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He leaned his head against the wall, staring up at the blood-splattered beams laced beneath the ceiling. “Did you ever get an answer out of those vampire bats?”

I looked up, too. Remembered Lord Arad and Velika’s scraping, screeching voices.

“They told me there was a ‘lady from the sea.’ That she had hair dark as shadows and skin that glowed like honey. And apparently you…” I returned my gaze to Fabian. “You would meet with her, right here in this classroom. You fell in love in secret, but after she had the baby—m-me—she wanted to take me back to the ships and raise me to be a spy and assassin and warrior.”

Each of my words seemed to ring through my ears, louder and louder.

“They said you kidnapped me,” I told Fabian finally. “Stole both me and this knife to prevent me from growing up with that fate.”

Not that it had worked, in the end. I was a spy now. I’d assassinated Kitterfol Lexington. And I was training like a warrior. Exactly as my mother had wanted.

“You truly don’t remember any of it?” I asked, desperation bleeding out. I didn’t know why I was even asking. Coen had already scoured Fabian’s mind to find that almost everything regarding my mother had been erased long ago.

Fabian’s face twisted with remorse.

“I wish I could, Rayna. It’s… strange. Like the puzzle pieces of a memory jammed into place. I know I loved her, but only as if someone else told me so. I remember this classroom and looking up and seeing all the bats hanging upside down and taking you away from her, but the details are like looking through a foggy windowpane, if that makes sense.”

It didn’t. It made even less sense than before.

“Do you mind if I take a look?” I asked, nodding at his head.

“Oh. Sure. Yes.” Fabian nodded.

I hated how nervous everyone got when I mentioned my Mind Manipulating. Nobody liked being invaded in this way, but maybe there was something I could find, some clue that both he and Coen had missed. So I dove forward.

Fabian’s mind was built like the walls of our cottage back at home: smooth, lopsided stones stacked on top of each other, rising to a thatched crown. The gate itself hung like two enormous shutters, a clear window into his thoughts.

I hurried through them. Memory after memory twirled to life all around me, less like mist and more like smoke puffing out from a crooked brick chimney. The smoke took the shape of Don and me countless times—the three of us baking cookies, dancing in the kitchen, and working in their shop.

As tempting as it was to linger and watch the highlights of my own childhood, I kept going until I finally found the one I was looking for.

The abandoned classroom. The bats. Fabian and a woman whose features blurred and warped within the smoke. A baby born with blonde ringlets—me. The moment Fabian knocked the woman unconscious by sending the blood from her brain to her feet and whisked me away, along with the knife.

There was nothing before or after.

Just those fragmented pieces, as Fabian had said.

I didn’t pull away yet, though. Turning, I inspected the walls encasing this memory and paused. Drifted closer and squinted at them.

Each stone was perfectly symmetrical and round, glued together with what looked more like sap than mortar. Almost as if the walls were on the verge of bleeding.

A horror I couldn’t quite name wrangled its way through my gut. Maybe Coen hadn’t noticed, not having lived in our cottage his whole life, but I knew something… something wasn’t quite right about this. I just couldn’t understand where the missing pieces were or where these ones had come from.

All I knew was that this part of Fabian’s mind didn’t belong to him. Nobody had erased his memories of my mother, like he and Coen assumed. Rather, somebody had planted false memories within the confines of his mind.

Which didn’t make sense all over again, dammit. The bats had been witnesses. Their story lined up with Fabian’s splintered recollection.

Unless someone had told the bats to lie to me two years ago?

My own mind was spinning too much to stay in Fabian’s any longer. Pulling myself out, I reoriented myself next to him, cross-legged on the floor.

“Anything?” he asked.

I shook my head. “No. It’s… it’s just as you said.”

There was no way I was about to tell him he might’ve been manipulated so much worse than he’d ever thought. Not when he was in such a fragile state already. I leaned my head against his shoulder and nodded at the piles of objects before us.

“Can you play for me?”