Chapter 133: The Life She Lost

Astrid Vale

"What day is it?" I asked again, keeping my voice light, testing.

She gave me the same date, exact and unhesitating, and I turned it over in my mind, trying to line it up against anything I could remember. Nothing fit. The math didn’t work no matter how I arranged it, and something in the back of my mind kept insisting that this was wrong, all of it wrong, even as the rest of me wanted so badly to let it be right.

I decided to test her differently.

"What did you used to call me," I asked, "when I was little? Before I could even say my own name properly?"

"Little bird," she said without hesitation, a soft smile pulling at her mouth. "You used to flap your arms every time you got excited. I called you my little bird for years."

My chest tightened painfully. She was right. Exactly right, down to the memory of my mother laughing every time I did it, some private joke between the two of us that I’d never told another living soul.

Whatever this was, it wasn’t a cheap fabrication built from guesswork.

She pulled me through the rest of the morning as though nothing were wrong at all, making the same breakfast she used to make when I was young, humming the same tune she always hummed while she worked, the small home around us arranged exactly the way I remembered it from childhood. I found myself laughing at something she said, an easy, unguarded laugh that caught in my throat the second I heard it leave my own mouth.

I hadn’t laughed like that around my mother in years. Not since before the ball started robbing rich men, before the fear crept into every corner of our lives.

I tried to hold onto Ivy’s face while I sat there, and found, to my horror, that it took effort. Her features blurred at the edges, softened into something less specific than they should have been. I forced myself to concentrate, pulling the image back into focus through sheer will, the sharp curve of her jaw, the particular way she rolled her eyes at everything.

Then I reached for Reed. Harder to hold onto than Ivy had been. And Xander, harder still, his face threatening to dissolve entirely before I clawed it back into clarity.

"You don’t have to remember people who were never there," my mother said gently, watching me struggle.

Something cold slid through me. This wasn’t only showing me a false world. It was trying to erase the real one, piece by piece, replacing memory with memory until nothing remained to contradict it.

I thought suddenly of Criston, something he’d said once about illusions that I hadn’t fully appreciated at the time. The dangerous ones don’t look false. They use what you already believe.

If it knew what I wanted most, it could turn that exact wanting into the weapon meant to keep me here.

My mother reached for my hand across the table. "You don’t have to go back," she said quietly.

"Back where?"

"Wherever it is you think you came from," she said. "You could stay here. With me. No academy, no danger, no one chasing you. Just this. Just us."

I looked at her, at the face I’d grieved for over a year, the voice I’d have given anything to hear again, and for one long, unbearable moment I actually considered it. Everything I’d survived since that night, the years of scrubbing floors and hiding my name and running from a king who’d taken everything from me, could simply end here. I could stay.

I thought about Reed’s steady presence beside me, the careful way he’d learned to read me. I thought about Xander’s stubborn devotion, loud and unguarded in every way Reed wasn’t. I thought about Ivy dragging suitcases up two flights of stairs on our first day, refusing to let me disappear into silence.

I looked back at my mother, and something in me refused to let go of them, even here, even now.

"What did you call me," I said slowly, "the night you died?"

Her expression shifted, something calculating flickering just beneath the surface before she answered.

"Astrid," she said. "I called you Astrid."

I went very still.

That wasn’t right. That night, in the dark behind that hidden wall, she hadn’t called me Astrid at all. She’d whispered something else entirely in those final seconds before the King’s boots crossed the room, something soft and private that I’d carried with me ever since, a word I’d never once said aloud to anyone, not Reed, not Xander, not even Ivy.

She couldn’t know it. Not unless she’d actually been there.

Which meant she hadn’t been.

I pulled my hand back slowly. "You’re not my mother," I said.

The warmth drained from her expression instantly, smoothing into something blank and unreadable, the room around us going unnaturally quiet, the hum of the kettle on the stove, the distant street noise outside, all of it cutting off at once like someone had simply switched it off.

For the first time, the room felt impossibly small. The walls seemed to lean inward, the familiar photographs on them suddenly looking wrong, their faces too perfect, their smiles frozen in place. I swallowed hard, refusing to look away from the thing wearing my mother’s face.

"What’s wrong?" she asked, her voice flat now, stripped of every trace of gentleness it had carried a moment before.

I backed away from the table, my chair scraping against the floor.

Beneath the silence, something else surfaced, faint at first. Metal scraping against stone. A muffled sound of someone crying.

Then, unmistakably, Ivy’s voice, distant and desperate.

"Astrid!"

I spun toward the door, and everything around me lurched violently.

My mother’s hand closed around my wrist, her grip suddenly far stronger than anything human, cold and unyielding.

And all at once, the memory of where I actually was came crashing back into me whole.

A wild scream tore through me.