And Octavia didn’t fall.” A sob burst from my chest. “You’ve been behind all their deaths.”
I fell to my knees, the room shrinking around me. My head spun in dark chaos, throbbing with terror. A low hum, similar to the noise Ligeia’s and Rosalie’s ghosts had made, buzzed from the corners of the solarium. I shriveled against it, pressing my hands over my ears, but nothing could muffle the roar. It grew louder and louder, and I cried out, screaming against the chaos. I was certain my eardrums would burst.
And then it was suddenly gone, and the only noise I heard was Cassius’s footsteps as he approached me.
“Get up.”
I remained where I was, wishing the ground would swallow me whole.
“Annaleigh,” he warned.
Certain I was about to take my life’s final breaths, I rose to my knees, shivering before him.
“You honestly believe I killed your sisters?” His eyes roamed over me, his disappointment a tangible weight.
The pressure in my head tightened, like a fist clenching around my brain, knuckles unmercifully white. I turned to the side, retching. Cassius was immediately at my side, supporting my frame, holding back my hair. He murmured meaningless noises of assurance, his fingers tracing soothing patterns across my back as I threw up. When I dared to meet his gaze, it was as though I’d been lost on the water in a soupy fog, unsure of which way I was heading, before a swift wind picked up, revealing the shoreline had been in front of me all along.
As clarity rushed over me, my confusion turned to horror. What had I done?
“Cassius, I’m so sorry. I don’t…I don’t know what’s happening to me.” I wiped my mouth, wishing for water.
“It could be a concussion,” he muttered, probing the growing knot at the back of my head. “Let me see your hands.”
With far more tenderness than I deserved, he took them, examining the sides, swollen and split, the nails broken from trying to pry the doorframe free.
“What caused this?”
“I…I thought I’d been locked in.”
I could see in his eyes he didn’t believe me.
“And you couldn’t wait until someone came for help?”
We were much too close to one another. Color stained my cheeks and chest, and I looked down, ashamed to meet his eyes. “I saw my sisters.”
“Camille and Lenore locked you in here?”
I shook my head.
He frowned. “The little ones?”
Another shake.
“Oh.”
The jagged ends of my fingernails dug deep into the palm of my hand. “Do you believe in ghosts?”
He paused for such a long moment, I worried he thought me mad, but he nodded. “I do. We need to do something about your hands.”
“My hands?” I echoed. My hands were the least of my problems.
But Cassius drew me from the solarium and down the hall before I could protest. The sconces were unlit; the corridor was silent. It felt as if we were the only two people awake in the house, in Salann, in the whole of Arcannia.
“Hanna keeps a little box of gauze and ointments in a kit in the laundry room,” I offered, but he walked past the hall without pause. “Where are we going?”
He stopped at the door leading into the garden. Cassius traced his fingers down the wood’s grain, unable to look at me. “You need to know I was going to tell you all of this eventually, Annaleigh, truly I was.”
My guard flared up, gooseflesh scouring my arms. “Tell me what?”
He pushed the door open, letting in a blast of icy wind. “Come with me.”
I dug my feet into the carpet runner. “We can’t go out there like this. We’ll freeze to death in minutes.”
“It won’t take minutes. But I have to be outside.”
“For what?”
He pulled me out after him into the snow. I gasped, my breath squeezed from me as a thousand frozen knives bit in. My feet rebelled, painfully numb with every step I took. The winds sliced through the thin silk of my robe, and my body trembled against his as he dragged me after him.
“Cassius, this is insane!” I protested, shouting to be heard over the gusts.
“I need to be away from the trees. We can’t be under any branches.”
Once in the open, he pressed me flush against the length of his body. I burrowed into his embrace, seeking all the heat he had to offer, propriety be damned. With my head tucked beneath his chin, nestled close to his chest, I couldn’t see what was happening, but it felt as if we were in a sudden