Page 24 of Venom & Vanity

“Yes.” No performance in it. Just the flat honest truth. “But if there is a chance I can help get us off this island and go home, are you going to stop me or let me help?”

He searches my face for so long without speaking that I start to wonder if he has any intention of answering at all.

“Home is safe for you,” he says finally. “Returning home means certain death for us. You made sure of that.”

The words hit me like a physical thing. I reel back, and I hate myself for it, for letting him see the impact.

“What the hell is that supposed to mean?”

“I'll leave you to it,” Cinder's voice comes from somewhere to my left, quiet and deliberate, and I hear her footsteps retreat without looking. I don't have the capacity to look anywhere except at Daddy, at the cold certainty in his eyes and the thing underneath it that I can’t name, that makes my stomach feel like something is tearing loose inside it.

“You act pure and holier than thou,” he says. His voice is low and controlled and somehow that’s worse than if he screamed it. “But I know the real you. The viper beneath the skin. The snake that slithers in and destroys lives because she can.”

Sir and Bash move up behind him without a word. A wall. A verdict.

“What do you think I did?” I ask. My voice comes out quiet. Steadier than I feel. The twister inside my stomach is picking up speed.

“We know what you did.” Sir's tone is emptied of everything. No rage, no heat, just the flat finality of something that has been decided. He looks at me like I am already guilty of whatever crime they have written my name beneath, like the trial ended before I ever walked into the courtroom.

I search their faces for something. A crack, a flicker, anything that tells me the door is still open.

Nothing.

Fear moves up my spine slowly, the cold creeping kind, and with it comes something worse. The realization that I have been a fool. A spectacular, catastrophic, completely avoidable fool. Somewhere between the chains, the masks, the dark water and the ten-minute countdown, I allowed something to shift inside me and I told myself it was strategy, told myself it was survival instinct, told myself I was in control of every inch of what was happening to me.

I wasn’t in control.

I haven’t been in control since the moment I woke up on this island.

All they see when they look at me is a means to an end. It’s all they have ever seen. And I stood in the middle of that and let myself believe otherwise. The joke of it is so devastating I almost want to laugh.

Anger saves me. It always saves me. I grab onto it like a lifeline and I let it burn through the hurt before the hurt can make me stupid.

I square my shoulders. I blank my face. I become the version of myself that the queen's cruelty built, the one with walls so high nothing gets over them.

“You've already decided I'm the villain in this story.” My voice comes out cold and clean, no tremor in it, nothing for them to use. “There's no point in me standing here defending myself against a charge you won't even name, is there?” I look between them, all three. “This whole thing has been about revenge. Not once did any of you think to ask my side. You chose to be judge, jury, and my executioner without giving me a single word in my own defence.”

“You ruined our lives!” The roar tears out of Grumpy, raw, ragged and cracked straight down the middle. Underneath the fury is something that sounds like grief, real grief, the kind that doesn't perform itself. It almost undoes me.

Almost.

“How?” I shout back, and I mean it as a question, a genuine one, because I’m exhausted by the circular hell of being punished for something I can’t even defend myself against. “Tell me how. Name it. Say it out loud.”

“You lied⁠—”

“Enough.” Daddy cuts Grumpy off and the authority in that single word silences him instantly. His eyes find mine and stay there. “The why means nothing. All you need to know is we're here because of you. Our lives were taken from us. Because of the lie you told.”

Something breaks open in my chest.

I have spent this entire time on this island holding everything at arm's length. I’ve been Snow Frost the prisoner, Snow Frost the fighter, Snow Frost who gives nothing away and takes what she wants and feels nothing she hasn't chosen to feel. I’ve been so careful. I’ve been so relentlessly, exhaustingly careful.

I step forward before I can stop myself.

Past Daddy. Past Sir. Until there is barely a breath of space between me and Grumpy, and I have to tilt my head back to keep his eyes on me and I do. I hold them because I have been holding them since the moment I woke up chained to that ceiling and recognized the green of them through a red apple mask and said nothing.

Not a goddamn thing.

While he called me whore, prisoner, Apple and every name except the one he used to call me.