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hold.
    To stop his voice from filling my mind.
    You had the perfect opportunity to kill her!
    “I don’t like this.” A new voice followed Sain’s. I tried to focus on it, to let it drown out the madness and allow the fragile pieces of sanity I had left to take hold. It wasn’t enough.
    Kill her!
    “You think I do? We’re surrounded by an army with two children inside who are trying to kill each other and two adults debilitated…”
    Go back and kill her!
    “Edmund has thought through his plan far too well.”
    Now! Kill her now!
    “You sure you didn’t have anything to do with this, Sain?”
    Kill!
    “Even if I did, do you think I would have been able to stop it? You rescued me from that place all those years ago, you even helped in controlling me. You know I have no say in the matter.”
    Kill.
    “I know. It’s just…”
    Kill!
    “Don’t you trust me?”
    “Kill!” the word burst out of me before I had even reached a fully conscious state. Every command I had sent to my body over the last few minutes broke through the barrier at once, and I flailed.
    The men called out in alarm as I slipped from their hold and fell onto the hard stone of the floor like a hundred ton weight. A ripple of pain shook through me, and I screamed in agony, the sound more in frustration than pain, as tiny droplets of blood sprayed over the stone below, making the taste of blood in my mouth grow.
    Kill her. Kill her.
    She tried to kill you.
    Find her.
    Find her!
    I’ll find her.
    Kill.
    “Kill her!” the words ripped out of my chest as I moved to crawl away, to find her in any way I could. My movements were stiff and fragmented while I tried to fight through the pain in my joints.
    I hadn’t moved more than a few feet before their hands were on me again, and my eyes snapped open to the grey stone that lined all of the hallways of this retched place. It was tinted red from my own blood that still flowed through the gash in my head, drenching my hair and drying in rivers down my face. I looked at the red, at the window, at their hands, at a table that stood old and forgotten a few feet from us.
    Window. Hands. Table. Window.
    Kill.
    Yes.
    “Let me kill her!” I tried to fight the men again, but their grip only increased, the pressure of their hands strong as they pulled me across the floor. The table skidded away from us on its own as my back was pressed into a cold wall.
    Lights flickered around us in green and grey as their magic detonated, the room full of dark, haunted shadows, though streaked with the bright white flashes of lightning that plagued this part of Spain for whatever reason.
    While, to anyone else, the lights and colors would have been frightening, to me, they were the only familiar thing I knew. They were the identical green hue of the dungeon I had been kept in for so long, the dim glow of my imprisonment, the glow that only came when things were safe.
    Like now.
    I stared at the light as my eyes dodged through the room. The shadowed space was so familiar that it panged inside of me. The knowledge of missing something with so much pain attached to it was surreal. I supposed it made sense, however, since it was the only thing I had known for months, the only thing I knew for sure was real.
    What are you waiting for?
    You saw her.
    The dirty Drak.
    No, she’s not.
    The words seeped through my mind, my own surprise growing that I had fought back, that something inside of me still wanted to defeat my father’s torture. I still wanted control over who I was.
    She doesn’t love you anymore.
    She said so herself.
    “No … Nonononono … No … no…” Words seeped from me the same as they always had. The hands that held me in place loosened slightly as I clawed at my hair, pulling at the blood soaked curls in an attempt to escape the madness. Pain ran over my scalp with each tug, the pressure giving me something else to focus on.
    My focus darted from the stone floor to Sain as he came around to face me. His