Choose Wisely

Chapter Twenty-Five: Fight For Truth

"What are you putting in my drink?" I demanded, my attempt at being unseen flitting away from me as soon I made the connection. Everything was falling into place- but the final puzzle was a horrifying scene to behold. Please have some excuse. Please don't have betrayed me.

Please.

Josh whipped around, every action guilty, damning him further and further in my mind. His eyes widened and the glass bottle slipped from his fingers, smashing into tiny shards into the floor. He held out a hand as if I were a bird that might fly away. I flinched backwards, suddenly disgusted by those very hands that had once held me.

"Just the extra spice," Josh lied though it was off-key and completely flat. You would have thought that since all this time he had been lying to me, his lying would have been more fluent.

"I know what Intima's Bane is," I said, my voice rising high in utter anger. "I know what it does, I know where it's from, so it's not just some extra spice!" I was shouting now: he couldn't have done this to me, he couldn't have violated me by clouding my sense of what I wanted, Josh wouldn't have done it to me.

"I can explain," he told me quickly, holding out both hands now almost as if he were already surrendering. "Please, just let me explain."

"How do you explain something like this?" I hissed at him. "How do you explain-" I cut off, brushing off gathering tears in my eyes furiously. My anger overwhelmed me but my grief that Josh could have destroyed me like that was threatening to overpower even that violent emotion.

He was silent and now hunched over. Shame curled onto the features of his face and stayed there. He wasn't pretending now. He knew that there was no going back.

"Why?" I asked him, my voice cracking. Josh. My lover, my friend, my saviour. How much was a lie?

"My mother checked the medical records," he admitted, his voice hollow. "When you had your Privilege. It showed that I had the rhesus factor in my blood: I was rhesus positive."

"I don't understand."

"Well with my medical training, I did," he snapped out, his hands clenching onto the counter. "The rhesus factor is found on the surface of red blood cells and whether or not you have the D antigen determines whether you're rhesus positive or negative. Being rhesus positive has... it has its consequences."

I was silent, confused by this stream of information. When I confronted him, I hadn't expected a medical lesson. But I closed my mouth and let him talk, wanting- no- needing the answer.

"You're rhesus negative," he informed me, though I barely knew what the words meant. "So, if we ever tried to have children... there could be- there could be difficulties."

"What kind of difficulties?"

"During pregnancy or sometimes birth," Josh told me, his eyes dull. "The placenta removes itself from the uterus's wall and some of the baby's blood cell from its circulation makes it way into the mother's bloodstream. But if the baby had inherited my rhesus positive blood, you would be mixing two very different blood types. The first child might not be affected but with a second..."

He looked defeated. I almost felt sorry for him until I remembered what he had done to me. "The second would- in severe cases- die. The mother's blood- being of a different nature- would summon up antibodies to destroy the baby's blood as it would recognise the rhesus positive blood as a foreign agent."

Antibodies. Rhesus positive. Destroy. I recognised the words, even understood the science behind most of what he was saying. I just didn't get how it applied to me.

Josh saw this. "Don't you get it?" he said softly. "We were incompatible. In the eyes of the scientists controlling the Privilege, I was no good for you. And I wouldn't be Chosen."

"So you drugged me," I whispered, finally seeing how this slotted in place. "That way, the Privilege wouldn't be in your way anymore. And it would be my choice."

"I had to, Natalia, I had to!" he cried out, slamming the counter with his flat hands. "My mother... she would have killed me. I would have been disgraced from the family like Dane. I... I couldn't fail her."

I recalled another time. We were lying in his bed, entwined around each other.

"..My father's okay but my mother's a bitch and I just can't handle the constant pressure she pushes me through, like she wants me to dance on hot coals without screaming. It's too much. I always have to get it right. I do - I do bad things. I have to do bad things."

He'd been confessing to me and I hadn't even known it. The pressure of drugging me and lying about it all the time had been pushing him over the edge. I thought that I was there to catch him.

Instead, he had just dragged me down with him.

"The first time you drank it was on one of our first dates," he said. "I had a flask of the stuff in my car though I hadn't been sure if I wanted to go through with it yet. But then you asked..."

One item- an old fashioned silver flash- touched my eyes. It was an antique, that much I could tell from the engraving. Tiny italic letters were etched into the silver: v, maybe an a, n, e, possibly an m, a u and then another m. Vanemum. I wondered what it could possibly mean. Maybe a family heirloom. Maybe a piece of trash from the sidewalk.

"Anything in that?" I asked, clearing my throat and gesturing towards the flask. When my mother had first died, I had curled up in my room and cried. Sometimes I felt like all I could do was cry. Crying forced out all those feelings, reaching down your throat and yanking them out while the pain made the moisture spread in your eyes.

But I wondered how it would have been if I had ignored that desperate need. If I had numbed that need for expression through alcohol and pushed those feelings further down so the ever-reaching hand had nothing to touch. Josh looked startled for a moment, probably not expecting me to suddenly start exhibiting signs of alcoholism at the first mention of my mother.

"It might be too strong," he said quickly, hurriedly. Seeing my face, he tensed but paused. "Sure. Go ahead. This stuff has an extra spice to it though."

I nodded. It wouldn't be like I would be able to know the difference anyway. Nimbly picking it up, I unscrewed the cap and took a swig. The burn of the alcohol hit me first and then the extra spice Josh had promised. I refused to wince and instead kept my face neutral.

"Like it?"

"Got any more?"

"I thought that maybe I could help you to love me," he admitted: broken, lost. "But you weren't staying with me. After we had sex, you just shied away from me- right into the arms of West. I could see it happening right in front of my eyes. I didn't know what to do. So when West left... I saw it as my lucky break."

Passion, unexplainable passion, had hooked its claws into me that night. I'd slept with Josh and woken up the next morning not knowing why. Weeks and months after that, I'd tormented myself still not knowing. After so much time passed of no excuse, I chalked it up to lust.

It hadn't been.

"But you stayed away from me," he continued. "You wouldn't come out and I knew that I never really mattered to you in the same way you mattered to me. So when you finally agreed to visit me... I slipped Intima's Bane in your coffee."

No, I wanted to cry. Stop. Stop telling me this. Let me live a beautiful lie.

"Every day for those next months, I drugged you," he explained. "I thought I would be able to get to the Choosing Ceremony- but then I ran out of money. The stuff was expensive- too expensive. I stopped paying my supplier." He met my eyes and I slotted another piece into the puzzle without him even having to speak the words. "You met her. Briefly. Karen Winters- or Kaz- as some know her. When I didn't pay her, she refused to give me any more."

The old tree at school, our normal meeting-place, an argument between a boy and a girl and an assumption I made that it was not as insidious as it was.

Walking up to them, I decided I wasn't going to hide in the shadows. Maybe, I could even help Josh if he was having trouble with this girl.

"Hey," I called out, only metres away. Josh whipped around and I responded with an apologetic expression, sorry for having scared him. The girl next to him gave me her a look, her eyes flickering up and down as if she was judging me just by how I held myself. She smiled slightly, a tiny hint of a lopsided grin that made me feel uncomfortable.

"She tormented me in front of you," Josh said. "Kaz made sure she visited right when you came- she knew the reason why I wanted it- and used it against me until I promised to give her the money for the next batch. But it wouldn't come for awhile- the shipment would be delayed because I hadn't put in my order earlier."

"Josh has told me all about you," she continued, that strange look of hers still centred on me. "It's really sweet, you know, how much you guys love each other." Now I wasn't the only one feeling uncomfortable. Josh was appearing distinctly pissed off.

"You've made your point," Josh snapped. The two exchanged gazes: hers' one of victory, his of simmering anger. There was more going on here, much more. This argument didn't seem to be a one-off, more like an on-going flux of it.

"And then what?" I asked roughly.

"Then you started having withdrawals," he said haggardly. "You would get angry, paranoid, desperate. I knew what the symptoms meant. I thought you could wait out until my shipment came in. But then- you started getting scared."

"Oh God, Josh, I don't know what's wrong with me," I spluttered, racing through the words if only that it kept from falling. Like flailing your arms around as if that would make you fly from the cruel ground racing up to meet you. "One second I was fine, the next I just couldn't stop thinking about killing her and I can't stop, God, it's in my head-"

As soon as we had separated from the Choice Centre, he wrapped me in his arms as I sobbed, folding his head over mind and holding me gently while I tried to make sense of the violent tremors running through my body.

"I don't know what's happening to me," I cried, my voice branded with terror.

"I loved you, Natalia," he confessed, his voice cracking. "Just because I did what I did doesn't mean I don't love you- because all of it was for you. It was because I loved you that I did all these things. So when you started getting scared, I couldn't wait for the next shipment. I went to the only person who might be able to help you."

"Your brother," I realised, a spark alighting my dull self. It felt like all the nerves in my brain were dying out as I listened to him: the first person I had felt close to romantically- and it had all been a lie.

"I'd asked him for help before," he admitted, doggedly continuing his speech. "After so many years, I had turned up on his doorstep and asked for help. I wanted him to help me hide the drug in his house- if you had seen it in mine, it would all have been over. And he understood. He understood how home was and how the pressure was enough to kill for. That's why I went to him. But when he found out what the drug did, he chucked me out."

"Then I started having withdrawal and you went to him once more," I said, speaking the words as an elongation of my thoughts. Maybe because saying them out would mean they wouldn't have the same betrayal lingering in the depths of the words.

"He was angry," he replied. "Disgusted with me."

"... you've got some fucking nerve, Joshua," the words- like a whiplash- careened into my ears at high velocity. Dane's voice was low and cold, brutally cold. "Thinking you can... right in here after what you've... you little shit."

"He didn't want anything to do with me. But when I explained to him it was you that needed help, he agreed to give you an injection: something that would slow down the process until I was able to get more of the drug. I had to go out to get it and also pay more to make sure the next shipment was hurried up."

"I told you... enough was fucking enough," Dane hissed. "You think that you can just march back in here... what you did... I never thought you'd be an idiot enough... when I told you about the place. Yet... here we are... once again... dammit Josh, you even brought her into this."

"We were okay then, for a few months," he said. We weren't alright. You were lying to me. "But then West came back. He fucked everything up-" Now Josh was angry, his hands clenching the kitchen top so hard, his knuckles were turing white. "He got you and he got you good. You stopped paying attention to me and I lost you. You stopped taking the drug. You would have had a withdrawal after awhile."

I remembered headaches and paranoid thoughts. At the counsellor's session with West and Josh, especially.

Of course it hadn't helped my irritation had been plaguing me for weeks. Flashes of paranoia and anger had interrupted my normal thought cycle leaving me desperately wanting to ask Josh for Dane's medicine but too stressed at the idea of confrontation that it just left me feeling worse. My shoulder ached from the injection Dane had given me weeks ago, a constant pain that dragged me from dreariness to weariness.

"I'd lost you," Josh repeated it. "And I knew it. Trying to draw you back in with the drug wouldn't have done anything. For once in my life... I gave up."

"What changed?" I asked.

He looked at me for a moment. Opened his mouth. "Your father," he answered. "The day of your date with West, he called me to him for a meeting."

My hand rested on the door and found no resistance as the door drifted open. Worry tugged at me and West exchanged a look with me as we both entered the house.

Nothing seemed amiss. The chandeliers in their decadent glory were lit, each candle supporting a flickering flame that leaped and danced and left their marks by the shadows on the walls. But the door was open and that was immediately wrong.

"Natalia?" Josh stepped out of the dining room area, closely followed by my father. Father looked pleased in that self-satisfied way that always signalled trouble. "I just came to visit-" His words trailed off as he locked eyes with West.

"He made a bargain with you," I said, the words almost a gasp. Of course. Even in Josh's worst hour, Father would help him to drag him deeper to a place where I could never forgive him.

"He knew the medical records," he said. "He knew I'd been buying the drug in the market-place. From Chase- one of the stallholders. I'd been giving away your secrets and he tracked down the perpetrator until he got to me. That's why your father made the deal, well it was one of the reasons why."

"I'd been giving away your secrets."

I remembered my own meeting with Chase.

"I've never met you before."

"Yet I feel like I know you so well," he commented. "My business trades stolen government goods for secrets: every secret, any secret. West Ferrars may have only come here once but what he was asking for begged a hefty price. I'd heard about you from all sorts of different secrets that makes shivers running down your spine seem like a party game."

"Because he always wanted me to marry someone with an equal name to ours," I answered one of them.

"And because he thought I was just like him," Josh admitted. I thought of whip-lashes and cuts carving up the surface of my skin. I thought of screams and begging. I thought of the lies he'd told me. Josh was causing me the same pain as Father would have marked me with.

"We are the same, you and I," he told me, walking towards me so that he stood right over me. "We destroy what we love, if we love at all." Stroking my cheek with the tips of his fingers, Father brushed past me then, leaving me in the darkness.

That wasn't me, though. That was Josh.

"He told me he could replace the Privilege," he said. "He hadn't used his power before because shifting the balance could land him in the delictums- even someone as powerful as himself could be taken down for interfering with the Privilege's science. But he told me where to look and how to destroy the evidence. I sneaked into one of the information facilites and used the main data computer to wipe any record of the rhesus factor. I was free of it."

"You allied with my father to do this?" I spat, contempt rotting me to the core. "You drugged me, betrayed me, lied to me. You violated me every chance you got."

My body was on fire with how I remembered that first night we'd spent together. Others spent just kissing and holding each other but still not my choice. Still something he'd taken away from me. Still breaking my will and destroying my freedom.

"I did this because I loved you!" he shouted as if I would understand with his volume. He surged from leaning over the counter and was suddenly next to me, his body inches from me. "I loved you. So when I find out you're leaving the cities altogether- I- I couldn't let you do that! I thought maybe if I upped the dosage on the drug, you would stay. I needed you to stay. I needed you."

"You don't love me," I said, shaking my head as I backed away. "Taking away someone's choices isn't love. Forcing someone to love you isn't love. Dragging someone away from what they want isn't love!" I was shouting, I was yelling, I was almost screaming at him.

I stepped backwards and hit the wall, pain echoing up my spine. I shifted and walked backwards, back out into the living room. He stepped forward but I held up a hand.

"Don't," I warned him, my voice shaking with anger. "Don't you dare. I can't- I don't want to talk to you anymore. I don't want to see you anymore. I don't even want to look at you anymore."

His face creased and he shook his head, disbelievingly. "Natalia, please, we can work things out-"

"We're so far past that stage it's fucking unbelievable!" I yelled. "You lied to me, you drugged me, you raped me. You never loved me. You were obsessed with me and of never failing. You couldn't stand that this part of your life let you down. I'm leaving. I'm not giving you the afternoon, I'm not even going to give you another minute. I've wasted months on you."

I turned and strode to the door, anger carrying me far and fast. I was too angry to cry now.

"Natalia," Josh begged me, just a few steps behind me. "Please don't go. Please."

I was paused at the door, a figure set in stone. Seconds after he'd spoken, I yanked the door open and left, knowing those would be the last words he would ever speak to me.

-------------------------------------------------------

When I entered West's housing district and marched off the tube. I was desperate, I was afraid, I wanted him. When I saw his apartment, I sprinted up the stairs so fast, I nearly barged right through the door. Knocking: quick, fast, urgent. I prayed for sounds of his presence.

Two seconds later, I received it. Footsteps. They lead to the door and then stopped. When the door remained shut, I realised what he was considering. He knew his time was nearly up- that he would be erased. The person at his door could be the one to drag him from it.

"It's me," I told him through chipped wood. "West, it's me." The door was flung open and I almost fell into West's arms and then he was holding me, soothing me, stroking my hair as I started to cry: wracking sobs that attacked my whole body and threatened to explode me.

But he held me so tightly there was no chance of me losing myself that way. Like it was always when I was around him. My shoulders were shaking.

"What happened?" he asked me, drawing back. His face changed and darkened and I knew he was beginning to guess and soon he would know. Soon, his voice became urgent. "Natalia, what happened?"

"Josh drugged me," I choked out, though that wasn't why I was crying. "The reason why I slept with him the first place, why I stayed with him. He drugged me. Intima's Bane found in the same stall you went to. Months. When you came back, I stopped having it and stopped- stopped needing him." A raw cry kneed within me and I had to hold my hand to my mouth so that I wouldn't let it go.

"With my father's help, he returned it," I whispered. "The Privilege. Before, he needed it revoked because he had a blood problem and they wouldn't pick him. Now he needed it back up because he saw I was going to choose you. This afternoon, I went to see him and I found it all out and I told him I never wanted to see him again."

I stepped back and hit the wall, my back sliding down as I cried, finding the ground harshly. My whole body ached. I ached with pain and I ached with anger and I ached with grief of losing someone that I had thought Josh was.

West crouched down beside me and I knew he was angry, the kind of anger that leads you to kill a man because I was crying and I couldn't stop but it was better than screaming. His anger was carved out in the lines of his face and I knew he wanted to torture Josh for what he had done to me.

I'd been betrayed by someone who had known me inside and out. That was the worst pain, I thought, anyone could feel.

West moved me so that I was sitting in his lap, his arms moving around me as I cried, holding me together as everything inside me threatened to break apart.

"We need to leave tonight," I told him after awhile, my tears easing slightly. I had given myself too much time. I needed to leave soon. There wasn't room for anything else now. Not when every minute counted.

"The tracker-"

"Josh cut it out of me," I said, lifting my arm. "Before I found everything out."

West nodded as if it was nothing but I could feel him sagging in relief. "Then, we'll leave tonight. We'll meet at nine-thirty at the market-place entrance. Enough time to pack everything we need."

Everything was moving fast. To get out of this city, I wanted it to move even faster.

I shifted so that I was facing him. He brushed a stray hair out of my eyes, his fingers brushing my cheek like I was delicate. West leaned forward and kissed me so that I could feel it in my bones, his hand on the back of my head as he parted my lips. I kissed him back, needing the memory of him imprinted everywhere on me before I left him to pack.

His other hand fit into the curve of my spine so that my legs were curving around his hips. I was still in my white dress. I drew back, though still close enough that our lips were inches apart.

"Tonight," I promised.

"Tonight," he repeated.

-------------------------------------------

When the clock struck nine, I crept out of bed, my bag on my back and my breath hitching in my throat. I took a last glance around my room, to all the memories I had had in here. My gaze was held by my mother's photograph, the glass still warped and cracked.

I fingered the cracks, the ridging in the glass delicate under my feel. Picking it up, I placed it over my farewell letter. That way, when Father read it, he could see another piece of why I had left. Because bit by bit, Father had taken pieces of our family from me until there was nothing left.

Creeping to the door, my hand gently prised it open, thankful that it didn't creak. Without another look back, I walked out into the hall. Everything was dark in the house, the chandeliers unlit and the inhabitants asleep, save for one. My hand trailed the wooden staircase which gleamed in moonlight that filtered through the arched windows.

The door never appeared so frightening and ominous, not just a door to outside but a door to a different world. I didn't know whether the Outcasts were still out there. But they had left trails for others to find and I was determined to take the path they laid out for me. Right now, it was all I could hold onto.

Ten metres... eight... five... three... one...

None.

My hand enclosed around the handle and turned it carefully. Even with my delicacy, the door creaked as it opened and I stiffened, hoping if anyone heard they would think it just the wind. The air was cool outside, a relief for my fevered temperature that raced around my skin. I breathed in the night, inhaling a new life.

"I hoped I could save you," a voice came from behind me. "I hoped that you wouldn't go down the path that your mother and your sister went down."

I didn't have time to turn. Didn't have time to run. Didn't have time to scream.

I heard the sound of air whooshing towards mine. Then felt pain lance from my head to the rest of my body. My legs crumbled from beneath me, darkness collapsing in on itself. In my blurring vision, I saw my father step over me, his expression saddened.

"I was wrong," he whispered.

West, I thought as shadows claimed me. Run.

-----------------------------------

When I woke up, Father was standing above me and restraints dug into my limbs, holding me down on one of the racks. Panic immediately seized me. I knew the drill.

"Always letting your emotions getting the better of you," he said sharply as I struggled. "Before: lust. Now: fear. When will it end, Natalia?"

"You knew it wasn't lust," I spat at him. "You knew what Josh was doing to me."

"Yes," he replied. "I knew before you did. It was inelegantly executed but with his motives, it was to be expected. But Josh has proven to be a valuable asset. Particularly in warning me that you were about to run."

"He told you?" I whispered, another stab of betrayal twisting in my gut.

"He told me," Father replied, eyes glinting with malicious pleasure. I had hurt him by trying to escape. Now, he would hurt me. "As soon as you left, in fact. I waited for you to run. I hoped you wouldn't. I didn't want another natural failure of a daughter."

"This city failed me," I said angrily. "By lying to us all. Erasing our minds, enslaving our choices, forcing us to marry and giving us another lie as to why. The human population is level. We're all just arguing over something that isn't even true."

"Don't be so dramatic," Father snapped. "Yes, there might have been some lies. But it was all to ensure control. The current government wants that control. I helped provide it with them. So when we reassigned Choices to others when they weren't Chosen and they started to fight, I provided the memory erasure. It was only until this year the other cities accepted it however- which is how your worthless lover escaped erasure."

"How helpful of you," I snapped.

"You have no idea how helpful I've been to the cause," he said. "Servire causa, servire mundi. Did you forget the words, Natalia?"

"I stopped believing them," I hissed. "When I realised how even they were a lie."

His face contorted into a kind of rage I hadn't seen in him since he killed my mother. Father schooled it and walked around, his hand reaching out and selecting something I couldn't see.

"I couldn't do it when you were unconscious," he told me. "I had to wait an hour just for you to wake up. But it's all going to be worth it just for the look on your face." His hand flashed upwards and I caught the glint of silver before I recognised what it was for.

"No," I choked out, squirming away from it. "No, Father, don't." The argentum memoriae. I had been terrified West would be erased by the use of the device.

Maybe I should be more afraid for myself.

The silver dial was held to my face and Father was turning the dial right in front of my eyes when-

"I wouldn' t do that if I were you," a low voice came from the other side of the room. West. His eyes flickered all over the scene, then zeroed in on my father holding the silver dial. The whirring stopped. It was ready to consume me.

All I had to do was inhale.

But West was there in a flash, knocking it aside with all the ferocity of an avenging angel. Father snarled, getting to his feet. Anger reared its ugly head inside of him and I knew that if West stayed, there would be no saving him. I tried to speak, but the gag muffled my screams.

"You never deserved her," Father sneered, facing down West. "You think that just because you were paired with her means anything? It doesn't. She was destined for Joshua-"

"Yeah, she was really destined for Josh," West answered back. "Since he had to use drugs to get her to sleep with him, break with the Privilege and have her choose him. Even then, Josh must have been really destined for her, when he realised she was falling for me and had to wipe the records and revert the Privilege. It really sounds like their love was written in the stars."

"You know nothing of partnership," Father spat at him.

"And you do?" West spat back. "You killed your wife. You wiped the memories of your daughter. And now you're about to do the same to your second."

Father's face tightened- West shouldn't have pushed him there. Because there was no rage like Father's concerning his wife, his perfect wife, who was meant to obey him from the start. Turning, Father selected the whip from the rack of weapons and fixed his attention back on West.

"You are scum," he told West. "I'm not going to give you the liberty of living like I did to the others. No, you can die. Your grand love for my daughter can be washed away with your own blood."

My wriggling intensified as I tried to undo the knots tying my hands. But this was not some book in which they were tied loose and I could escape. This was a horror story and I could not escape.

West was unarmed. Unarmed and untrained. My father had experience in causing pain and killing; he liked what he did and he did it well. Yet West was gentler and had never handled a weapon, let alone felt it bite into skin and watch as blood flowed.

"Strange," West called out to my father. "That you would kill me without even giving me an honourable chance of fighting back."

"You think I care?" Father said, shaking his head. "You will die, boy, and I am going to make sure of it. You won't have a chance." Then he struck. Lashing the whip forwards, it barely missed West as he ducked. Father laughed, a laugh of insane power and of someone who knew exactly how to use it. He moved again, spinning the whip in his hand before striking it out once again.

West cried out in pain, the whip catching him on his side. I struggled, tears prickling my eyes as I saw his shirt ripped, the mark already bruising his side and tearing into his skin. His eyes narrowed and when Father was preparing to strike, he dived to the side, rolling out of the way. The concrete would have hurt but he didn't pause, now right next to the weapon's rack.

West just had time to snatch a dagger from the rack before Father launched out with the whip again, nearly catching West on the side again. Father was angry now, a snarling monster of anger and disgust. He did not like parrying with him, as if they were equals. I could predict his next move and knew he would go in for the kill.

Father's whip lashed out in a flurried series of hissing blows- and every single one of them landed. West clenched his teeth and started to walk. Though the whip marked him again and again, he kept on walking through it, towards my father, though he nearly staggered and fell at one point. Father started to realise what he was doing and backed up, intent on getting a proper weapon from the rack.

But West was there and blocking him, taking the advantage of his pause. Father's hand whipped out to backhand West's face-

But then West stabbed the dagger into his side. I would have gasped if I had the ability. It was my father and he was falling to his knees, West releasing the dagger so that it stayed in his side. It looked almost comical, this knife sticking out of him, like pins in a cushion. West was shaking all over, an uncontrollable tremor that I didn't think he even noticed.

He hurried to me, his hands shaking, his right hand smeared with blood. My father's blood.

What did it say I was just relieved it wasn't West's?

"You weren't there," he said to me, his voice shaking as he tried to undo the restraints. "At the market-place. I waited for ten minutes then realised something had to have gone wrong. Some servants tried to stop me at your door but I didn't let them. I knew you would be down here."

The restraints he managed to unfurl steadily, streaking the bindings with blood.

I threw my arms around him, closing my eyes because there was nothing stopping us and because we were free to run and free to be together, without having society dictate every instance that we shared.

I pulled out of our embrace, still wrapped in his arms. The way we fit together was the way I wanted to stay. And now I could.

"Thank God you're alright," West told me softly. "Thank God."

I kissed him then, our lips matched and remembering each other. We would have these moments and a thousand others, as many as we wanted.

He pulled back, his mouth curved into a smile, opening his mouth to say something-

Then he fell away from me. West crumpled to the floor without another sound as my father stood over him, the silver device still in his hand. He was pale with blood-loss, his other hand clutching his side. The argentum memoriae was covered in blood.

West's blood this time.

"No!" I cried out, falling to my knees beside West, clutching at him desperately. There was blood slowly leaking like a snake out of his head and his eyes were shut and there wasn't a trace of that smile he had given me delicately just before.

I was yanked up by my hair, my father's bloody hand nearly tearing it out of the roots as I was forced upwards. I cried out in pain as he held me close to him.

"See how easily love destroys you?" he whispered into my voice: arched, terrifying. "I'm only going to be helping you, Natalia, when I take your memories."

He moved the argentum memoriae and I struggled but he forced me closer, the dial still pointing to the first etched stage. Being dragged unconscious. I closed my mouth as he jabbed me closer to him, the device so close to me, it was nearly caressing my lips.

Father's hand pressed down on my nose, blocking out my only chance of oxygen amd I suddenly breathed in, gasping in the breath that would be my mind's destruction.

One simple inhale.

I slumped against him, my body already losing its fight and my vision blacking itself out.

"Now, you'll obey me," he whispered softly, the last thing I heard before I was dragged into a white blankness.