I scramble to my feet, panting and dizzy. “Bree?” Patricia reaches for me, but I can’t look at her. Or Mariah. Patricia calls my name again and again, but her voice sounds farther and farther away—and no wonder, because I’m running from her. Again.

I feel like a coward, but I don’t stop.

33

AFTER THE MEETING with Patricia and Mariah, several hours ignoring their calls, and a fitful nap that left me more tired than rested, I arrive at the Lodge completely uninterested in sitting at a table and making small talk. Nick is nowhere to be found. Busy, he’d texted. That’s fine; I don’t feel like talking.

The dinner display is massive: shrimp cocktails on the rim of mini wine goblets filled with red cocktail sauce; vegetable crudités on two-tiered silver serving dishes; seasonal flowers in red and white nestling between baskets of warm rolls, crostinis, and olive-oil soaked baguettes. Layers of grilled pineapple sticks sit by chocolate-covered melon on a white serving platter.

Right now, none of it is appealing.

I keep thinking about how Mariah and Patricia looked at me when I told them that the Order killed my mother. I can still see their eyes: they may believe my story, and they’re sorry if it’s true, but they think it’s something I need to accept.

Their branches of root bring both of them closer to death, and so maybe acceptance is possible for them, but I’m not them.

I’m a daughter whose mother was taken from her.

Acceptance, I decide, is for people whose parents just died with no reason. True accidents or illness. Acceptance is not possible for murder.

Whatever Mariah did sent cracks through all of my old walls and brought After-Bree, raw and spiteful, clawing to the surface. I don’t bother to repair them. I just let myself feel. More deeply than ever before, I feel the presence of death in my chest. My mother’s, my grandmother’s, my great-grandmother’s. Now that I hold all of that death, how can I just accept it?

If there’s one thing the Order has taught me, it’s that I’m my family’s Scion. I have a duty to fight for them.

I’d been in the infirmary in the Lodge basement so many times, I’d started thinking of the entire floor as “William’s.” I’d completely forgotten it houses the Order’s training rooms too.

Even underground, the biggest room’s ceiling is twelve feet overhead. It can easily fit every chapter member and probably another twenty on top of that. Tonight, however, it’s just the six Pages that remain in the tournament, spread out while we wait for our coaches.