Page 148 of Claiming Pretty

Now all I could see was the glint of madness in them, so sharp and bright it was undeniable. She believed what she was saying. She truly believed she wassavingthe Sochai.

I couldn’t stop the tremor that ran through me. This woman—my mother in all but blood—wasn’t just part of the monster. Shewasthe monster.

And worse, she thought she was the hero.

“Liath, Sarah, Keela…” My voice cracked, the names catching in my throat as I stared at her pale, detached face. “Why are you killing the ‘daughters’ off? One by one?”

I swallowed hard, my chest tight with the unspoken question lingering in the air.And me?

Would she kill me too? Her only daughter?

“The lesser of two evils,” she said, her tone unnervingly even. Her words landed like a slap, their cold detachmentsucking the air from my lungs. “The Society can do much good in this world—I wouldn’t expect you to understand even a fraction of its power, Ava—but it would all be ruined if our… unsavory past were to come to light.”

“‘Unsavory’?” I repeated, my voice sharp and brittle as glass.

It wasn’t a word for their atrocities, for the lives they destroyed, for the utter destruction of innocence.

Ebony offered no further response. Her expression was locked into a perfect mask of indifference. The color drained from her cheeks, leaving behind a pale, marble facade.

Gone was the flicker of emotion I’d seen earlier—the pain, the pride, the madness. Her eyes, once alive with conviction, were now dull and lifeless.

There was no trace of humanity left. She looked like a statue carved from the cold stone walls around us.

And I understood why. If she let herselffeel, it would all come crashing down. If she allowed even a moment of reflection, she would see the warped wreckage of her beliefs, the mountain of sins she’d committed in the name of good.

Her soul was a house of cards. One gust of truth, and it would collapse. She couldn’t afford to pause. Couldn’t afford to look back.

As I stared at the woman before me, I knew what I had to do.

My fingers brushed against the ruby ring, the poisoned stone a deadly promise, ready to end this nightmare with a flick of my wrist.

But I couldn’t.

My chest tightened, my resolve fracturing beneath the weight of heartbreak.

She wasn’t the High Lord in this moment. She was stillEbony.Still the woman who had taken me in, who had saved me from the clutches of yet another Sochai ‘father.’

The woman I had once believed loved me like a daughter.

Instead, I reached up and slipped the blade from my hair, its sharp edge gleaming in the torchlight.

My grip tightened as I pointed it toward her. “You’re not going to get away with this.”

Ebony’s expression didn’t flicker, her voice resonating with the cold authority of the High Lord. “I thought you’d understand, Ava.”

Her hand disappeared into the folds of her robe. The metallic glint of a gun caught the corner of my vision, and instinct took over.

I moved faster than I thought possible, my training with Ty snapping into place.

Using a disarming technique he’d drilled into me a hundred times, I grabbed her wrist, twisted it sharply, and sent the gun clattering to the floor.

I spun her, yanked her against me, and pressed my blade against her neck before she could react, the sharp edge biting into her pale skin. “Where’s Ciaran?”

Ebony didn’t flinch, even with the blade at her throat. Her lips curled into a faint, chilling smile. “Yes, it’s about time they joined us.”

They?

She snapped her fingers, the sharp, jarring sound echoing through the chamber.

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