Page 128 of When Night Falls

She left her kids behind in the wake of a monster.

She didn’t do anything to stop his cruelness.

She got to parade around with respect and the promise of love while my mother faded into the distance as a forgotten memory.

"How about the time I got whipped across the chest for simply smiling the way my mother did. Because he told me that you hated that I resembled her. She made you jealous, so he tried to make me look less like her by searing cigarettes into my skin or marking me with his belt." The memories I've worked hard to never forget in regard to the very things that made me surface in my head.

"I didn’t mean it like that,” she tries to defend herself. But her admission to it, nonetheless, is harrowing.

One time, it was eight days. Eight days of me fighting for air, because my mouth was so dry that it felt like it was closing up on me. I couldn't talk for a month after that.

I give the stake one last good push, driving it almost entirely into her body with the heel of my boot.

She groans against the intrusion. "I am exactly who my father wanted me to be. Who you allowed me to be. Carved from the trauma I was forced to endure; forged by acts of evil and blinded by ideas of false love. I will fucking take from you what you took from me!"

"There was-" She gasps for air, suffering from the same thing I had to go through. "Nothing I could do."

I decide to rip the stake from her chest and watch as blood drips delicately from her open wound. I know it'll heal over soon, but her torture is not even close to the end.

I wave the bloodied stick around in delirium, relishing in this moment. She straightens herself up as she looks me directly in my eyes. I hate that she shares the same eyes as her daughter. It's daunting.

"You think I wanted this life? You're wrong. I didn't have a choice when I was ripped from the night. When I was basically told that I had to marry a vampire, have his kids and become a queen. I didn't understand, but I didn't have a choice." Sheyanks one her hands to try to make herself more comfortable, the chain rattling against its restraint.

"I want to see my daughter!" She shouts, yanking the chains again, and again, and again.

"I wondered when you’d ask." Proof that my initial plan was always going to work, luring her out with something I knew she couldn't resist.

"I hate what I did to her. Tothem. You don't think I've suffered through my decisions? I hate what I've become, which is why I tried to undo it."

"You didn't seem too remorseful moments ago. And undoing something doesn’t mean replacing it with something else. You did marry again, didn’t you?" I refuse to let her gaslight me into thinking she yearned to rid of the monster she turned into. Her claims of hating her vampirism are worthless to me when she opted to stay the very thing she said to have feared.

She could have stripped all of her blood and gone back to human form, decaying to her proper age and maybe I would have granted her freedom from my promise to end her.

"I am filled with regret every day." I hear her voice crack, emerging sadness from her tone as her body visibly deflates. "I married again for safety, for love. I fell in love with Dominek and I wasn’t going to earn the respect of Hollows Tracee after what I’d done. When Renard died, I felt like it was too late. I hate that I didn't get to see them grow up. I had to leave the twins behind because I was scared. I hate that I had to choose between my happiness without them or a miserable life with them. But I had to leave. I needed to be free. I knew my kids would be safe. I knew I'd get a chance to see them again."

"Yet you never came to see them again. And your daughter was far from safe, Ameliana. Are you that delusional?" I allow the fury I feel for the innocent soul who was just as destroyed by her decision as I was to rage freely in my voice; passion for thepain that no one should have to endure . . . feeling like someone doesn't want you enough to just walk away. "Do you even know what's going on between our societies? Do you know where Travois is?" Her lack of awareness dumbfounds me.

"Troy told me. And I don't know anything about what goes on outside of my compound’s walls."

"You have to know something. You have been in their shadows for years and you're going to tell me that your king isn’t planning to retaliate? Your own son is being unjustly framed, coerced into guilt, for your husband’s. Does none of that affect you?"

“Dominek? Dominek is not dead. What are you talking about?”

“Do not toy with me. I will take your life right here.” I press the stake against her carotid artery. She flinches at the manic threat that my tone carries.

"Rivian, I regret leaving the twins behind, I really do, but I didn't want this life. I left the first time because I was scared. If I could have taken them, I would have. But I didn’t have the means to take care of them. Then he ripped me from the life I tried to make up for and forced me into this marriage again. I left the second time because he enacted punishment on me for escaping the first time. That, and I fell in love."

"Dom,” I say under my breath as I stand back up and take a few steps back.

“Dominek is not dead, Rivian. I don’t know who told you that but it’s a lie. And soon, he’ll come looking for me.” I infiltrate her mind to see that she is not lying.

But then why did Viktrum announce his death? How does theFactionnot know that he’s alive?

“If he didn't give me the out I needed to escape Renard, I would have stayed but I don't know if I would have survived.”

My rage makes her jump as I close in on her face, taking up space and reveling in the way fear suffocates her. The wayIsuffocate her.

I wrap my hand around her neck, causing the chair to fall out from under her as I force her up against the wall behind her. The chains pull tight from their cemented rigs, and she winces at the pain.

---