Page 115 of Cursed Shadows 2

“In a kiss—”

I cry out as father snatches a fistful of my hair.

His firm grip sears my scalp like a blaze. But it’s unyielding as he tears me away from the wall, ignores my cries, and drags me over to the copper washtub.

I don’t get a moment to right myself, not before he—by the hair—pulls me off balance.

I go tumbling into the drained tub. And I land, hard.

My temple knocks off the copper edge, my leg twists beneath me, and my knee smacks off the bottom. A dizzy moment steals me as I try to push up. If it’s the pain or the shock of it all, I don’t know.

But it’s smacked clean out of me when father’s hand comes down on me again. His strike catches my cheekbone. The next comes down on my temple. The third—a fierce backhand to my jaw that bursts my lip on impact.

No fourth comes.

The skirt caught between my legs is damp, my bladder delivered on its promise. I’m stiff in the copper washtub, twisted at an odd angle, my bones screaming beneath my flesh. My eyes close against the reflective copper, I don’t need to look to know blood spills from my mouth, trickles down my nose and stains my darkening eye.

Like beasts in the wild, if I’m quiet and still, he’ll stop attacking.

And he does.

Father steps back and clicks his fingers. “The last dance of the season is two nights from now.”

At his summons, the rush of little feet pitter patter into my bedchamber. Servants, ready for their commands.

But father speaks only to me as he says, “You will reject your darkling—publicly. You will shame him. Deliver a slight so terrible that he will never forgive you. And only then, if I am satisfied enough by your performance to perhaps forgive you one day, only then will I decide your punishment. Make it the best performance of your short, little life. If I’m not pleased, then the Grott is where I will vanish you for two years, and then we will see if I can stand to look at you again.”

Bones and muscles are bolted together, as rigid as a fallenstatue, except one movement that gives me away—the tremble of my bottom lip, the shudder that twists from terror… to heartbreak.

I loosen a shaking breath, feeling father’s gaze spearing through me like swords. For a long moment, he just stands there, watching me, deciding my fate—waiting to see if he might change his mind and just send me off to the wicked horrors of the Grott tonight.

Finally, he barks at the servants but I’m far from forgotten, “Wash her! Scrub her clean until she bleeds. Then,” he adds with a rumbling growl I cringe from, “feed her the boneworm and lock her in the basement until the morning of the farewell.”

Nausea crawls up my throat.

Boneworm.

The nausea fast turns into a retch that bubbles and burns.

Father spares me a look, one filled with disgust and not a speck of pity, one that tells me he’d rather tear the flesh from my skin right now.

But then he turns his back on me. And he storms out of the bedchamber, leaving me to the cruelty of the servants.

Knife takes charge.

He scrubs my body the harshest with the bristled brush. I do bleed. Tiny pricks all over my arms and legs and back and chest, even the soles of my feet.

I don’t fight it. To fight them would be to fight father.

So I endure it. With sobs and cries and winces, I suffer the full wash, the torture of it, then part my lips for Knife to stuff a tiny, thorny white worm down my throat.

I almost sick it up the moment it’s wiggling its own way down my throat. But the barbed thorns fight me, and I only burp against its intrusion.

For two days and two nights, this boneworm will live in me. It’ll crawl and writhe under my flesh, lay eggs on my bones, and whisper songs to itself that I’ll be haunted by in my basement isolation.

And still, I suffer it all without a fight.

Because the Grott is worse.

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