Why had I done this again?

I stared at the door that led to my parents’ apartment, trying to trace the steps that had gotten me here, and realized that I had simply fixed it as a “destination” in my head, and then taken the slowest way there as an excuse to think.

I hadn’t actually considered that I was going in to see my parents. And now that I was standing in front of their door, part of me wanted to turn around and head back the way I had come. I wasn’t sure I had it in me to deal with this—not just because of the tangled web of emotions that came with interacting with my parents, but also because I had to be careful. They were on the same team as Lieutenant Zale, who had served under Devon Alexander for over fifteen years. The same guy who had just arrested me—albeit for only a few minutes—and was possibly working to bring down Scipio. There was every chance that he had something to do with Ambrose’s death. If anyone was Devon’s ally inside the Citadel, it was him.

Which meant my parents could be working for a man who wanted me dead. What was more, they could be doing it knowingly.

It occurred to me then that I could be walking into a trap, but I dismissed the idea. I hadn’t told them I was coming, and I doubted that they would be reckless enough to attack me in their own home, this soon after Ambrose’s death. It would be too suspicious.

My stomach churned. I was talking about my parents as if they were planning to kill me. And hey, my mom had offered to once, on the day I was born. Population rules in the Tower were very strict, and normally couples were permitted no more than two children. My parents had given birth to my sister Sybil, and then attempted to have a second child.

However, biology has a funny way of not always working out, and they had accidentally conceived twins: my brother Alex and myself. As Alex was born first, I was the burden—the extra mouth to feed. Normally, I would’ve been eliminated. My mother had even insisted on it.

But Scipio had interceded. For a while, my mom had thought Scipio had a destiny planned for me, and that idea had intensified after my sister Sybil died. But I later learned that Scipio had only saved me because somewhere else, an infant had been stillborn, and the population level had to be maintained. Needless to say, my parents had been less than thrilled to find out their youngest daughter was normal.

I sucked in a breath. Dwelling on the past was pointless, and did nothing to help me with the future. My mom apparently really wanted to see me, and if I didn’t handle it now, she would persist. I’d just walk in, tell her I was all right, and then get out as quickly as possible.

That seemed easy enough.

I pressed the button and announced my name and rank to the scanner, enduring a skull-rattling scan that felt slightly harder than normal. I belatedly realized that it probably was; the entire Citadel’s security systems were following more stringent protocols in an effort to prevent any more infiltrators from getting around.

It ended heartbeats later, but I barely had a moment to breathe a sigh of relief before the door slid open, revealing my mother on the other side.

I’d never seen my mother looking so frazzled before. Her hair was down in dark waves around her face, and dark blue shadows that were almost black clung to the area under her eyes. She wasn’t even in uniform, and it was already almost seven in the morning!

As soon as she saw me, relief poured into her eyes, and a second later, my mother—a woman who had found a thousand different ways to make me feel ashamed of myself my entire life—pulled me into a tight embrace, and held me as if she were afraid of letting me go.

A surge of powerful, mixed emotions reached up and wrapped a steely fist around my heart, and I froze, uncertain of what to do or how to react. A part of me wanted to push her off of me. She’d had her chance to be a mother to me, and she’d failed. She’d treated me more like one of her Squires—and a disappointing one at that. What made her think she was even worthy of holding me now?

On the other hand… my entire life, since I’d been a small child, this had been all I ever wanted from her. A simple hug, an encouraging word or two here or there. A mother who loved me for who I was, and didn’t despise me for what I wasn’t.

So I didn’t push her away. But I didn’t return the hug either, and a few seconds later, she broke it, keeping only her hands tethered to my shoulders. She glanced both ways down the hall, as if looking to see if anyone were there, watching us, and then pulled me inside and quickly shut the door behind us.

Then her hands were squeezing my shoulders, and she was looking at me with an intense gleam in her eyes. “What happened?” she demanded.

Of course. She just wanted to know my side of the story. It was unlikely anyone not in the investigation knew what was going on outside of a Knight being murdered. They probably knew it was Ambrose. But beyond that, they had no idea.

“I’m fine,” I assured her, which was weird and made me hesitate for a second, as I tried to figure out what to say next. “I don’t really know what happened. We were out of the Citadel, helping Zoe look for a missing child. When we got back… we found them.”

My mother gave me a flat look that screamed “I don’t believe you”. And sure enough, she immediately said, “I’m not buying it, Liana. Not after what you said about your lash qualifier. Tell me the truth.”

“The truth?” I asked, and a laugh escaped me at the absurdity of her request. Yes, I had made a mistake and let slip to her that my lash line had been tampered with during the qualifier. It had snapped, and I had almost died. But for her to be asking me for the whole truth? Even if I didn’t suspect she was secretly working for Zale, I wouldn’t have told her. Because I doubted very much that my mother—the very picture of a model Knight—could accept the truth. “Mom, trust me when I say that neither you nor Dad could ever handle the actual truth.”

My mother frowned and opened her mouth to retort, but my father spoke first. “Don’t speak to your mother like that,” he growled. I glanced toward the living room, and saw him emerging from the opening, his eyes already narrowed in the familiar glare that always inhabited his face when I was in his presence.

Over the years, I had studiously avoided engaging my father. I’d submit to his anger rather than fighting back, because it was easier. And I was afraid. But after I had been exonerated for Devon’s murder, I had changed—and I wasn’t willing to put up with it anymore.

There were several different ways of dealing with bullies. The first was with humor. The second was by accepting their insults without showing any sign that they bothered you. I went with the former, knowing it would only irritate him more.

“Y’know what, Dad, you are perfectly right. Let me try again,” I said, affecting a wide-eyed and innocent gaze. I turned to my mother and said, “Mom, trust me when I say that neither you nor Dad could ever handle the actual truth.” This time I used an exaggerated, high-pitched voice.

My father made an irritated noise, but to my surprise, the corner of my mother’s lips kicked up. It was gone within the blink of an eye, but I could’ve sworn I saw it.

“Silas, enough,” she said harshly, before modulating her voice to a kinder tone. “Liana, let’s sit down in the dining room.”

I immediately moved to follow her, eager to have a little bit more space put between me and my parents. The entryway was not an ideal place for… whatever was going on.

We sat down at the table, my mom taking the chair at the head so she could be next to me, while my father sat across from us. He folded his arms across his chest and pursed his lips. He clearly didn’t like that I was here.

“Liana, I know that Astrid is running point, but she’s being very tight-lipped about the investigation. And there is something going on. People are trying to kill you.”

Not me. Ambrose. And they had won. But I wasn’t about to tell her or my father that.

“Mom, I’ve told you all I know,” I said tiredly. “There isn’t anything else going on. I promise.”

“But yesterday you said that your lash end had been cut,” she reiterated. “That wasn’t a mistake—you said it in the heat of the moment, which means you believe it to be true.”

I pressed my lips together and said nothing. She had a point, and it was futile to try to argue with her, because she was right. It was true—I had told her that in the heat of the moment. But that didn’t change the fact that I had no intention of telling her what was really going on with Ambrose. She couldn’t handle what was at the heart of the matter, or what it would do to her perceptions of Scipio and the Tower.

The silence stretched out for several long heartbeats, while my mother waited for me to respond, and I didn’t.

It was my father who finally broke it. “You see, Holly, there is nothing more going on than a horrible act of violence. You’re being paranoid. No one is targeting Liana.”

There was something about his tone that really struck a nerve inside of me. The derisive and dismissive quality of it. And the snide look on his face when he spoke. My blood began to heat, until it felt like it was simmering just under my skin, a barely contained boil.

He’d used the same tone my entire life, and it had always made me feel less useful than the bin that held the family’s compost. I had developed a certain immunity to it, but that didn’t matter, as it wasn’t actually directed at me this time.

It was directed at my mother. And witnessing him doing it to her, dismissing her like that… It made me angry beyond belief. He wasn’t taking her seriously.

And I cared. I wasn’t sure if it was because I didn’t like the idea of him treating yet another member of his family like he had me, or if it was the fact that my mother was finally starting to care about me, but either way, it was insufferable.

And I wanted to wipe the smug look off of his face. So I told them the truth.

“Scipio is dying.”

For several heartbeats, nothing happened. Both my parents sat there wearing the exact same expressions as they had before I uttered those three little words. Then again, I had just stated something that had the potential to give every citizen in the Tower a critical meltdown, so time to process was to be expected.

It started with my mother. Her eyes blinked several times in rapid succession, and she shook her head. “What? What do you mean?”

I carefully considered what I was going to reveal. I couldn’t tip my hand as to knowing about legacies, because I still couldn’t be sure this wasn’t a ploy to find out how much I knew, but I could spin a very simple narrative that fit in with most of the events as they knew them. Scipio had set me onto Devon because he suspected something was up. I found out that Devon and several other unknown people had hatched a plot to take Scipio out. I thought it was finished after the trial, but then Scipio came to me again, and told me it wasn’t. He was still under assault, and unsure who to trust. I was doing my best to help him, but Ambrose got caught in the crossfire. I would have to boil down the motivations of his killers to something more digestible for my parents, and omit a lot of details, but in the end, it would fit together pretty nicely.

And I might be able to get a read on them to see if they knew more than they were letting on.

I began to speak, carefully summarizing the trial but revealing the fact that Devon’s crime was tampering with Scipio, and manipulating decisions from the great machine. That part of the trial hadn’t been revealed in detail—only that Devon had been found guilty of sedition against the Tower. The council had decided that giving away more than that could start a panic, and redacted it from the public transcripts. The expectation was that neither Leo nor I would reveal it either.

Whoops.

My mom’s eyes narrowed, and my dad’s mouth flattened into a thin line that practically disappeared behind his beard. But I went on, as planned, fudging the truth about Scipio asking me for help (it was really Leo), and prepared myself to talk about Ambrose’s death. But my father never let me get that far.

“I will not tolerate this any longer,” he said, slamming his fist onto the table. “You will tell no more of these blasphemies to anyone, or I will arrest you for sedition and terrorism.”

“Silas,” my mother chided, alarmed.

I ignored her, meeting my father’s gaze head on. “Go ahead and do that. But don’t come running to me when Scipio finally dies and this whole Tower gets thrown into the dark like Requiem Day. Because that’s what will happen if you ignore this, Father.”

“Enough!” he shouted, standing up so quickly that his chair went flying.

“No, it’s not enough,” I shouted back, also rising to my feet. “Because you know where you and your precious Knights will be?! Right here in your precious Citadel, sealed in and slowly suffocating to death. Along with everyone else! So go ahead, take me to the prisons, expel me like you have so many others. Oh, did I mention that law, the one letting you kill those poor little undesirable ones you hate so much, was the one that Devon manipulated? Did you know that Scipio never wanted those poor people to die, but only agreed to it because—”

My father had apparently had enough, because his hand snapped out and grabbed a fistful of my robe and undershirt in a tight grip, jerking me hard. My hips slammed into the edge of the table, but my hands were already reacting, my adrenaline surging from the snapping rage that had come over me, and I slammed my hand into the inside of his elbow and dragged his forearm toward me. My other arm snapped out, hand open, driving my palm into his nose with the full force of my body. There was a sharp snap, and my father released my clothes as he staggered back with a howl. I let him go, and his hands immediately went to his nose, trying to catch the blood that was now streaming out of it at an alarming rate.

I was shaking like a leaf, terrified of what he was about to do. My muscles screamed for me to press the attack, but my instincts told me to run away as quickly as possible. I’d never fought back against my father, and he had a terrible temper at the best of times. I wasn’t sure I could hold my own—but I wasn’t going to let him manhandle me anymore.

He spat out a curse as he gingerly touched his nose, then snatched his fingers back with a pained groan. I tensed as he straightened, turning on me with dark, heavy eyes that promised violence. “You stupid—”

“That’s enough, Silas!” my mother shouted angrily, and my father froze, the anger in his face draining away with the blood dripping from his nose. “You’re lucky Liana only broke your nose. I was going to break your arm if you didn’t let go of her.”

My head reeled as her words made it through my agitated state, and I relaxed a fraction of an inch, watching her from the corner of my eye. She had stood up as well, and was now looking at my father like he was a rust hawk egg that needed to be crushed under her boot.

“Holly, you can’t actually believe all this! She’s a liar, and she’s trying to pull off this whole ‘Scipio’s chosen’ thing to add to her standing in the Tourney. She’s always been opportunistic, lazy, and filled with excuses, and this latest prank is nothing short of an attempt to—”

My mother hit him. More specifically, she rammed her fist so hard into his jaw that he went down in a twisting spill, slamming against the wall halfway down. My eyes widened, and I met my mom’s gaze. Her eyes, hot and heavy with anger, lightened a touch when she looked at me, and then darkened again when my father made a sound.

“Go home, Liana,” she said, her voice carrying a dangerous note of warning in it. “I will net you later. Your father and I need to have a few words.”

My heart beat like a steady, rhythmic drum in my chest. I had no idea what I’d just witnessed, but every cell in my body was telling me to heed my mother’s command, so I left—quickly and wordlessly, and with barely a look over my shoulder.