Page 237 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

Foggy, gray nothingness, andhim.

I had dreamt of Vincent countless times. But this version of him felt so much more real than even the most vivid of them. The fine details of his face struck me like a knife to the chest—all the things I didn’t realize I’d forgotten, like the slight crookedness to his nose or the way his hair favored the left side over the right. The version of him in my mind was generic, sanded down by months of absence, even as my grief clung to him.

I said, mostly because I needed to remind myself, “You’re not real.”

None of this was real.

Vincent smiled sadly at me.

“Aren’t I?”

Mother. Hisvoice.

“I’m real in every way that matters,” he said.

“You’re a dream. A hallucination. I’ve lost a lot of blood and—”

“I left so much of myself here, in this room.” Vincent’s eyes lifted, as if taking in this place beyond what was shrouded in darkness. “More than I ever had intended to give it. And all of that still remains, even if I do not. Isn’t that real, little serpent?”

It seemed so, so real.

“I’m inventing you,” I whispered. “Because you’re what I want to see.”

He lifted one shoulder in a delicate half-shrug. It was such a familiar movement, it made my breath stutter. “Perhaps,” he said. “Does it matter?”

In this moment, it felt like it didn’t.

He stepped closer, and I took a step back. He froze, momentary pain crossing his face.

“The things you’ve seen here have so tainted your image of me? I meant to give this place all my greatest achievements, my greatest ambitions. Instead, it became a monument to all my greatest mistakes.”

So many mistakes in the end. Never you.

Vincent’s final words flitted through my mind. He flinched, as if he heard them too.

“So many mistakes in the end,” he murmured. “I never wanted you to see this version of me.”

“I never wanted to see you this way.”

And Goddess, I meant it. Sometimes I envied myself from a year ago, who’d known, beyond any doubt, that her father loved her. Yes, it was the only thing she could believe in, but that, at least, was solid, immovable.

Losing my trust in Vincent was more than losing trust in a single person. It had broken something within me, destroyed my ability to put that trust into anyone else.

Pain flashed over his face, there and gone again so quickly, I thought it might be a trick of the light. The idea that this version of him could be a figment of my own mind slipped further away. If it was a hallucination, it was such a perfect one that it might as well be real.

And with him standing right in front of me, the anger that I’d been suppressing for months bubbled up to the surface.

“You lied to me,” I ground out. “My entire life, you told me the world was a cage. But it was you that put me there. You manipulated me from the time I was—”

“I saved you,” he snapped, lurching closer.

Then he winced, as if he had to clamp down on his anger, force it back.

“Youkidnappedme,” I choked out. “You killed my mother and you—”

“I did not kill her.”

“Yes you did!” My voice boomed through the room, echoing off the stone ceilings. “You went to Salinae that night knowing she lived there. Youdestroyedit knowing—”

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