Ren stopped dead before the schedule. She’d hoped, prayed she might be mistaken. But there it was scrawled in chalk. A white stroke through her name, to indicate she’d begged off sick today.

This is wrong. It’s impossible, she thought. Yet with every step she took toward her best friend’s door, her certainty grew.

Somewhere, deep down, part of her had known.

The new gowns, all in dark colors, long-sleeved. The offers of information on Lexana, the insistence on helping research Rozalind.

Things are actually better with my mother now, she’d said. Ren’s gorge rose as she realized what that meant.

Things were better now that her mother was dead.

But my father… I just want him to say he’s proud of me, just once. Because he’d refused to acknowledge her? Or because she was a product of incest, the child he wanted to hide from the world?

Ren rapped on Audrina’s door. No reply. But the knob turned easily in her hand. She pushed the door inward just as her friend sat up in bed.

“Who’s—oh. Ren. Hi.” Audrina bore deep bags under her eyes, and her face had a sunken look to it. Still, she forced a polite smile, strained at the edges. “Can I help you?”

“No, Aud, this time I thought I should help you.” Ren stepped into the room, only a single pace. She leaned her back against the wall and surveyed the narrow space, a mirror image of the one in which Ren had spent so many years. Just a twin bed, with slim shelves built into the wall next to it, and a foot of space between to dress in.

Ren squinted at Audrina’s shelves. Among the darning needles and piles of yarn, she spotted a bloodletter, blood still caked on its blade.

“I figured you’d be exhausted right about now,” Ren said. “After what you did to Rozalind.” She tore her gaze from the shelf to meet her friend’s once more.

For a split second, the span of a heartbeat, she thought she was wrong. She wanted to be wrong. Desperately. Audrina was her oldest friend, her best friend, her one true ally in the Keep.

Or so she’d believed.

But Audrina dropped the polite smile. It bloomed into a grin, broad and feral, and it was like watching a mask crack and peel. The girl Ren thought she knew crumbled away to reveal the monster underneath.

“What gave me away?” Audrina asked.

“You told Akeylah you were the daughter of the moons. Because the moons favored us, right? And you clean up Kolonya’s messes—did you think I’d forget how we spent our lives down here?”

“You forgot a lot of things about our friendship.” Aud’s hand crept toward the bloodletter.