At last, my legs gave up, but I didn’t feel the ground hit me. I might have blacked out.

Sprawled on my side, I rubbed dirt from my sightless eyes and crawled on my belly. My thoughts tried to abandon me, but I held on, kept moving, determined to reach my father.

Until I couldn’t move at all.

The abyss pulled me into its yawning void, and as I fell, part of me hoped I would never wake again.

5

Of course, I woke. Life was too cruel to grant me a permanent reprieve from the pain. I lay face-down, my body a single pulsing ache wrapped in the welts of my mistakes.

I’d failed, and my shame took on a horrifying new meaning in the silver light of dawn.

With my cheek pressed to the leaf-littered ground, I blinked the grit from my eyes, disoriented by the view before me.

A pair of dirt-coated slippers peeked out from a hem of lavender silk. I twisted my neck, following the wrinkled skirt of a gown, up, up, up to the glaring visage of the countess.

She stared down at me, hands on her hips, scrutinizing the remains of a dress she’d worked so hard to make.

Guilt crushed my chest.

“Mother…” My voice burned in my throat, raw from screaming and parched from dehydration.

“Don’t.” She simmered in her stillness, her jaw quivering in unholy rage. “I don’t know what I did to invite such vile disrespect and hatred, but I will not hear your excuses. Not this time.”

“I don’t hate you.”

“Not another word!”

A brown mare whinnied behind her, and the sight of it confused me. That horse didn’t belong to the marquess.

Had my mother ridden it here? This deep into the woods before dawn? Alone?

I returned my attention to her face, her complexion drained of color in the frame of fallen, untamed hair. She looked so disheveled and tired, nothing like herself. And she was still wearing the gown I’d last seen her in yesterday morning.

“You came for me?” I rolled to my back and regretted it instantly.

A violent burst of pain blazed through my body, plaguing every muscle and joint. Dizziness mottled my vision, and I gasped through the torment, squinting at her ghost-white expression.

“Whose blood is that?” She pointed a trembling finger at my chest.

“Not mine.” I sat up sluggishly and scanned the thick grove for the Marquess of Grisdale.

How much could I tell her? Had news already traveled to the house about the arrest of Edric Sharp? I’d never so much as mentioned his name in her presence. If I told her everything now, would she stop me from rescuing him?

She stepped over me in a rustle of silk and made a beeline through the shadows of the trees, ducking under branches and yanking her skirts free from thorns.