entering the mirror felt exactly like running through glass. It hurt, as if a thousand pins were scraping over my skin, but once inside, I was awash in brightness. There was no floor or ceiling or walls. I existed in nothing, but I was not alone here. Only the woman opposite me was not Ravena.
“Ana?” I breathed.
I looked behind me to see out into the great hall. When I turned around, Ana was still there, slight and silver-haired.
“I don’t understand. You’re…aren’t you at the Red Palace?”
“I have not woken up, but I will…after this.” She smiled at me sadly. “Are you quite devastated?”
