T I S A A N A H
I was being ripped apart, and I loved every eviscerating second of it. I smelled nothing but blood, could feel
nothing but the withering of my enemies’ skin beneath my own. I sank into it and let myself drown — turned myself over to my pain and my vengeance.
And it took me too long to realize exactly what I had relinquished. That I not only didn’t want to stop, but that I couldn’t stop. My attempts to control my own body were met with that same thick glass wall, just like they had that day in the sparring ring with Max — but more painful, more vivid, because I was drunk on Reshaye’s euphoria, like every one of my nerves were firing at a hundred times their typical strength.
I fought the fog and pounded on the glass.
Let me back in.
{No.}
I threw myself at it, dragging my fingernails down it like claws. Let me back in!
A wave of suffocating pleasure clouded my senses as another body hit the ground, withering beneath my hands.
{You asked for my help. This is what I give you.}
But even its voice sounded slurred and drugged. It gulped scrap of emotion, of terror, like shots of liquor.
Body after body hit the floor.
No. No, I couldn’t let this happen.
I forced myself to calm, to breathe. Not a wall, I reminded myself. A web. A breath, and the layout of my own mind once again spread out before me in threads of glittering silk. But— but this time, something was wrong.
The threads weren’t arranged in complicated but neat clusters. Instead, they tangled. And they weren’t alight with delicate white light. They were on fire. Blue, black fire that crawled down the threads, as if drawing them into a closing fist.
I tried to sever them. Tried to push Reshaye back into its secluded corner. But I was greeted with a vicious strike, as if I were being slammed into a wall, then bound, ropes tightening around my throat.
Except, the ropes were my own memories.
The blurry, half-remembered image of the capital of Nyzrene burning.
The burn of my mother’s goodbye kiss on my forehead, and of Serel’s on my cheek.
I don’t need your money.
Hands — hands on my wrists, my body, my breasts, the whip that sliced my skin again and again and again.
Panic. Panic rising and rising, rising so high that I almost didn’t even see Max’s face before my eyes.
Don’t, I begged, before Reshaye let out a withering snarl and slammed a blanket of black over me.
Shutting me into darkness and drowning me in my own terrible past.
