Chapter 2: The Cellar

They chained my mother to the wall of a wine cellar and made me listen. I couldn't see her. That was the cruelty of it. Two rooms apart, a stone wall between us, and every sound came through perfectly — the leather, the wet crack of it, her breathing when she tried not to scream so I wouldn't hear. She screamed anyway. Eventually everyone does. "Where is he?" my father kept shouting. "Tell me his name, Helena! Twenty-two years I fed that bastard child—" "There was no one." Her voice was ruined. "There was only ever you." My stepmother laughed. I heard her heels on the stone. "Don't kill her, darling," Marissa said. "That's mercy, and she hasn't earned it. Keep her alive. Let her listen to what they do to her daughter. Then we'll gift her to Killian." Everything in me went still. Killian Voss. The Kane family's dog. The man they lent out when someone needed a woman broken instead of killed. The man who had put my best friend Aria in the ground when we were seventeen, and laughed at her mother's funeral. "No!" My mother's chains rattled like something dying. "Jonathan, she's your daughter — you can't give her to that animal—" "She was never my daughter." A boot. A wet sound. Then nothing. I sat in the dark with my wrists in iron and I stopped crying. Something else came in to fill the space where the crying had been. It was cold and it was patient and it has never left me since. Every single one of you, I thought. Every single one. At three in the morning, the lock on my door clicked. I came up swinging with the chain. "Ivy — Ivy, it's me." Elias. Dark hair, blood on his knuckles, my mother's driver's son. The only person in that house who had ever looked me in the eye. "They rotated the guards," he whispered, working a pick into the cuffs. "We've got nine minutes. Your mother first." I don't remember the corridor. I remember her face when the door opened. Helena Ashcroft, forty-four years old, tied to a wall, one eye swollen shut, her wedding dress-blue gown black with blood. "No," she rasped when she saw me. "No — you were supposed to run —" "Shut up," I said, and my hands were shaking so hard I couldn't get the cuff off. "Shut up, shut up, we're leaving, we're leaving—" "Ivy." She caught my face in her broken hands. "Listen to me. They're not giving me to Killian. They're giving you." "Then they can come and take me." Something moved in her ruined face. Pride. I think it was pride. We made it up the servants' stair. We made it through the east hall. We were forty feet from the garden door. Then the alarm went off. Every light in the Kane estate came on at once. He came around the corner alone, because he wanted it to be alone. Dorian, in his tuxedo shirt with the sleeves rolled, lipstick on his collar that wasn't mine, a gun in one hand and a bottle in the other. He'd been celebrating. "There she is," he said, and grinned like a boy at Christmas. "My runaway furniture. And the whore who made her." Elias stepped in front of us with a kitchen knife. Twelve men filed in behind Dorian. Then twelve more. Dorian took a slow drink, wiped his mouth, and looked at me the way you look at a thing you own. "Ivy," he said. "You should have knelt in that church. It could have been a long, boring, comfortable life." "I'd rather be dead." "Yes." He smiled. "That's the plan." He raised the gun and pointed it, almost lazily, at my mother's chest. "Kill them both," he said. "Start with the mother. I want to watch Ivy's face while it happens."