Chapter 29
None of this was real. It couldn't have been.
The memories crashing through me—Aurora's memories, my memories—felt like shards of glass forced into my skull. The scent of lavender cakes, the weight of a crown, the sticky warmth of blood on my hands—none of it lined up with the life I knew I had lived. The classrooms, the coffee shops, the glow of streetlights on rainy evenings. That had been real. This was the dream.
It had to be.
Because if it wasn't, then I was the monster.
The queen lifted the sixth heart—the gray, shriveled thing pulsing in reverse—between her fingers, studying it with a detached curiosity. The other relics had bonded with us, but this one… this one she kept for herself.
"Interesting," she murmured, tilting it toward the fractured light. "He kept a piece after all."
Yassie clutched her chest where the lock had buried itself, her breath shallow. "What—what did you do to us?"
The queen didn't answer. Instead, she turned to Sey, whose right hand had twisted into something jagged and dark, the shadow dagger now fused with his flesh. He stared at it like it might dissolve if he blinked hard enough.
"You always were his favorite," the queen said, almost gently. "Pity he never loved you enough to tell you the truth."
Sey's voice was raw. "What truth?"
"That you were never his son."
The words hung in the air like a blade waiting to drop.
I wanted to scream. To shake myself awake. But the golden scale burned against my forehead, its weight a constant reminder: This is real. You are here. You always have been.
The queen's gaze slid to me, and for the first time, her mask of cool indifference flickered. Something like sorrow passed behind her eyes. "And you, my little runaway. Did you really think you could hide from yourself forever?"
The floor lurched beneath me.
Because she was right.
I had run. Not just from the palace, not just from the king's experiments—but from me. From the things I'd done. The sister I'd failed. The crown I'd let them press onto my head while she—
No.
I squeezed my eyes shut, but the memories surged anyway:
A hand gripping mine, slick with blood. A voice whispering, "It should have been you."
When I opened my eyes again, the queen was kneeling beside Lyr's remains. The gore shimmered unnaturally, as if refusing to settle.
"He's not dead, you know," she said, pressing two fingers into the pooling blood. It recoiled from her touch. "Not really. You can't kill something that was never alive."
Yassie made a choked sound. "What does that mean?"
The queen smiled, but it was hollow. "It means, my dear, that none of us are what we seem."
Behind her, the king's empty robes began to twitch.
And then—
The sixth heart beat.