Page 97 of Drop His Mask

Familiar icy blue eyes, dark raven hair that matched my own. But a nose and lips that were the mirror images of Jayce’s.

I was seeing a ghost.

“Mommy?” The soft, sweet child’s voice bounced around me.

The word was a chord to a broken instrument in my chest that had never been played. It was a protective instinct that hit hard and fast. It was years of emptiness and longing.

I was sprinting to Sparrow before I knew what I was doing.

“Acherishedmother. You put a mother in this game to die. Not only a mother, but one that bore a daughter.”

Anadil continued her announcement, but I ignored it.

Dropping to my knees and opening my arms, Sparrow rushed to me and wrapped her small body into mine.

Squeezing her to my chest, I took in years of sadness and longing. Of missing something that I would never have.

But she was here, she was real. “You’re alive.” I peppered kisses across her forehead and hair.

“Mommy,” my daughter cried. “They promised you would come. I missed you.” Her words were broken with the youth of her voice, but I understood them as if they were written before my eyes.

“A mother and daughter. This is what these games have devolved to,” Anadil shouted. “And now. They will be separated again.”

One moment I was taking in Sparrow, wrapped around her, soaking in her warmth, the next I was being dragged backwards away from her, tuggedinto bulky arms. “No, please! Please! Don’t take her from me again!” I begged. “I will do whatever you want.” Tears streamed down my eyes.

A flicker of an unknown emotion swept across Anadil’s face, but just as quickly, it was gone. “We will be in Violencia, where it all began.”

Where we stood shook until it began to extend across the remainder of the dome. I turned on my captor,scratching,clawing, a blind animal trying to escape, to return to my daughter.

My daughter.

Sparrow.

She is alive.

Anadil grabbed a screaming Sparrow up into her arms, walking across the newly formed bridge.

Finally, managing to escape the confounds of the arms that had trapped me, I sprung forward to chase Anadil. To my daughter.

Only to be knocked back by a large explosion. The sound bursting my eardrums, smoke filling my nostrils and lungs.

Debris flew everywhere as I landed flat on my back, and I choked trying to catch my breath. The dome above me cracked, rain filtering through.

“We have to leave.Now. You won’t be any help to your daughter if you are dead.” Felix–my captor, the man that had literally wrenched me away from my daughter–was now the one to offer me a hand to my feet.

But I didn’t take it. Ignoring my vitriol directed towards him, he carefully grabbed me until I was wrapped in his arms.

“I’m taking you to your freedom. It is time to leave.”

I wanted nothing more than to fight, to scream, to do anything at all. But my soul felt as if it had left along with Sparrow. I was an empty husk processing all of the information that had hit me fast and hard.

I didn’t have the energy to question him, to wonder where we were going. My thoughts were preoccupied with the crippling realization thatmy daughter had been alive for years, and I had never, not once, even tried to look for her.

Chapter 52

Just One Man

Julian

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