“Adrian will figure it out,” Ana said. “But first, you must tell him.”

Ravena came back into focus. She stood opposite me, and it was the first time I’d ever seen any kind of expression on her face beyond hateful smugness.

I remembered the rest of that night. Adrian and I had fled to the cottage under the mountains where we would spend a final night together. It was the same place Adrian had buried the bones of High Coven. It was where we had been captured, where Adrian had been beaten and where Dragos had raped me.

“I never told him,” I whispered, staring at Ravena now. “I never told Adrian.”

This revelation was a knife to my heart. There was a part of me that wanted to wonder what might have happened had we lived. Would I have had a boy or a girl? Would I have been able to use those names I had chosen?

“That is what Dragos took from you,” Ravena said. “It is what men did to you because they feared you. Shall we give them something to truly fear?”

Ravena held out her hand, and while I had no real insight of what she wanted, I knew that I needed inside that portal if I was ever going to stop her.

I took her hand.

Entering the mirror felt exactly like running through glass. It hurt, as if a thousand pins were scraping over my skin, but once inside, I was awash in brightness. There was no floor or ceiling or walls. I existed in nothing, but I was not alone here. Only the woman opposite me was not Ravena.

“Ana?” I breathed.

I looked behind me to see out into the great hall. When I turned around, Ana was still there, slight and silver-haired.

“I don’t understand. You’re…aren’t you at the Red Palace?”

“I have not woken up, but I will…after this.” She smiled at me sadly. “Are you quite devastated?”

I could not speak, but the pieces were falling into place.

“Mirrors show the truth,” she said. “I cannot hide from you in here.”

“Please do not say it,” I said, shaking my head.

“I wanted you to remember me,” Ana said, and I closed my eyes against her truth. “So badly, but when you didn’t, I knew I would be on my own.”

“This whole time, it was you. Why did you create such havoc for The Book of Dis? You could have just taken it.”

“I did,” she said. “I have been using it for quite some time.”

I shook my head.

“I have created a lot of monsters testing the spells you created,” she said. “I often wondered what you were thinking, especially with the crimson mist.”

The mist, I thought. Isla.

But that would mean that Ana had cast the spell that killed her lover.

Worse, though, was that I was the one who had written those spells.