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His moon-pale eyes flash upward and lock onto mine. “The darkness inside of you. Who put it there?”
My throat bobs as I swallow, but I shake my head. “I told you; you’re out of questions.”
Nox frowns, but he doesn’t push. Instead he says, “I’d like to show you something.”
I can hardly manage the squeak of inquiry that proceeds from my throat.
“Wait up for me tonight,” he says. Then he winks and is gone.
CHAPTER24
BLAISE: AGE TWELVE
Pain.
It comes in torrential waves, ripping my muscles apart, cleaving this child from my body.
It hurts it hurts it hurts.
I’ve never hated Derek more. Not when he accused me of bearing a child to another man. Not when he left me after promising to marry me. Not when he let me rot up in the attic for months.
This pain should be his, this creature inside me, his.
He should have to bear it, not me.
Because the pain is going to kill me.
Sweat rolls off my forehead, soaking my pillow, but no one thinks to wipe it with a cloth.
The only use my stepmother finds for the cloth is to shove it into my mouth to stifle my screams.
She’s sent the servants from the house, carried them away to perform pointless tasks, but there’s always the chance the neighbors will hear.
I’m sure she’s concocted a lie to feed them on the off chance.
If the pain doesn’t kill me, the rag will, and then my stepmother will be a murderer.
There’s a part of me that hopes I’ll die, just so she’ll bear the blame for it. So she’ll rot in jail, deprived of her fine gowns and sparkling brooches forever. Then again, she likely would find a way to cover up my death too, and then I would have died for no reason at all.
So I decide I will not die, even if Derek’s baby wishes it so.
But then the pain ebbs, and I watch as the midwife lifts the child into her arms, as she slices the cord.
My heart floats on wings of joy.
And then there is another jolt of pain, one that should not be happening, not when the baby is out in the world.
And then there is nothing.
“Where is my baby?”
The words spew from my lips before I fully reenter consciousness, before I feel the pillows stacked around me or the emptiness in my belly or the aching of my muscles.
“Safe. The child is safe and well cared for.” It’s Clarissa speaking. I know without opening my eyes.
I frown, my mind coming back to me in trickles of memory. “With the wet nurse?”
I’d wanted to feed my child, but as Clarissa’s story was going to be that the child was left on our doorstep in the middle of the night, she forbade such a thing.
