I worry for a moment about Annalise. If I can’t end this, she’ll suffer even more.

She’ll meet the same fate as my mother.

“Couldn’t do it on your own?” he asks.

“Neither could you.” I shift my gaze to his crown.

His power bucks against mine, but I struck first. I have the upper hand.

Still, I wobble as I step toward him. He sees it.

“Numerius is the one who killed your mother.”

“What?”

His arm breaks free, and I focus on trapping it again before he can strike, but he did what he intended. He distracted me.

“You’re lying.”

“Not this time. Let me help you kill him. All I did was tell them where to find her. I never would have done it myself. Never.”

A lie. He said he wished he’d done it himself.

“I can kill him without you,” I state calmly, even though my heart stutters under the strength of the power I’m using as the vines churn around him. What if I steal his crown and all that extra power breaks me?

“Maybe,” he says.

That word slows me. It’s not a lie. There might even be a small trace of worry on his face. I don’t know if it’s worry that I’ll die or worry that Numerius will win. My guess is on the latter. But it’s genuine.

He senses my hesitation.

“We can get vengeance for your mother together. Not a day goes by that I don’t regret telling him where she was. I tried to take it back. I tried. I left hiding just to stop it, but when I got there, all I found was you, crying over her body.”

The vines wrapping around him halt.

He smiles. “We can avenge her together.”

“You watched me cry.”

His smile falters.

“You left me alone in that moment.” I don’t know why it surprises me, this new, particular coldness, but my veins turn to ice thinking about him standing there, watching me in the worst moment of my life and not reaching out to me. And he didn’t just watch me. He left me in the woods while he went inside and stole her things.

“It made you stronger,” he says.

The words are a slap. It didn’t make me stronger. It made me harder. I’m beginning to learn that those are two different things.

“It made you mine.”

He turned me as cold and hard as the ice his power wields. Hard enough to do what needs to be done to win. Because Lucius isn’t the only threat.

And he’s not the one who drained my mother to the brink of death.

The vines peel away from him. Dots of blood cover his white suit where the thorns split skin.

It’s a more appropriate outfit for him.