Page 166 of Claiming Pretty

The Sochai was mine, firmly and unquestionably. No more whispers of dissent, no more grumbling fathers, angry over my ordered loss of their daughters.

Ciaran Donahue had inadvertently strengthened my grip by silencing them for me. Their depravities had died with them, and now, the society was free to evolve.

My era had begun.

The filth my father allowed to fester would be cleaned away, burned like the rot it was. I would rebuild the Sochai into something powerful, untouchable. I would steer it into a future no longer mired in the unspeakable crimes of the past.

Guilt crept in, unbidden and sharp, like the edge of a scalpel I hadn’t seen coming.

No.No.I slammed the door shut on it, but it slipped through the cracks anyway, a shadow I couldn’t escape.

I’d done what I’d done for a reason. For agoodreason! Why couldn’t that be enough now? Why wasn’t it enough to silence the echoes of their screams in my head, the way their frightened eyes would haunt me in my sleep?

The Sochai had become an evil thing. A rotten tooth, blackened to the root. A diseased lung, festering with every breath.

There was no cutting around the infection, no delicate excision that would save it. Even my surgeon’s hands—the steadiest, most precise in the country—weren’t capable of that kind of miracle.

No one’shands were. The rot was too deep. The nastiness that had taken root required death.

Only from the ashes could something clean, something pure rise up. That was the truth I’d clung to, the truth I still held on to like a lifeline in this sea of whiskey and regret.

Those girls—thoseinnocent girls—they couldn’t remain. Not when they’d started to remember.

They were a case of sepsis waiting to happen, poised to infect everything I was trying to salvage. Keeping them alive would have tainted the waters I was working so desperately to clean.They had to go.

I made the decision because it was the only decision.

And yet, no matter how many times I told myself that, the weight of it pressed down on me like a lead apron. Their blood clung to my soul, an unrelenting stain I would carry to my grave.

A surgeon didn’t weep over the leg she amputated, even when the patient survived and went on to change the world. She didn’t cry for what was lost when the sacrifice ensured a future.

So why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I stop feeling this hollow ache, this gnawing grief that tore at the edges of my resolve?

The empty glass trembled in my hand as I reached for the bottle, my fingers unsteady.

The Macallan spilled, sloshing onto my father’s oriental rug, soaking into the dark velvet robe I’d wrapped around myself like armor.

The robe that had concealed the weakness in my legs as I tore the sheet off Ava after watching that boy fuck her.

The robe I had clutched tightly around me as Icontemplated the unthinkable—murdering my own daughter to save myself.

But I hadn’t. I had let her go.

As the fire crackled and my victory settled in my chest, I felt an ache I hadn’t anticipated.

I would never see Ava again.

The girl I saved. The girl I loved, though I could barely say it, barely admit it even to myself. The girl I tried so desperately to protect—from them, from herself, fromme.

I tipped back the glass again, but the burn this time was hollow.

My mind flickered back to that day in the hospital room, to her youthful dark eyes locking on mine, wide with confusion and terror.

I hadn’t seen her as anything more than an order then. Another test of my loyalty to my father. Another step toward my heirship that I was too afraid to refuse.

But when I was forced to rip her baby from her, it changed me—something maternal, buried deep inside me, sparked to life.

I swore that day I would fix this. Fix her. Fix everything.

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