“I forget nothing. And don’t you try to take the moral high ground with me—as if you had any concept of what morality means.”

Saetan’s eyes iced over. “Very well, then. Let’s take a look at your concept of morality. Tell me, Alexandra. How did you justify it when it was obvious Jaenelle was being starved? How did you justify the rope burns from her being tied down, the bruises from the beatings? Did you just shrug it all off as the discipline needed to control a recalcitrant child?”

“You lie!” Alexandra shouted. “I never saw any evidence of that.”

“You just tossed her into Briarwood and didn’t bother to see her again until you decided to let her out?”

“Of course I saw her!” Alexandra paused. An ache spread through her chest as she remembered the distant, almost accusing way Jaenelle would look at them sometimes when she and Leland went to visit. The wariness and suspicion in her eyes, directed at them. She remembered how much it had hurt, and how Leland wept silently on the way home, when Dr. Carvay had told them that Jaenelle was too emotionally unstable to have any visitors. And she remembered the times she had felt relieved that Jaenelle was safely tucked away so others wouldn’t have firsthand knowledge of the girl’s fanciful tales. “I saw her whenever she was emotionally stable enough to have visitors.”

Saetan snarled softly.

“You sit there and judge me, but you don’t know what it was like trying to deal with a child who—”

“Jaenelle was seven when I met her.”

For a moment, Alexandra couldn’t breathe. Seven. She could imagine that voice wrapping itself around a child, spinning out lies. “So when she told her stories about unicorns and dragons, you encouraged her.”

“I believed her, yes.”

“Why?”

His smile was terrible. “Because they exist.”

She shook her head, struck mute by the collision of too many thoughts, too many feelings.

“What would it take to convince you, Alexandra? Being impaled on a unicorn’s horn? Would you still insist he was a fanciful tale?”

“You could trick anyone into believing anything you choose.”

His eyes got that glazed, sleepy look. “I see.” He stood up. “I don’t give a damn what you think of me. I don’t give a damn what you think about anything. But if I sense one flicker of distress from Wilhelmina or Jaenelle because of you, I’ll bring everything I am down on you.” He looked at her with those cold, cold eyes. “I don’t know why Jaenelle ended up with you. I don’t know why the Darkness would place such an extraordinary spirit in the care of someone like you. You didn’t deserve her. You don’t deserve even to know her.”

He walked out of the room.

Alexandra sat there for a long time.