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“Sarah. It’s Sarah.”
“Is it, though?” I ask, watching her closely.
The door swings open once more and Lyssa backs through, a tray of food balanced carefully in her hands. She freezes the instant she registers Sarah’s presence, the tray slipping from her fingers, ceramic shards going everywhere as the cup and plate shatter.
But even before they hit the ground, she has Sarah locked in a brutal chokehold, forearm crushing against her windpipe as she hauls the other woman off her feet with seemingly no effort at all. Sarah doesn’t so much as flinch, her hands hanging limply at her sides as she stares at me with that same eerie, vacant expression.
“Lyssa, stop!” I cry out, my voice ringing with more authority than I actually feel as I struggle out of bed.
For a moment, I’m not sure she’s going to listen. Then, slowly, almost grudgingly, Lyssa releases her grip and tosses Sarah away from her in disgust. The other woman crumples to the floor in an unceremonious heap, drawing in a rattling gasp of air.
“If you ever come near Scarlett again, you’re dead,” Lyssa tells her. “Do you understand me?”
Sarah just nods as she pulls herself upright. She’s making no move to defend herself, to lash out or throw accusations in return. There’s something almost...broken about her stillness, her docile acceptance of Lyssa’s threats.
I wonder if this is how she dealt with Grandmother’s abuse, too.
“What are you doing here?” Lyssa demands. I open my mouth, feeling some strange urge to defend the woman who was my greatest tormentor apart from Grandmother, but Sarah beats me to it.
“I came to apologize to Scarlett.”
Slowly, almost mechanically, Sarah turns to face me fully. “For Adam,” she continues woodenly. “I came to tell you…that I’m sorry. I killed him on Grandmother’s orders, and I’m sorry.”
My breath catches in my throat. Hearing her say sorry like that, as though it will make any difference…
“Grandmother had been watching you for a while,” Sarah goes on. “Wanted to recruit you into her ranks. She thought killing your brother would be the most effective way to bring you into the fold—to make you burn for vengeance so you’d be open to her offer when she made it. She made me wear the mask. Wanted me to make sure it appeared in that video so you’d think it was Lyssa. And…it worked. It set you on a path straight to us, straight to her.”
It takes every ounce of restraint I possess not to lunge across the space separating us and beat her face in. Lyssa can see it, too, because she holds out a hand to the side, where Ariadne—Sarah—can’t see, silently urging restraint.
“So that’s it?” I ask thickly. My legs are weak, and it’s not from the blood I’ve given. Not now. “You killed Adam in cold blood on Grandmother’s orders, all so she could twist me into one of her attack dogs, and you’re sorry about it?”
“I didn’t have a choice,” she says flatly. And then: “What would you have done, Scarlett? What noble path would you have chosen?”
“Knock it off with the sarcasm,” Lyssa says softly, “or I’ll remove your tongue from your throat.”
My hands have curled into white-knuckled fists at my sides as I fight to stay calm, to stay right here. Because no matter what lay behind Sarah’s actions, the end result is the same.
My beloved brother is still dead. And that can’t change.
“Do you really think that makes a difference to me?” I ask, my voice shaking. “That Grandmother ordering you to do it somehow makes it forgivable?”
For the briefest of instants, genuine remorse flickers over Sarah’s carved-marble features. “Of course not,” she murmurs. “But I’m still sorry, Scarlett. For—for everything.”
With that, she backs toward the door and finally leaves the room, so that Lyssa and I are left alone in silence. For several moments more, neither of us speaks.
Until, haltingly, I give voice to the most pressing inquiry I have right now. “How’s Hadria doing?”
Lyssa gives a faint half-smile. “Better than anyone should be after that hit she took.” She shakes her head with a small huff of disbelief. “Already sitting up and talking like she wasn’t just about dead an hour ago.”
The knot inside me loosens up a little. Lyssa wouldn’t be so casual if Hadria’s condition wasn’t truly improving.
“I’m glad,” I say, and I even smile. “I wish things could have been different, you know?”
“What, that you’d taken the bullet instead?” She grins, hustles me back into the bed. “That I had?” she demands in mock outrage.
“Of course not,” I snort softly, as I let her bully me back into the sheets. “I mean…I wish I’d known about all this”—I gesture vaguely to the room around us—“and about the Syndicate, before Grandmother got her claws in me. Maybe then I could have—” I cut myself off abruptly. “But that’s not how life works, is it? It doesn’t matter what might have been. I made my choices.”
Lyssa says nothing to that, patting the quilt up high around my shoulders. “Do you still plan on killing her?” she asks carefully, each syllable feeling heavier than the last. “Sarah, I mean. To try and make things right for what she did to Adam?”
