Céline had been in the Circle for only a few months, but she’d already learned this lesson: if Valentine hated something, it was her duty to hate it too.

She was trying her best.

There was no Law that a Shadow Market had to be located on a site rich with dark energy, marinated in the blood of a violent past—but it helped.

Paris had no shortage of possibilities. It was a city of ghosts, most of them angry. Revolution after revolution, blood-spattered barricades and heads rolling from the guillotine, the September Massacres, the Bloody Week, the burning of the Tuileries, the Terror … As a child, Céline had spent many sleepless nights wandering the city, summoning visions of its greatest cruelties. She liked to imagine she could hear screams echoing through the centuries. They made her feel less alone.

This, she knew, was not a normal childhood hobby.

Céline’s had not been a normal childhood. She discovered this only when she arrived at the Academy, where for the first time she’d met Shadowhunters her own age. That first day, the other students had chattered about their idyllic lives in Idris, galloping horses across the Brocelind Plain; their idyllic lives in London, New York, Tokyo, training under the kind eye of loving parents and Institute tutors; their idyllic lives anywhere and everywhere. After a while Céline stopped listening and drifted out unnoticed, too bitterly jealous to stay. Too embarrassed by the prospect that someone might make her tell her own story. After all, she’d grown up on her parents’ Provence estate, surrounded by apple orchards, vineyards, rolling fields of lavender: by all appearances, la belle epoque.

Céline knew her parents loved her, because they told her so repeatedly.

We’re only doing this because we love you, her mother would say before locking her in the basement.

We’re only doing this because we love you, her father would say before lashing her with the whip.

We’re only doing this because we love you, when they set the Dragonidae demon on her; when they dumped her for the night, eight years old and weaponless, in a werewolf-ridden wood; when they taught her the bloody consequences of weakness or clumsiness or fear.