We landed in a battered bedroom of Chasseur Tower. Bits of broken furniture littered the ground around us. I seized a shard of bedpost as we rolled. When I thrust it at her chest, she lurched sideways, and it lodged in her arm instead. Relentless, I twisted it, relishing her shrieks. “Give up.” I lunged for another piece of wood. “You’re alone. Your lover, your son—they’re gone. They’re dead. Josephine is going to kill you too, and if she doesn’t, Morgane will. You’re in over your head—”

She wrenched the wood from her arm and used it to block my strike. “We are not alone, little mouse. We are never alone.” Giggling softly, she flicked her eyes behind me. “Not like you.”

I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. I wouldn’t look. I wouldn’t—

Like a moth to a flame, my gaze drifted over my shoulder, following Reid’s voice. I dreaded the sound of it. The look on his face. Nicholina cackled without moving to attack.

She’d already chosen her weapon.

She was trying to drown me too.

Reid towered over my pitiful form, his voice loud and angry and hurt. Estelle’s sister still cooled at our feet, but neither of us looked at her. We had eyes only for each other. “I’m a Chasseur!” he roared, wringing his hands. His knuckles clenched white. “I took an oath to hunt witches—to hunt you! How could you do this to me?”

“You—Reid, you also made an oath to me.” I listened to my own impassioned plea with bitter regret. “You’re my husband, and I’m your wife.”

His expression darkened, and my stomach rolled. An ache built at the back of my throat.

“You are not my wife.”

Cold, familiar despair chilled my bones at his words. How often had I heard them? How often had this exact scene plagued my nightmares?

“You see?” Nicholina crept closer, blood dripping in her wake. The puncture in her arm, however, had already vanished. I tore my gaze from Reid to study the smooth alabaster skin there. The waters had healed her. Nicholina realized it at the same moment I did, and a heinous grin split her face. She twirled the bloody shard of wood between her fingers. “Lucky you tricked him, really. Lucky, lucky, lucky.”

I picked up my own shard to match, lifting it high. “He would’ve loved me anyway.”

Then we were drowning again, caught up in fresh currents. When she tried to drive her shard into my skull, the wood burst in a geyser, spraying her face as we left the previous memory. Burning her. She shrieked again, and in that moment, I saw another scene flash: a dark tent and cloaked figures, my mother and La Voisin. They shook hands amidst the smoking sage while Nicholina hovered in the corner. Her heart rioted.