Capture the Crown (Gargoyle Queen #1) -Jennifer Estep Page 0,141

the stone made me shudder.

“And lucky for me, I still have one more arrow to go,” Milo purred.

He took hold of the second arrow and ripped it out just as brutally as he had the first one.

More pain, more screams, more tears.

Then everything went black, and I finally, mercifully, passed out.

* * *

One moment, I was drifting along in the sweet black void of unconsciousness. The next, I was standing by the table, staring down at my own tortured self. I sighed. Thanks to my severe injuries, I was ghosting again. Terrific.

One of the workshop doors creaked open. I glanced in that direction, although my real-world body didn’t move. To my surprise, Delmira slipped into the chamber carrying a small basket.

She glanced around, but Milo, Wexel, and the guards were gone, and I was the only one in here. Delmira shut the door behind her, then rushed over to me.

“Oh, Gemma,” she whispered. “I’m so sorry. I never meant for any of this to happen.”

A few tears dripped off her cheeks and spattered onto my right hand, and a little jolt of power, of magic, pulsed through my wound. Even stranger, it eased my pain, just a bit.

Delmira wiped her tears away, set her basket down, and started pulling items out of it. A bowl of water, a tin of salve, white bandages. Not what I’d expected.

The princess cleaned the wounds in my hands, then opened the tin and dipped her fingers into the salve inside. She talked to me the whole time she worked, the way that people sometimes did to sick loved ones. She must have thought that I could hear her. If she only knew.

“This is liladorn salve.” Delmira smeared a light purple cream all over my injured hands. “I made it myself from a recipe I found in an old book in the palace library. It will close and heal your wounds, although they will probably still scar.”

The purple salve started glowing with a faint, almost translucent light, but Delmira didn’t seem to notice it, and she kept rubbing the concoction all over my hands. Cool, soothing tingles rippled out of the salve and soaked into my skin, and the soft scent of lilac filled my nose. I wondered how much magic was in the salve—and how much of it was Delmira’s own doing.

My bones straightened, my tendons realigned, and my muscles pulled themselves back together. A few minutes later, the ugly wounds in my hands had healed to bright red scars, as though someone had painted crimson starbursts onto my skin.

“I begged Mother to let a bone master heal you, but of course she refused,” Delmira continued talking. “She never should have let Milo torture you. Sometimes, I don’t know who is the bigger monster—Mother or Milo.”

She slathered a final layer of liladorn salve onto my hands, then bandaged them. Next, she turned me over onto my side, grimacing at how the chains clanked. Her lips pinched together as she saw the whip wounds on my back, but she cleaned and bandaged those as best she could through my tattered gown.

“I used to bandage Leo’s wounds after Uncle Maximus hurt him,” Delmira said, still talking to my body. “Uncle Maximus was always jealous of Leo’s mind magier power, and he would have Leo brought to his workshop. He claimed that he was teaching Leo about magic, but we all saw the marks on Leo’s back, and we knew that Maximus was really trying to take Leo’s power for his own. He never succeeded, but Leo still suffered terribly. My uncle had a whole collection of whips, and he used them all on Leo. Milo too, from time to time. And me, once.”

Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she stared off into space, as if remembering that horrible event. Delmira shuddered and rolled me onto my other side so she could reach the rest of my wounds.

“Of course Mother tried to stop it, but Uncle Maximus shipped her off to Seven Spire. He said it was so she could spy on the Blairs, but we all knew that he wanted to get her out of the palace. She thwarted him, though. She sent Leo and me away from Myrkvior before she left for Bellona.”

Surprise filled me. I had always assumed that Maeven had wanted to go to Seven Spire, that she had been eager to orchestrate the massacre, but that didn’t seem to be the case.

“You must hate Mother and Milo and probably me too,”