Page 55 of Devoured

I walk backward to the far wall, refusing to take my eyes off the queen. “Are you going to tell me what I am now?”

“No.” She twirls the match between deft fingers. Her head tilts, and her pupils widen on my face. She looks… hungry. “I am going to show you, Vanessa, and you are going to be compliant without being compelled. Do you understand?”

I glance around for evidence of what’s to come, of what she might possibly do to me in this empty room, but I can’t find a single clue. “I’m always compliant.”

“Hmm.” A short growl. “May I ask you a question, Vanessa Serafina Hart?”

I nod. Perfectly obedient. “Of course.”

She presses a hand against the wall beside her, and in this moment—in this one, infinitesimal breath—she looks like Sin. Beautifully postured, regal, with an air of dark charisma that glints in the crooked tilt of her obsidian crown, in the crimson lips that twist into a half smile on her bewitching face, in the undefinable emotions honing her gaze. I recognize her in a way I haven’t recognized her before. In a way I haven’t wanted to recognize her.

Right now, alone in this room with nothing separating us, I don’t just see the Severi parts of her—I see pieces of the girl she’d been before.

The longer I stare into her eyes, however, the more her smile withers, until it vanishes entirely and I’m unsure if it ever existed at all.

“Why must you allow death to torment you so much?” she asks. “I watched you for months through glimpses of Sin’s own mind and your dreams. I saw the map of your brain, and it contained oceans of grief. You let sadness break apart reality until you were drowning in it. You had so much anger inside you, but you cowered from it. You had so much power, but you ignored it. You drenched yourself in death, and you let it weigh you down.”

Whatever question I expected, it wasn’t this. My fingers carve angry crescents into my palms. She tracks the movement with a vexed glance.

“My best friend died.” I exhale hard, heart palpitating against the sudden onslaught of memories. They prick like needles through my organs, snarling thread through viscera until I’m sick with knots. “I lost my home. I lost my body. Any autonomy I had vanished because of werewolves. You were supposed to be fairy tales. You were monsters that lived in closets and under beds and—and you weren’t supposed to exist.”

Cora merely blinks in response. Not as if she’s confused, but as if she’s disappointed.

“You are so emotional.” Cora rakes a nail across her bottom lip. “You might not have believed we existed, but once you learned the truth… What do you think werewolves are born to do, Vanessa? Do you think we’re put on this earth to run in the sunshine and dance in the rain? You said it yourself. We live in the closets of human imagination, under their beds and in their nightmares. We are animals, like all others, and we do not have the privilege of ordinary lives. We live. We kill. We die. That is our nature. You live. You kill. You die.”

I stare at her. She stares back at me, her pupils still dilated with anger, with palpable disdain. Irritation flames across my chest, mottled and red. “Is this why you brought me here?”

“No.”

“Then—”

“I was merely curious. It’s been a long time since I’ve felt so much, even through another’s mind. You know I killed my human lover just moments after I lost my crown. Just moments before my sister cast me aside and I became a Lone Wolf. How do you think I’ve survived for so long? I do not weep. I do not succumb.”

“You shredded your soul. You bit so many people that it tore you into pieces.” I inhale a sharp breath. I shouldn’t ask. I should remain silent. Obedient. But—“Is that why you bit them? Because you were a Lone Wolf?”

She wrenches her gaze from mine to glare daggers at the hearth. “To be exiled is nothing I can or will describe to a child like you. But yes, a pack brings comfort. That is what a pack is for, after all. But you do not see me sniveling over it.” She licks the tips of her fangs. “I have survived, Vanessa, because I haven’t allowed myself to feel the way you do. The sadness. The misery. The grief. There is no surviving when you’ve already dug your grave inside the rot of corpses.”

The Wolf Queen steps forward, toward me, even as she continues to level her gaze at those silver, glacial flames. “You have a strength inside you that could rend this world apart. You could be so much more than you are. But you must first exorcise the weakness. You must eradicate the humanity from your bones. Embrace the anger. Embrace the madness. Lose everything else. Become boundless,” she murmurs. “Become powerful like me.”

Boundless.

Powerful.

Is that what Cora wants with me? With… with all of us? No, I think, desperately wishing I could shout it instead. I don’t want to lose the rest of myself. I don’t want to be anything like Cora Severi, regardless of what it means for my power, my strength.

“If you are going to learn the truth of yourself, there is no other path,” Cora purrs. “This is it, darling. Embrace your darkness—embrace your monstrosity—and thrive.”

The door creaks open on a gust of frigid air.

Princess Valja Dahlström stumbles inside the room, shoved forward by two gargantuan wolves whose gray nostrils billow smoke. Chains clang around her ankles and wrists and throat, her blonde hair plastered to her sickly white face with rusted old blood.

“Princess,” Cora greets with a low snarl. “Join us, will you?”

The wolves herd her deeper into the room, but Valja knocks into a wall, one of her wounds splitting deeper, smearing a trail of blood behind her. She doesn’t open her mouth. As if she can’t. As if they’ve taken away her ability to scream.

“What is she doing h-here?” I ask, forcing myself to remain upright. Conscious. “How is this going to teach me anything about what I am?”

“Because we are going to use her to practice, Vanessa.”