This time my parents were accompanied by no one. Not a single Wychthorn bodyguard or soldier stood in the room to protect them from the Crowthers and the cadre completely loyal to Valarie. Any single one of the Crowthers, Ferne included, could cut my parents down in a blink, and leave the room splashed in crimson. But I didn't think they'd go so far as death. A vicious wound perhaps, since they needed my parents alive to get their hands on Brangwene's Hjarte—the war hammer ensconced within my family's treasure trove.

My mother and father's gazes were locked on mine and utter torturous relief shone from my father as I came to a stop beside Valarie. My heart almost burst from my chest with happiness. The sharp-edged pang of hopelessness was drowned beneath a sea of warmth and tenderness for them both. I jittered on the spot in my outlandish high-heels, my hands fidgeting with the tulle skirt. I wanted to run across the room and throw myself into their arms. I wanted my mother, and all those lovely mornings we spent with each other in her grand aviary with the sparrows and thrushes and finches, sipping bergamot tea while the sun warmed the day.

I wanted my father most of all.

He'd always been my champion and my companion.

My mother had her bony fingers wrapped around my father's arm, holding him tight, not for reassurance I realized, but to stop him from running for me.

I could see in the line of his posture, the tautness to his stiff limbs, the fight in his eyes, his desperate need to cross the room for me.

And I felt the same.

I wanted to fling myself into his arms for a reassuring hug.

My father's blue eyes were silver-lined and he quickly and unobtrusively brushed the moisture away with a hand. He scanned my face and the rope around my throat. Questions arose in his gaze. The loudest—are you alright?

I tipped up my quivering chin and gave him a watery smile, brightness filling my veins like sunshine. I was alright. I lived, and I'd ensure they would too.

I wouldn't bow.

I wouldn't allow the Crowthers to possess Brangwene's Hjarte and manipulate my parents further.

This plan of Valarie's was going to fail.

Golden light caught the sharp cut of Valarie's cheekbones as she shifted her stance, pushing her shoulders back and angling her head slightly. An imperious brow arched as she met my father's steely gaze with her own, her pink lips parting. However just before she spoke, Ferne addressed her aunt in a low raspy voice. "I'll be the one who speaks with the Wychthorns, Aunt Valarie." Valarie was startled but hid it well. Ferne continued. "Graysen's not here to tell the Wychthorns what happened that night, but I am."

"Ferne, I'm not sure—"

"It's my right to do this." Iron strength ran through Ferne's tone. "And I'll do it alone."

Valarie hesitated, staring at her niece with careful consideration.

She'd been the one who'd wanted to do this. To wield me as a weapon to break my father so he'd sink to his knees and beg for mercy. Not for himself, but for me.

While Valarie was lost in rumination, I caught a flurry of motion in my periphery. The tulle skirt swung wide as I twisted around and watched my father untangle his arm from my mother's hold and begin to hurry across the large room. My heartbeat burst into a frantic pace. I jittered forward a few steps desperate to meet him halfway, but his actions had stirred a counter-movement. Bodyguards with severe glares launched forward and positioned themselves between us in silent demand that my father stop.

He'd barely made five steps before he'd been forced to pull to an awkward halt. Fury creased deep lines around his mouth. His gaze whipped to Valarie and his voice lowered like an animal warning off a threat with a bark. "My daughter tried to kill herself. What is she enduring at your family's hands?!"

The rapid clatter of heels on stone heralded my mother's arrival at his side. She clasped my father's arm, tugging at him to fall back. "Byron, please," she begged, darting a worried look at a nearby bodyguard with his fingers reaching inside his jacket to where I assumed a blade was hidden.

My father ignored my mother, shaking free of her hand. Addressing Valarie, he raised his palms outward and tried his best to soften his tone, but it still came out dark and angered. "Let me speak with my daughter. I need to see that she's alright."

Before Valarie could open her mouth to reply, Ferne's voice snapped across the room, piercing and bitterly cold. "You give in to our demand, Byron Wycthorn, and you'll be given that chance!"

At that moment she sounded so much like her aunt that a chill shivered down my spine. Perhaps Valarie had the same thought, her startled gaze cut from my father to Ferne, and she blinked rapidly, staring at her niece with confusion clouding her expression as if she no longer recognized the young girl at her side. She placed a hand over Ferne's still clinging to her arm. Though she cleared her throat, her voice was thready. "Perhaps it's better that I—"

"You will allow me to do this...alone," Ferne interrupted, not unkindly, but there was a challenge whetting the edge of her tone.

Valarie was still reluctant, but she nodded, carefully unhooking Ferne's arm from her own. "As you wish. I'll be right out that door if you need me."

Ferne tipped up her chin in reply, her lips forming a grim line.

Valarie turned on her heel and walked away, the hem of her black lamé dress flicking with her elegant stride. Two of her guards fell in beside her but the rest remained with Ferne, pulling back to stand as sentinels around the room.

One of the men opened the door for Valarie, and just before she swept through the open space, my father called her name. She stopped within the threshold and slowly turned around to meet my father's gaze.

Hurt haunted my father's eyes. His voice was a low rasp steeped in pain. "Valarie, this needs to end."

My gaze bounced between them both and astonishment caused my eyebrows to rise. For a heartbeat, that cold expression of hers thawed and that same hint of pain that carved itself into my father's features crossed hers too, and I caught a peek of what I'd seen earlier when I'd arrived at the Emporium, someone lost within the machinations of their own doing. There was a silent conversation transpiring between my father and Valarie, one I couldn't understand because I didn't hold a cipher to their secret language, and it strummed at my curiosity.

What the hells lay between them?

Was this more than formidable foes?

My father's lips twitched as if he were on the verge of saying something else, but it remained on his tongue when her face hardened into her usual cold, austere expression. "It's too late."

And then Valarie was gone, twisting around and disappearing into the shadows of the Emporium as the door shut quietly behind her.

Now it was just us. Ferne and I stood near the long boardroom table. While my mother, with one hand bunched around that little vial of poisonous pills, the other with a handkerchief stuffed inside its fist, pressed closer to my father. They stood beside the twin couches facing one another across a low coffee table.

Ferne took a few careful steps forward, one of her hands stretched out before her, fingers making a slow trilling motion as if she had thrown her senses outward and was using them as a walking cane. Her head was slightly tilted, an ear angled toward my parents. She wore her long black hair loose and the swaying gait of her pace caused the inky locks to fall across her face and her eyes bound with a strip of fine lace. But why should it worry her to have half her face obscured behind strands of hair if she possessed no eyes to see?

A pang of sharp guilt shredded through my veins like splinters of glass.

She'd been blind since the age of three because of what my parents had done to protect me.

Ferne stopped not too far from my parents and canted her upper body into a formal bow, straightening slowly. She wore a modest and youthful dress, one I might have worn at her age, with the waist tied back with a ribbon, the pale yellow fabric falling away in ripples of layers. She was 16 years old. And when I thought back to what I was like at that age, though I'd already become betrothed by way of what I'd foolishly believed to be a marriage contract, I'd been childish and wild and dare I say rather spoiled.

But Ferne... She was still a girl, gaining confidence in herself during those ungainly teenage years, however, there was something she carried about herself that was beyond her youthful age. Sorrow.

Confliction wedged itself within my chest. While Ferne would strive to gain what she needed for her family, I needed to protect mine. I understood the Crowthers needed the Hjarte. Hells, in some way they deserved it after all my family had done to them, but I couldn't let Ferne put my family at risk by allowing her to claim the treasured warhammer.

I stood beside Ferne waiting for her to make her demand.

Silence blanketed the room.

Silence but for the tick-tock tick-tock from an old-fashioned clock hanging on the wall above the mantle of an empty fireplace.

Silence was a living, breathing entity within the room. Almost like the Emporium itself. The ancient building's curiosity still plucked at my skin, probing and prodding to discover just what I was, and now it turned its mind's eye to Ferne, almost seeming to lean in with anticipation at just what was going to spill from the girl's mouth.

The ends of the dress's ribbons tied around her back swayed as she shifted her weight uneasily from foot to foot. Her hands were linked at her middle and she unconsciously scratched at a thumbnail with the other. She opened her mouth, hesitating for a long drawn moment before she spoke. "I don't remember my mother, not in the way you all do."

My heart plummeted into an abyss of guilt.

A wounded sound crawled up from my mother's throat and her legs buckled beneath her. My father quickly slid an arm around her back to support her trembling, frail frame. My mother had been broken from the part she played in Tabitha's betrayal. Tabitha had been her best friend and I imagined that she'd have spent a lot of time with her and Ferne when she'd been a baby.

Ferne's body stiffened. Her mouth hardened and she angled her head further away from my parents as if she refused to acknowledge the pity that radiated from them. She carried on speaking in a low, raspy voice. "The memories I have of her are vague impressions. I was too young to remember what she looked like, to remember the sound of her voice." And I imagined that her memories of Tabitha, when she still had her sight, were held in her mind as distorted images seen through a pane of glass, cloudy with dust. "It seems that my childhood was exactly like my mother's. She suffered from amnesia and lost both her mother and all her memories too."

Oh gods, I hadn't known this.

Her voice softened as she slanted her head sideways, the ends of her long hair falling over her shoulder, while she rubbed her curled fingers of one hand anxiously against the other. "I hear about my mother all the time. My aunt describes how she looked and the favorite sayings she had. My father tells me of the things she loved to do with us, or by herself. My brothers share with me all the cherished moments she had with me when I was a baby... But I-I...I don't remember any of it."

My heart stumbled an awful beat at her confession and the pained half-smile, the gnawing on her bottom lip, and how she shyly glanced aside as if embarrassed to have admitted that.

A moment later, she tipped her head back, angling her face to the ceiling, and sucked in a deep lungful of air as if breaking the surface of a lake. Her lips wobbled into a wide smile and her nose scrunched as she said, "Smells, that is what I remember the most about her. Roses and the smell of rich earth and crisp greenery." Her voice took on a dreamy quality as her hands lowered to her sides and she fidgeted with the layers of her skirt. "Sometimes I get hit with it when I'm walking outside in the gardens. Sometimes I sneak into her closet just to sit in the space with the faint scent of her still clinging to her clothes. My father...he does the same." Sadness bled across her features, casting her mouth downward. "But I don't remember her."

My eyelashes fluttered shut briefly as anguish threatened to swallow me whole.

Ferne tensed and she stopped fidgeting. Straightening her head she addressed my father, her tone sullen and filled with condemnation. "Byron Wychthorn, the simple whisper in Master Sirro's ear to distract the Horned Gods from your daughter to save your family, resulted in the utter ruin of mine."

While my mother bowed her head, stifling a mournful cry behind the hand clutching the balled handkerchief, my father squared his shoulders, carrying the heavy burden of blame as he'd always done since he'd made that fateful decision all those years ago, and met Ferne's accusation with quiet stoicism.

"I dream about that night." Ferne paused to mutter, "Dream," shaking her head at her foolishness. "Nightmares more like."

I knew that Graysen was plagued by nightmares, so dark and terrifying it resulted in insomnia, but I had never considered that Ferne might experience them too.

"They're filled with terror and pain. Heat and acrid smells. Fire splashed across the roadside." She raised a hand, stirring her fingertips through the air as if sifting through her choice of words, through her senses too, as if she were sifting through the thick churning smoke of that night. "The bitter smell of oil and rubber and metal burning. The stickiness of blood. Screaming... And much worse, the awful sound of silence... The Horned Gods slaughtered almost everyone else but us and Wes."

My blood chilled.

She began fidgeting again. Youthful gestures as if she were uncomfortable in her skin, slowly rolling her ankles outward and then back in, fingers burrowing into her skirt. "Graysen doesn't talk about what happened that night but for the few rare times when I asked about it because I was there and had questions of my own."

The high heels I wore made a scraping noise against the stone as I shifted my stance to face Ferne better, my eyes growing rounder. Graysen had never spoken about it in detail with me either.

Her mouth pursed petulantly as if she dared us to challenge her when she said, "Despite what you know of him, what you think of him from how we've shown ourselves to the Houses, my brother has a great heart. A heart that had led him to warn my mother about what he'd overheard at House Novak. He revealed that the Horned Gods were coming for Nelle. He could have done what so many Houses had done before, said nothing, and let you and your family take the fall. But he was worried about Nelle because he'd known her secret since they'd met as children. He knew she was other and he never told a living soul her secret, not even my mother, not until that drive back home from the Novaks because he was terrified about what might happen to her if the Horned Gods discovered her secret."

My parents shared an astounded look at the revelation that Graysen had known about me all that time and had not said a word to anyone about my secret. My mother's chin quivered and tears welled in her eyes. She leaned against my father as if she could no longer support her own weight. She spoke so quietly I almost didn't hear her say, "Byron what have we done?"

Ferne ignored her and carried on speaking coldly. "My mother could have done the same. She could have decided not to make that phone call to you, Marissa. But she did. She warned you that Nelle was in danger. That your family was in danger too." She loosened an irritated sigh through her nose. "And in turn, what kind of hearts did you possess?"

Betrayal. She didn't need to say it. Our hearts were poisonous, selfish creatures.

My mother began to openly weep into her handkerchief. My father ran a hand up and down her trembling side.

Ferne carried on in an angry rush of words, her voice rising to a shrill note. "My brother tried to protect us that night. He was just a kid facing off against Horned Gods. Brave. Stupid and foolish. They broke his body. Snapped his bones like twigs. They were about to kill him when my mother willingly sacrificed herself to save him." Heat stung the backs of my eyes and a lump formed in my throat at the rapid images spinning through my mind of the Graysen I'd known at the time. Boyish. Tall and lanky. Trying his best to defend those he loved against insurmountable odds.

The younger girl's tone had calmed but it was no less chilling when she said, "And then it was just me and my brother. A broken teenager and a toddler and Mistress Lyressa." She huffed a disbelieving laugh, gesturing with a flick of her fingers at her eyes hidden behind the delicate yellow lace. "She liked the look of my eyes. 'Pretty,' she'd said. That's why she stole them, for no other reason than that. Like they were a new piece of flashy jewelry she desired to possess... I passed out after she'd scooped the first eyeball out with her fingers."

I pressed a hand to my chest as acid rushed up, burning my throat. Nausea roiled like a turbulent sea in my stomach.

Silence stretched out between us as we processed what that night would have been like for their family. While Ferne collected her anger. When she spoke again her voice was much quieter. "I don't remember what life was like for us before she left us."

I realized right then that my parents didn't know Tabitha was still alive. Left us, could simply be a polite way for Ferne to say she'd died. I wasn't sure if I should say something to my parents. I was paralyzed by indecision. Would it make it harder for my father to keep his hold on Brangwene's Hjarte if he knew Tabitha was alive?