Page 367 of Alchemised
He drew a deep breath. “This room is safe, but Morrough has eyes in the house. He watches from the hallway sometimes. Now that you’re pregnant, he’s unlikely to have you brought in again, but as long as it was a risk, there was always the chance he’d see anything that happened here.”
Understanding slowly dawned on her. All these months, Kaine had been performing for Morrough through Helena’s eyes, knowing that any moment that passed between them might be seen.
What had been real, then? Any of it? None?
A wave of exhaustion struck. She felt as if all her memories had been shaken and lay jumbled and upended, out of order. It was hard to even think clearly.
She wanted to sleep, to sink back into the abyss, but she was afraid that her memories might slip away again. That Kaine would vanish, and when she woke it would be Ferron again, ice-cold and cruel.
Try as she might, the two were categorically separate in her mind.
Kaine, she knew.
But Ferron was a monster. Her fear and hatred of him were rooted in her bones. That horrific chair of bodies, his pile of victims. She couldn’t forget that.
Her head throbbed, her skull threatening to crush her eyes out of her head. She squeezed them shut. The bed dipped, and Kaine took her arm. She felt her veins swell, and there was a prick of a needle as he put in a new intravenous drip.
“Don’t pull this one out,” he said as he worked. “All your years in a hospital, and you’re still a terrible patient.”
He laid her arm down and began going through the vials again, finding one and adding it to all the tubes that joined with the saline running into her arm.
“You should sleep now,” he said. “We’ll talk tomorrow.”
“What if I forget again?” Her voice was small, nearly trembling with fear.
He didn’t answer.
“Will you—will you go back to being the way you were, if I forget?”
“It’s almost over now,” he said, not answering the question.
She could feel the drugs in her veins, a heavy shroud bearing down on her. She fought to keep her eyes open, to stay awake, to remember.
“Then what?”
The room seemed darker.
“You’ll take care of Lila, the way you promised you would.”
THERE WAS A CRACK OF faint light cast between the curtains when her eyes opened again. She could see the room, her prison. Kaine was gone.
She was only awake a few minutes before the door opened, and one of the necrothralls entered. Helena stared.
“I saw you before …” Helena said as the necrothrall set down a tray with a bowl of soup on it. “I was here, before.”
Why would she have been here?
“Shhhhh …” The necrothrall released a soft, hissing breath through her teeth, shaking her head as if in warning.
She reached into a pocket and withdrew a folded piece of paper, holding it out to Helena.
There was only one word, written in clear strokes.
REST.
The paper slipped from her fingers and the necrothrall took it immediately, returning it to her pocket before offering soup.
Helena forced a few spoonfuls down, but her body recoiled, trying to hurl them back up. She tried not to think, to stop trying to remember, but it was like trying to ignore Lumithia in Ascendance.
