Chapter 128: Woe is me

BONNIE

I woke to the smell of crushed yarrow and something metallic that coated the back of my throat. The ceiling above me was pale stone, veined with gray, familiar in a distant way that made my stomach clench. I had seen this ceiling before. I had stared at it after I woke from that cruel dream. Was I in the...

I made the mistake of moving, and pain immediately exploded in my head.

My head felt hollowed out, scraped clean.

I tried to lift my right arm and found it pinned beneath what looked like a weight. Then I noticed Fia. She sat beside the narrow bed, her shoulders curved forward, and her hands resting on my chest. Blue light pulsed from her palms in slow, rhythmic waves, seeping into my sternum with a warmth that bordered on burning. It should have comforted me. It did not.

I opened my mouth to speak and coughed instead, a dry, racking sound that sent further pain spiking through my ribs.

Fia’s head snapped up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, the skin beneath them bruised with exhaustion and what could have only been an attack, but her mouth softened when she saw me looking back at her. "There you are." ℴ

Her voice sounded rough, like she’d been shouting. Or crying.

The thought disturbed me more than finding myself in the royal infirmary and more than the fact that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten here.

"What..." My voice came out as a rasp. I swallowed and tried again. "What happened?"

She withdrew her hands. The blue light faded, leaving her fingers pale and trembling. She flexed them once, twice, before folding them into her lap. "You don’t remember?"

It wasn’t a question. Something cold settled in my gut.

"I remember..." I searched my skull for the shape of recent hours and found only static. White noise. A blotted space where memory should have lived, inked out so thoroughly that even the edges felt wrong. "The Omegas. One of them had said the retainers were being executed. So... I ran."

Fia nodded, encouraging but guarded. "Keep going."

"I climbed onto the platform." The images came in fragments, disjointed and strange. There was blood on wood. The weight of something heavy in my hands. I was holding a... Goddess... two had been harmed and then nothing. A wall of nothing that rose up and cut off everything after. "There were bodies. I tried to... I think I tried to help. And then..."

I pushed myself up on my elbows. The room tilted. Fia’s hand shot out to steady my shoulder, and that was when I saw her face properly.

Her bottom lip was split, crusted with dried blood. A bruise bloomed across her left cheekbone, dark purple against her brown skin. Her hair was a small mess now, hanging in tangled strands around her face, and her top was torn at the shoulder, the fabric stained with dirt and something darker.

I stared at the damage, and my breath came short.

"Fia." I reached for her lip. She flinched back, just slightly, just enough. My hand hung in the air between us. "Did I..."

She didn’t answer. She didn’t need to. The silence carried the weight of confirmation.

I pressed my palms against my temples. The hollow feeling in my skull wasn’t emptiness. It was stolen property. Someone had been here, in my head, and they’d taken the keys with them when they left. I dug for the memory, clawing at the white wall of my mind, and pain lanced behind my eyes like a hot needle again.

I screamed. The sound tore out of me before I could stop it, high and broken and terrified.

Fia grabbed my wrists. She pulled my hands down from my head and held them tight, her thumbs pressing into my pulse points until the pain receded into a dull throb. "Stop. Bonnie, stop. You’re going to hurt yourself."

"What did I do?" The question came out whispered. My throat felt stripped raw. "Fia, what did I do to you? What did I..."

She released one of my wrists. Her fingers traced the split in her lip, almost absently, and her eyes held mine with a directness that made me want to look away. "You don’t remember attacking me?"

"No."

"You don’t remember the courtyard? The platform? What you did to Johann?"

The name meant nothing for a moment. Then it did, and the cold in my gut spread outward. "Johann... The Prince..."

"Yes."

I looked down at my hands. They were clean, scrubbed pink, the nails trimmed short. No blood under them. But I could feel phantom weight there, a pressure in my palms that suggested they had held something terrible or perhaps did something terrible. Johann was responsible for those deaths. Did I... "Is he dead?"

"No." Fia leaned back in her chair. The wood creaked beneath her. "He’s in his chambers. Under guard. Breathing through a tube, last I heard, but breathing."

I tried to picture it. Tried to imagine my hands around his throat, or a blade, or whatever had caused Fia to look at me with that particular wariness. The image wouldn’t come. The wall in my mind stood firm, white and buzzing and absolute.

In no world could I see myself facing someone like that? Did I lose it and give in to my powers like I did when I was ten? Taking out those sentinels, that evil Beta, and my mother’s body. Was that it?

It was the only way I could have threatened anyone.

"I did that?" I trembled. It wasn’t a question this time; I knew in my bones it involved me. "I hurt him. I hurt you."

Fia’s jaw tightened. "Yes."

"How?"

"You lifted him off the ground." Her voice was flat, clinical; the way she spoke felt as though she was trying to distance herself from pain. "You had him suspended by the throat with the gift of small miracles. You were crushing his windpipe when I intervened."

I shook my head. The motion made me dizzy. "I don’t... I can’t..."

"You fought me." Fia touched her cheekbone again, the bruise darkening even as I watched. "You threw me against the walls. You struck me. You had me on the ground with your hand raised, and for a moment there, Bonnie, I genuinely didn’t know if you were going to stop. I thought I might have to fight back with the intent to kill rather than contain. Because of how rabid you looked. Because of the emptiness in your eyes."

The words landed like stones. I stared at her, at the damage I had wrought, and felt my chest constrict until I couldn’t draw breath, because I still could not believe it. So, I repeated myself like a damned fool. "I did all that? To you?"

It made no sense. I was not violent... and to Fia? Why would I be that sort of person to her?

"Yes."

"I’m sorry." The apology came out inadequate, pathetic, a drop of water against a forest fire. "Fia, I’m so sorry. I didn’t... I would never..."

"You did." She cut me off, not cruelly but firmly. "You did, and you meant to. You intended to kill Johann, and you intended to hurt anyone who stood in your way. Including Lysander."

The air left my lungs. "Lysander? Where... is he?"

"Since you asked, " Fia stood up. She moved to the window, her back to me, her posture rigid. "He’s not here because he’s trying to contain the political fallout. Attempted murder of a royal heir carries weight, Bonnie. The council is probably screaming for your head. The nobles will want you burned, if not worse. Lysander is probably in a meeting now, lying, bargaining, threatening, doing whatever he can to keep you from being dragged to a cell. Or worse, a pyre."

I swung my legs over the side of the bed. My knees buckled immediately. I caught myself on the mattress, my knuckles white against the rough wool blanket. "I tried to hurt him? Lysander?"

"You intended to." Fia turned. The sunlight caught her face, illuminating the bruise, the split lip, and even the exhaustion carved deep into her features. "You didn’t get the chance. But yes. You looked at your mate with murder in your eyes. You laughed at him even when he begged you to stop. For a minute there, I thought someone or something had taken over you."

The horror of it settled over me like a shroud. Not just the violence. The forgetting. I had become something so terrible that my own mind had rejected the memory, or it had been taken from me, and either option felt like drowning. To have done these things and to carry no memory of them, to have hurt a friend, nearly killed a man, threatened my mate, and to have it all erased by my own hea...

"I can’t remember." My voice cracked. "I try to think back, and there’s nothing. Just white noise and static. Fia, what if I do it again? What if next time there’s no one to stop me?"

"You won’t."

"You don’t know that." I pushed off the bed, stumbling to my feet. My legs held, barely, trembling beneath my weight. "This power. This thing inside me. It’s not a gift. It’s never been a gift. It’s a curse, just like—"

"Stop." Fia crossed the space between us in two strides. She grabbed my shoulders, her fingers digging in hard enough to bruise. "Stop it right now. I am not going to sit here and listen to you blame your powers for your choices."

I stared at her. Her eyes were bright and angry. That clinical distance shattered.

"You think you’re the only one who’s suffered?" She shook me once, sharp. "You think you’re the only one with monsters in their closet and head? My father never loved me. Not truly. He looked at me and saw a tool, a means to an end. My mother sacrificed her future, her happiness, her very life to give me a chance at one. I spent half my childhood dodging my half-sister’s cruelties and my stepmother’s schemes. I have buried friends and allies too. I have killed to survive. I have woken up screaming more nights than I can count."