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The ache was so acute, like a knife was being plunged into my body and continually twisted, but I kept tapping, kept feeling, even as my breath came faster, shallower, and my tears carved a river down my cheeks.
“Keep breathing,” Zuriel encouraged.
Dragging in a deep breath, I continued. “I was so scared. I felt so alone. The guards had mostly left me alone until that point, but she always acted as a buffer between them and me. Without her… without her, they started to hurt me. That was the first day I was whipped. It was just one lash, but I was terrified. The chains–” the panicked sensation rose within me, and I had to breathe harder, tap faster, “the chains were shortened, and they ripped open my tunic. I screamed, I pleaded, I cried, but it was no use. I can still feel their fingers on me as they tore the shirt.” A tightening sensation across my back had me biting my lip to stop from crying out. “The whip…” The lash felt as fresh as it had when it landed across my back for the first time. “That wasn’t even the worst time. They only hit me once. But I still feel it so acutely.”
“Keep the focus there, and keep tapping. Breathe,” Zuriel said gently.
I did, allowing myself tofeelevery bit of the sting, the utter terror as I waited for the whip to fall, and the anguish that I no longer had the only person who loved and cared for me there to protect me. My muscles bunched and tensed as I relived the moment over and over and over; all the while, Zuriel encouraged me to suck down sharp, icy breaths. The air in my lungs was the only thing grounding me to the present moment as I confronted that fateful day.
“Now, we’re going to rewrite that story. How is your younger self saved from this situation?” Zuriel prompted. “Visualize every last detail.”
Without hesitation, I replied, “I’m there. The female I am now, not my younger self.”
“Keep going,” Zuriel encouraged.
“I throw myself in front of her, taking the strike so she doesn't have to. I catch the whip in my hand and yank the male forward. Then I burn him alive with my fire.” The tappingcontinued, but with a vigor that shifted from despair into confidence. Suddenly, the terror that had tears spilling from my eyes morphed into something different, something not quite like absence of pain, but the pain of the memory was no longer like a hot knife slicing through me. “I run to her side, unlock her chains, and then we race away from there together. I fly her to safety, and we find a place to live where no one would ever hurt us again.”
“And where is that?” Zuriel asked.
The name immediately popped into my head, nearly stealing my breath. It wasn’t a place, but a person. “Somewhere far, far away,” I said, since neither the Night Realm nor the Iron Realm felt like appropriate destinations.
“And what would you say to her once you had gotten her to safety?” Zuriel prodded, redirecting my thoughts.
“That we were free. That I would love her and take care of her. That I wouldn’t let anyone hurt her ever again.” My voice cracked, and a fresh waterfall spilled from my eyes.
That’s all I’d ever wanted anyone to say to me.
And Kazimir had, when the Nighthounds rescued me. I believed him then, too. But it was a half-truth, and he’d broken my trust when I learned of it.
“Where are your thoughts now?” Zuriel asked, as if sensing my shift in focus.
“Kazimir,” I gritted out, my arms tightening almost protectively over my chest.
“What about him?”
“I thought I was safe because he said those exact words to me when he rescued me. I guess I was safer than I had been, but when I came to the Iron Realm, I learned that wasn’t necessarily true.” My words held a hint of bitterness.
“In what way?” Zuriel asked, his head cocking slightly to one side.
I gritted my teeth as a fresh wave of anger rose from within, protecting the hurt that was still so raw. “I trusted him to tell me the truth after everything I had been through. After everything I told him. But he manipulated me. He told me I would be a better ruler than King Zalan, which I think is true, but he told me that to maneuver me for his own gain: being king himself and being with me. I can’t excuse the half-truth of that, not when I let my guard down for him, not when I let him get close to me.”
My vision blurred, and I clenched my teeth, anger at myself rising from somewhere unknown. “How could I have been so stupid, just blindly trusting the first people who showed me kindness after everything that I suffered? After everything I went through, all the abuse, how could I have been so foolish as to let all the lessons I’d learned about surviving disappear into nothing?” The tapping on my shoulders quickened as more self-loathing broke through the hurricane of emotion whipping through me. “How could I have been so blind to his intentions? How could I have trusted him? Any of them?”
“How could you have known any better?” Zuriel murmured, breaking my tirade.
“How could I have known anything?” The words broke out of my throat like shattering glass, nearly mirroring the sensation stabbing into my heart. Hot tears spilled down my cheeks, steaming in the cold air, and I sucked in a lungful of it, welcoming the burn it offered to soothe the tidal wave of pain that threatened to drown me. “Everything I thought I knew… Everyfuckingday I’m learning something new, that challenges what I used to think, what I used to think Iknewwith certainty. I feelpowerlessbecause of how much I don’t know, and the understanding that there is so much I have to rely on others for. How can I know that anyone is telling me the truth about anything?”
My voice had risen to a fevered pitch, but Zuriel was as calm as ever as he sat motionless and listened to me. “What do you think your mother would say to that question?”
The amethyst in my pocket warmed, as if my mother were with me then, encouraging me to surrender the pain and find my way out of the darkness. “I think she’d say that I need to trust myself more than anything,” I whispered, and with those words, some of the ache abated. “I think she’d tell me to look for the intentions of the person I’m speaking with, and if I find them to be good, then I can trust them.” Another statement that caught the breeze and swept away my inner turmoil. “I think she would tell me I am smart enough to figure things out for myself.” The words spilled rapidly from my lips. “I think she’d tell me she loves me and that I have many people who can support me now, that I don’t have to do it all on my own.”
Zuriel.
Liliana.
Drazen.
The other Félvér.
