Chapter 204: Refreshing 2

EDELINA

The first slap cracked across her cheek, snapping her head sideways. I struck her again before she could turn back, my palm landing on the same spot with enough force to send her sprawling hands toward her face.

I did not stop.

My arm moved with a mind of its own, my wrist flaring with each blow, my palm stinging against her skin. She tried to shield herself, curling inward as she scrambled backward on the wet tiles, but I followed her. Every time she opened her mouth to plead, another slap cut her off. My fury had gone strangely cold, so complete that I could barely feel anything beyond the pounding in my ears and the awful certainty that someone had tried to drug me into submission.

The fourth blow caught her at the temple.

She lost her balance and crashed sideways into the bathtub. Her head struck the sharp porcelain edge with a sickening crack, a sound like a pot dropped against stone.

Then she went still.

For a moment, I stood frozen, staring at her crumpled body. One hand crept to the side of her head. When she pulled it away, blood glistened between her fingers, dark against her pale skin.

I looked down at my own hand. It was trembling.

Some distant, reasonable part of my mind registered the blood, the angle of her body, the terrible sound her skull had made against the tub. It offered the faint suggestion that another woman, under different circumstances, might have felt remorse.

I felt nothing of the sort.

My ears rang. My throat burned. The taste of bile lingered on my tongue, and beneath the dizziness, the same conviction kept cutting through every other thought.

Someone had tried to put me to sleep.

"Are you trying to kill me?" I demanded, my voice breaking around the words. "Is that it? Did someone send you?"

The girl began to cry. It was a thin, frightened sound, barely more than a whimper, and she pressed her bleeding hand harder against her head as though she could hold herself together by sheer force.

"No, Your Majesty. No, I swear." Her words tumbled over each other. "I only wanted to help. I only..."

"Get out!"

She flinched but didn’t move fast enough.

"Get out!" I screamed, the effort tearing at my already raw throat. "And you had better pray this doesn’t cost you your fucking job and your fucking life!"

That finally sent her scrambling.

She dragged herself upright, one hand clamped to her head, the other gripping the edge of the bathtub for support. Her foot slipped on the wet marble, and she caught herself against the wall with a strangled gasp. For one brief moment, I thought she might fall again.

Then she stumbled toward the door.

She did not stop to curtsey. She did not look back. I heard her stagger through my bedroom, followed by the bang of the door and the hurried slap of her slippers against the corridor floor. Her footsteps grew fainter until the silence swallowed them completely.

I remained where I was, breathing through my mouth, my fingers curled into a fist at my side.

The bathroom was quiet now, save for the faint drip of water from the tap. Blood marked the porcelain where the girl had struck her head, and the sight of it should have brought me back to myself.

Instead, I turned toward the mirror.

The woman staring back at me was a ruin. Her face was blotched red and gray, her eyes swollen and glassy, her mouth wet and trembling at the edges. Her hair hung in tangled strands around her shoulders, and a smear of bile stained the collar of her gown. She looked exhausted, feverish, and far older than she had when she had woken up to execute all her plans.

For several seconds, I searched her face for something familiar.

I found nothing.

I turned on the tap.

Cold water battered my hands as I thrust them beneath the stream, then splashed it over my face. I scrubbed at my skin with soap, rubbing until my cheeks stung and my eyelids burned. I rinsed my mouth, spat into the basin, and did it again, swishing water around my tongue until the lingering taste of herbs faded to a faint, bitter ghost. Then I scrubbed the back of my neck, my wrists, the hollow of my throat, as I hoped, with everything that I had left, that it could wash away whatever remnants might have already found their way into my blood.

When I finally straightened, water dripped from my chin onto my gown. My face was flushed and raw, and my heart still hammered against my ribs, but the fog in my head had begun to lift. I could think again, if not clearly, then well enough to know I needed to get out of this bathroom.

That was when I noticed the mirror.

A gray film was spreading across the glass, blooming slowly from the center until it swallowed my reflection. I watched it creep outward, my breath catching somewhere in my chest.

I had seen that before.

It was like the night before.

My stomach clenched at the thought.

No... Not again.

I lunged for the glass and dragged my sleeve across it, wiping in hard, frantic strokes. The fabric squeaked against the surface. I swept from one side to the other, then back again, trying to clear the mist before it could become anything more than condensation.

But the fog thickened beneath my sleeve.

It spread faster than I could wipe, gathering in dense, shifting swirls that clung to the glass as though the mirror were breathing against me. My reflection disappeared entirely, and something began to emerge from the gray.

"Leave me alone," I practically screeched as I kept on wiping.

"Leave me alone!"

I shut my eyes. I pressed my fists against the sides of my head and screamed it, a raw, wavering sound that filled the marble room and bounced back at me twice over.

"Leave me alone!"

The echo died.

I stood there for a long time with my eyes squeezed shut. My pulse thudded in my ears. The water dripped from the faucet, one drop, two, three, with an almost kind steadiness.

Slowly, I opened my eyes.

The mirror was clear.

There was nothing in it but a bedraggled, furious woman with a wet face and a red mark across her palm from where she had struck the girl. No mist. No strange writing. No tall figure looming over her shoulder. Only the half-open bathroom door and, beyond it, the rumpled corner of my bed.

I stared at the glass, barely daring to breathe.

Nothing moved.

"Sleep," I whispered. The word felt foreign on my tongue. "This is what happens when you don’t sleep. It’s exhaustion. My own mind playing tricks on me."

I had seen a man standing in the foyer who had vanished when I looked again. I had heard claws scraping against glass that had reflected nothing but my own face. And now there was this, the mist, the silhouette, the same impossible presence that had pursued me from the previous night into the light of day.

I knew where it had begun. I had been dragged into a dream I could not wake from, trapped in that cursed meadow with no way to distinguish the nightmare from reality. But something had changed since then. The boundaries were blurring, the horrors I had endured in my sleep creeping into the hours when I was supposed to be awake.

Perhaps that was all it was. A mind starved of rest, stretched beyond what it could endure, beginning to conjure monsters out of shadows and reflections. I did not need a physician to tell me where that road led.

First came the visions. Then the inability to trust one’s own senses. And eventually, the moment when a woman could no longer tell whether the monster before her was real or merely another cruel invention of her own mind.

I gripped the edge of the basin and studied my reflection, searching for some sign that I was still in control of myself.

"I am in control of my own destiny. I am in control. I... am... in... CONTROL."

Of course...

The thought was almost a comfort. That this exhaustion could be fixed. That this hallucination was a symptom, not a haunting.

But could I fool myself? I was now afraid. Afraid of a man I was married to. But who would not be afraid of a demigod?

"I am not afraid of you," I said quietly, to the looking glass, to the pale tall thing I had imagined, to the amber-eyed man that was now making me afraid. "Do you hear me?"

My reflection stared back.

"I am not afraid of you, you fucking sicko."

Then I turned off the tap.