“No,” I say to Violetta. “There must be another way.”

It takes me a moment to realize that Violetta is looking at me. Her face suddenly terrifies me. I push myself up from the steps and back away from her. “You will not touch me,” I whisper.

“Adelina, I’ve seen you deteriorating over the past months.” Violetta speaks now with tears in her eyes. Why do her tears look tinged with blood? I blink. My illusions. They must be getting away from me again … but the whispers in my mind force my thoughts away, filling my head instead with more of my own fear. “I’ve held back many times, I haven’t said nearly everything I wanted to say, all because I don’t want you to be angry with me. I’ve seen your powers spiral wildly out of control, have seen you terrified by illusions that aren’t really there.” Violetta glances to one wall of the chamber, where the gold of the pillars reflects our image. “Just look, mi Adelinetta,” she whispers. “Can you see yourself?”

I barely recognize the girl reflected back at me in the pillar. The scarred side of her face is hollow with anger. Dark circles line the skin under her good eye. There is a savagery in her expression, a hardness, that I do not remember being there before. Behind me float ghosts, fanged creatures with glittering eyes. I know immediately that these are the whispers in my head. They crowd the reflection in the pillar, until they start to claw their way out of it and onto the floor.

I look away from them and back to Violetta. Her eyes are still bloody.

“Those moments are fleeting,” I snap at her, widening the gap between us. I have to get out of here. “Nothing more. I always recover. What Raffaele has learned is a mistake.”

“It’s not a mistake,” Violetta snaps back desperately. “It’s truth, and you don’t want to accept it.”

“He’s lying!” I shout, trying to drown out the whispers that have turned into a roar. The fanged creatures continue to crawl their way along the floor toward us. I try to erase them with my mind, but I can’t. “He has always been a manipulator!”

“What if he’s not?” Violetta replies, throwing her hands in the air. “Then what? Should we all stand by and watch one another fall apart?”

I turn away from her, then whirl back around. She is your sister, the whispers growl at me. How can she understand you so little? “Do you realize what my power means to me? It is my life. There is nothing more important to me than it. It has given me all of this.” I gesture around us at the opulent chamber, the gold-lined marble, the beautiful curtains. The reward for my revenge. “Are you trying to say that you want to take it away from me? Have you forgotten our promise to each other?”

“Our promise was always to protect each other,” Violetta says. “You protect me with your illusions. You comfort me from thunderstorms, you weave illusions around me to protect me from the horrors of war. Our promise was to never use our powers against each other.” She steps toward me. Bloody tears run down her face. “I am not against you!”

“Stay away from me,” I say through clenched teeth, holding one trembling hand out before me.

“You’ve won, Adelina!” Violetta snaps at me. Her anger contorts her face as if in a nightmare. Maybe this is a nightmare. Why does everything seem so hazy? “Just look! You have everything now—you control your prince, you control Teren, you control your Roses and your mercenaries, you control an entire Inquisition army. You rule a nation.”

My breathing turns rapid. “They follow me because of my power.”

“They follow you because they fear you.” Violetta tightens her lips. “Other kings and queens are human too. They rule with fear and mercy. So can you. You don’t need your power to lead this country.”

No. I want more than that. I want real weight behind my fear, I want the reassurance of—

“You want to keep your ability to hurt, don’t you?” Violetta suddenly says. “You want your power because you genuinely enjoy what you do to others.”

The tone of her voice turns me cold. The whispers swarm inside me and along the floor. Darkness appears in the corners of the chamber. “Well, Violetta?” I taunt. My words come out all on their own, vicious in a way I cannot control. “Tell me what I do to others.”

Violetta hardens her expression. In this instance, my gentle, beautiful sister is unrecognizable. “You destroy people.”

You see? The whispers roar. She has turned her back on you. She has always planned to betray you.

“And what do you do?” I shout. The whispers take over my words. It is as if I were watching myself speak. “You, my righteous little sister? You left me to suffer our father alone. Do you know what it was like for me, to lie bleeding on the floor, while he showered you with dresses in the next bedchamber? Do you know what it was like for our father to threaten to kill me, and then for me to murder him in return? No, you don’t. You stand on the sidelines and wait for me to do your dirty work. You hide in the shadows so that I can bleed for you. You give me your pitiful look when I kill, but you do not stop me. And now you judge me for that?”

Scarlet tears spill from Violetta’s eyes. “I am a coward,” she says. “I’ve been one all my life, and I am sorry for it. I never thought I had a right to stop you, after what you did for us. For freeing us from our father.”

“We are never free from our father,” I—the whispers in my head—spit at her. “Do you know that, even now, I can see his illusion in the corner of my eye? He is there, behind the banister.” I shove a finger in the direction of where my father watches us, his mouth curved into a dark smile. He holds out his hands, as if encouraging the swarming creatures on the floor to draw nearer to us.