Page 103 of Until the End of Ever
The next thing I knew, there was the sharp sting of a syringe piercing my skin, and everything went dark.
44
KLEOS
"Wake."
I didn't know how long it took for me to wake up, but it was dark outside. The mother of all headaches didn't change the fact that I recalled every excruciating second of the meeting with the Mother of the Year.
Dressed in white, Zenya Pendros stood over me, self-satisfied, proud of herself, as she always was when she got her way.
I moved—or at least, I tried to, willing my body to get up. Not a single limb twitched. I was completely immobilized.
"There, that's better," she drawled, mouth curved into a smile. "A full moon would have been preferable, but I believe most of the spell has taken hold.Stand."
I was on my feet in seconds, petrified. Not only because the body that wouldn't obey me moments ago had leapt to her command, but because I could see my reflection in the window.
Each of Lucian's beautiful red runes had been burned from my skin, and angry, dark scrolls now replaced them, carved directly with the black blood-stained knife I could see on my aunt's desk.
It was a miracle I couldn't feel any of it. Presumably, the spell controlling my body prevented me from feeling whatever was done to it. It made sense. It was, after all, a forcedmarriageritual. It had likely been designed so the victim wouldn't feel theirrape.
I was panicking, my mind coming up with a hundred different scenarios, each more disgusting than the last.The most horrifying thing of all was that instead of racing in fear, my heart beat slow and steady, enslaved to Zenya's will like the rest of me.
She could stop it. She could kill me with a single word, a single thought.
What monster did she intend to bind me to? Or would my mother tie a poor innocent man who didn't know what she'd done to me? Would I always be this empty doll, but with my mind intact? I could imagine no worse torture.
"Yes," Zenya said. "I believe it worked. I can see in your eyes you're still there. If you hadn't been so difficult, your mind wouldn't be part of the equation, you know. It would just have been a strange dream, and you would have woken up content."
Content?
She was insane.
I'd always known my mother was self-centered, but I didn't realize she was that deluded.
"I would know. The same was done to me. One day, I was saying, ‘no thank you, Mother, I'd rather have a career than some new blood ball and chain.’ The next, I woke up married. And you know what happened?"
I stared at her.
"I gained influence. People started paying attention to me. I wasn't just a little girl with too much power, but a woman. A mother, too. You came as a package deal."I wanted to throw up, imagining my father raping her while she was in the same state I was in. But instead of describing the horrific event I expected,Zenya continued, "Your father had knocked up a fucking barmaid, and they made me call their bastard my daughter. Can you believe that?"
I could.
In fact, nothing had ever made more sense.
Zenya wasn't my mother.
A strange knot inside me loosened at that knowledge. Every time I'd shown her something I was proud of as a child. Her indifference. Father might have been busy, and often absent, but he'd never had her degree of complete contempt. Because he was my father, while this person was no one to me.
No one but an enemy.
I knew better than to think blood meant everything. Zenya looked enough like her own parents for me to be rather certain they were related, and they'd done this to her. Meanwhile,Silver's foster parents weren't her blood, but they'd never, ever treat her like Zenya had treated me my whole life. Like a tool to be used then discarded when there was no direct advantage to it.
The situation was just as awful as it had been moments ago, but realizing I hadn't been hurt by my own mother brought me a certain degree of peace.
Someone knocked at the door.
"Yes?" Zenya called, like it was her own office.
