Page 123 of Mama Si's Paradise

My heart jumped. “It’s my pleasure,” I said with a nod, eyes on the ring still. “Out of curiosity, though, what exactly did they say about me?” I’d already asked about Valentine, but I wanted to know about Grey, too. So badly it scared me.

“Well, Valentine said that I was right about everything I told him of the sun and the sky out there in the world. It surprised me, to be honest.” She laughed and my cheeks flushed bright scarlet.

“Oh.” I grabbed my own tea from the table just to do something with my hands. Now I wished I hadn’t asked at all, but Genevieve kept going.

“Grey surprised me even more. He visits me so rarely, and he never says anything when he does, but that day you arrived, he said,I understand.”

I blinked at her. “Understand what?”

“His father,” Genevieve said. “He said he finally understood his father.”

I narrowed my brows. “That’s not aboutme, though.”

But Genevieve laughed again—so relieving to hear that sound. “Oh, but it is! It’s about you, all right.”

I didn’t get it. Not even a little bit, but I was afraid of what she’d tell me if I kept asking.

Out of all the brothers, Grey was the most…intensewhen it came to pretty much everything: how he carried himself, how he behaved, how others behaved toward him, how little he said, how he looked, how he lookedat me.I was fascinated and curious and terrified of him all at once, and as much as I was dying to ask Genevieve all about who he was and how he thought and how helaughed, I couldn’t. She was his mother.

But I could ask a general question about all the brothers, I guessed. “Do you talk to them often?”

“Oh, I do. Like I said, Grey rarely comes here, but the others do. I think they like my chambers better than any other place in the palace because it’s a glimpse of the outside world.” She leaned closer. “Little do they know that this doesn’t even come close to what the actual sky looks like. Oh, how I miss it, Fall.” She brought her hands to her chest. “It can get tiring to live in isolation like this. How I miss therealsky.”

“It does look a lot like this, actually. I don’t know how you did it, but it really does.” Especially at first glance.

“Magic,” she told me with a wink. “Soon, you’ll have more than enough to keep yourself safe from pretty much everything around here.”

“I doubt that extends to the brothers.”

“But it does!” she said, voice pitched high like I caught her by surprise. “That’s the thing about the brides of the Evernights—they become more powerful than their masters with time. I could kill all five of them easily if I wished with the amount of magic I’ve gathered by being here for almost fifty years.”

Holy shit—how old was she? “That’s a really long time.”

“And a lot of magic,” she said with a nod. “I could even giveyoua good energy boost right now, but your body wouldn’t be able to handle it, unfortunately. Not before the Blood Call. But maybe when you’re strong enough you canbuild your own sunshine room. Should you decide to stay, of course.”

I smiled. “It doesn’t matter what I decide anymore, does it? There’s no way out of this place.”

She thought about it for a second. “To be honest, I’m of the mind that the toughest part of anything is convincing ourselves that we’re right and that we’re going to go for it. Because once we’ve done that, once we’ve planted that seed within ourselves, there is absolutely nothing and nobody that can stop it from growing as big as we wish,” she said. “Once we convince ourselves that something canbe done,impossiblebecomes just a word.”

It was a nice philosophy, but one I didn’t share, unfortunately. But before I could say so, she said, “Now, if you’ll excuse me, dear. This old lady is tired. I want to get some rest.”

Here I was, hoping I’d get to spend the whole night here with her.

“Of course,” I said anyway.

She thanked me again for coming to see her and reminded me to never talk to the other brides—or to new ones—about her.

Then, she watched me leave the reflection room with her ring on my finger and a million more questions in my head until I was at the bottom of the stairs and found Valentine by the door, waiting for me.

Thirty

They letme leave the castle with the other brides the next day. The courtyard was vast, black rose gardens in every inch of free space, vines, thick and full of thorns rising from the ground in all kinds of shapes and sizes like they were meant for decoration. A single statue of a woman with her eyes closed and her hands to her chest stood in the middle, so old that roots had grown around its foundation and the vines slithered up and down it like snakes. The dark sky and the trees that surrounded us looked like they were moving because of the fire on the torches placed around the gardens and the stone benches. It was as beautiful as it was terrifying, but to be out there in the open air with nothing but darkness over me was still a relief.

It cleared my mind much better than I thought it could, so when I went back inside, I decided Genevieve was right. If I convinced myself that I could make it out of this place alive, then I could. I’d just have to find a way around all these guards and these animals, and the Evernight brothers as well.

I’d have dared to even ask Valentine to help me, if he hadn’t suddenly started to look at me differently sincethe night before. I couldn’t really say how, couldn’t put my finger on it, but something hid in his gaze every time I met his eyes the whole day, and I didn’t like it.

Or maybe it was because I could see so much more of everything now.

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