Page 26 of Venom & Vanity

Standing here by the water hole, with the tree line pressing in on three sides and the afternoon light sitting flat on the still surface and Snow Frost coming apart in front of us, I’m unprepared in a way I don’t have language for.

The masks don't help.

They never help with moments like this. You can’t have a conversation about two years of damage and the specific grief of a person who spent eight months searching for someone they were told chose to leave, while wearing a red apple mask, without the whole thing taking on a quality that makes the important words harder to say.

I knew who you were from the first moment I woke up.

Her words are sitting in the air between us, heavy and irrevocable.

I look at my son.

Bash isn’t breathing properly. It’s the mechanical version, the kind the body manages without the mind's involvement when the mind’s gone somewhere it can’t follow. His jaw’s locked behind the mask. His hands are fists at his sides. He hasn’t moved since Snow said his name.

His real name.

Bastian.

Like she’d been carrying it carefully through everything this island put her through and was only now setting it down.

Prince's hand is on his arm. Has been since the moment it left her mouth.

I step forward.

“Snow.” Her name sits differently than it has since she arrived. Apple was a weapon. A distance I could maintain while the situation and my own son's face, every time he looked at her, made distance increasingly difficult to justify.

She turns to me. The defiance is still there. But underneath it, visible in a way it hadn’t been before, is the actual person. Not the prisoner, not the fighter, not the girl with the sharp mouth and sharper instincts.

Just her. Standing at the edge of the water hole, with her chest cracked open and her eyes burning and two years of the wrong story finally starting to come apart at the seams.

“Sit down,” I say.

“I'm not⁠—”

“It's not a command.” I settle onto a flat rock at the water's edge, which puts me below her eye line. I watch her register what I am telling her with the position of my body. That this conversation is different than every other one we have had on this island. “Sit down.”

She sits.

“Tell me what happened,” I say. “The day he disappeared. From the beginning.”

She looks at Bash. Then back at me.

“The queen called me in that morning,” she says. Her voice is careful, measured, the tone of someone who has replayed this enough times to have worn the edges smooth. “She had been building up to something for weeks. I could feel it the way you feel a storm before it breaks. She sat me down in the grand room in front of that mirror she's obsessed with and told me she had made arrangements.” A pause. “That there was a son. From another family. A match she had negotiated that would bring more power and more coin to my father's kingdom. She said it would strengthen his position. Secure our future.” Her jaw tightens. “She presented it to me as though it were already done. As though I were property she had sold.”

“And you refused,” Prince says.

“I told her what she could do with her arrangement.” Something fierce and brief crosses her face. “She told me what I wanted was irrelevant. That she had seen me with Bash and that she wouldn’t allow me to throw away a strategically valuable match for some commoner who had nothing to offer her plans.” Her voice drops. “She said I had to end it or she would end it for me. I didn't believe her.” A pause that carries the full weight of that mistake. “I should have believed her.”

“You went to Bash instead,” I say.

“I was frightened and I was furious. I didn't know how to hold both of those things at the same time, so I took it out on him.” She looks at her hands. “I told him the queen was right. That whatever we were, it couldn't be anything real. That our names could never mix. I was a princess and he wasn’t a prince.” Her voice hitches on the last word and she controls it fiercely. “I told him to leave.”

The water hole holds the silence.

“He left to find you,” she says to me. “That was the last time I saw him.”

I’m quiet for a moment.

I look at Prince.