Page 85 of Labyrinthine
“I wonder if she was a mother,” he says.
I recoil. My body lurches with the force of my horror, and still his hands hold me fast.
A sound rises from my throat—a cry I didn’t intend. I don’t know whether it’s grief or rage. But he hears it. And he smiles.
“I thought a child would tame you,” he continues. “But if Darian gives you one, you’ll fight harder. You’ll have something to protect.”
The lash lands again. The slave doesn’t scream this time. Her body twitches, but her voice is gone. I shut my eyes, but it’s worse in the dark. The sounds keep coming. The smell of blood won’t let me forget.
I open my eyes to the world below. Her blood pools in the sand, soaking the earth that bore it. I cannot breathe. I cannot move.
He wanted to make me small. Instead, he made me sharper. And something inside me begins to shift. My fingers curl into fists. The stone cuts into my skin, but I don’t release it. Iwantto bleed. I want the sting to tether me to now—because what’s moving inside me isn’t slow. It’s rising.
Not horror. Not helplessness. Fury.
A rage older than me, older than him, born from every time I was silenced, every time I was told to smile while part of me died inside. He wants me passive. He wants me docile. But he wouldn’t go this far if he thought I was already broken.
This is a show of control, a cruel display of power.
And it’s all an act.
Don’t flinch.
“By the way,” he says, too casually. “You won’t be leaving Starsfall if Darian survives the Reaping. You only have to marry him. What happens beyond that is out of the gods’ control.”
My spine locks. Heat surges through me, wild and wrong and electric—my magic, lashing out, trying to protect me. It isn’t obedient anymore. It writhes beneath my skin like a living thing, striking against my ribs, clawing at my throat. My breath catches. The stone beneath me vibrates faintly, as though the whole balcony is waiting to split.
My father doesn’t move. But he notices. His gaze sharpens.
“It was Mallen’s idea.”
I don’t believe him. I do. I don’t want to.
But it fits.
Mallen, who watched, who smiled, and said nothing. Mallen, who would not stand in the open and say my name, though his gaze devoured me.
If Darian survives, he’ll stay. And Mallen will end him.
“I’ll get my magic back,” my father says. “And you’ll lose yours. No more games. Or fighting. Only obedience.”
I’m not sure when I collapsed, only that I’m no longer upright. My body has gone slack against the floor of the balcony. I shake with a cold that’s deeper than fear. It’s luminous and final. It’s ending.
This isn’t a fairy tale. There is no hero. No rescue.
There’s only me.
And the choice I make: to face what I fear or run from it.
The yard below is silent as a crypt. No cheering crowds. No laughter. No music drifting from the feasting halls. Even the single golden leaf that had been spinning in the air, caught in a lazy current, falls straight down, with no grace left in it. No resistance.
Like a body that’s finally stopped fighting.
My father inhales, as if enjoying the scent.
“This is what you bring, Azhara.”
His grip shifts. Not brutal, just necessary. He drags me from the balcony with the efficiency of a man discarding a piece of himself he no longer intends to acknowledge.
