Page 4 of Psycho Beasts

I shoved my cheek against the cool glass of the car’s window.

My too-clammy skin was desperate for a reprieve.

It wasn’t enough.

I pressed my left eye forward until the world blurred around me, and it took everything inside me not to slam my head down and bludgeon myself to death.

Mother’s voice was sharp and cold. “Coward.”

“Uh, I don’t think she, I mean he, is okay,” Lucinda whispered to Sadie with concern.

At least I was disguised as a boy, my masculine glamour a small comfort.

“Hmm, what?” Sadie’s voice was rough and scratchy, a sharp contrast to Lucinda’s.

It highlighted the abuse she’d suffered.

My stomach hurt for my best friend. There was too much tragedy in the world. It seemed wrong that we’d both suffered so much.

Lucinda whispered to her sister, “I have to tell you something.”

Sadie whipped her head down, concern shining brightly in her eyes. Fear contorted her face. “What is it?”

Lucinda opened her mouth, then closed it as she studied her sister’s worried face.

There was a long pause.

“I think Aran’s having a mental breakdown.”

Sadie’s shoulders slumped with relief. She hadn’t picked up on the fact that her sister had lied.

It was obvious from Lucinda’s posture, the catch in her voice, and the way her eyes shifted when she spoke. The sixteen-year-old slumped lower, burdened by something it scared her to share.

I said nothing.

Who was I to pry into others’ secrets? When my own were killing me.

Sadie shook her head and wrapped her arms around her little sister. “It’s rude to point out when someone’s having a mental breakdown. We all have them.” She looked over at me.

Sadie’s ruby eyes were full of concern as she mouthed, “It will be okay. You saved us all.”

It wouldn’t be okay.

Because I’d eaten my mother’s beating heart.

Yes I, Arabella Egan, the crown princess of the fae monarchy, had ripped my mother’s beating heart out of her cold chest and eaten it.

Consumed it.

Consumed her.

Raw, beating, bloody heart. In my mouth. Down my throat. The only way to kill a fae monarch.

The only way to ascend to the seat of death—hundreds of fae skulls covered in gold foil. The remains of a lost race of blood fae, people who had rebelled against the monarchy’s oppression and lost.

In my peripheral vision, Sadie whispered something to Lucinda. From what had happened in the arena sands, the race wasn’t lost anymore.

Sadie was a blood fae. A race so rare and ancient that they were more myth than real, which meant Lucinda was most likely one too.

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