Gamma Cole's head came up.
Rossana's hand went to her mouth. Her eyes filled. She made a small broken sound that carried just far enough to be heard by the people nearest her and no further. Several heads turned toward her with expressions of sympathy that she received with the trembling dignity of a mother watching something terrible unfold and being powerless to stop it.
Varder took one step toward Hazel. Just one. He didn't need more than that. "Where."
Hazel swallowed. "The storage room at the end of the east corridor. There is a large canvas travelling bag against the far wall." She paused. "She's inside it."
Gasps exploded in the arena,the pack leaders exchanged glances with the rapid silent communication of people recalibrating everything they were witnessing.
Varder turned to his guard captain without looking away from Hazel's face. "Bring her."
Ava was still counting her breaths when the storage room door opened.
She heard it distantly — a muffled thud that her mind registered and then dismissed because sounds reached her strangely through the canvas and she had been hearing muffled sounds for hours and none of them had been her mother and she had learned to let them pass through her attention without landing.
Then the footsteps became very close, almost like as if someone was coming towards the bag. someone grabbed the bag.
Ava's could her her pulse racing. Her mother. Her mother had come. She pressed her hands flat against the canvas and opened her mouth to say something and then the bag was moving — lifted, not rolled, carried by more than one set of hands — and something about the way it was being carried was wrong, too fast, too purposeful, without the careful gentleness her mother would have used. Her heart lurched from chest into her throat, something had gone horribly wrong and she didn't know what it was.
two pairs of hands, not one — and the world tilted and Ava's stomach dropped and her shoulder hit the canvas wall and she bit down on the sound that tried to come out of her throat because something about the hands and the speed and the complete absence of her mother's voice saying anything to her had sent a cold and specific fear crawling up through her chest that she did not yet have words for.
Ava's stomach dropped as she lay in the tilting lurching dark and she told herself there was an explanation. Her mother had sent someone. Her mother had trusted someone with the task of carrying her out. Her mother was waiting at the van, at the gate, at the end of all of this, the way she had promised.
The bag swayed as they walked and Ava could feel the rhythm of the footsteps through the bag, two sets, measured, unhurried, the footsteps of people who knew where they were going. These footsteps were not trying to be invisible.
The bag was set down.
Not carefully. Set down with the decisive finality of something placed where it was meant to be placed and left there. The impact went through her spine and she absorbed it without sound and lay in the sudden stillness and felt the cold that had been crawling up through her chest since the footsteps first crossed the storage room floor complete its arrival.
She was in the arena.
She was in the arena and her mother was not here and the van was not here and the east gate was not here and she was in the arena in a canvas bag in the center of the arena floor and she knew it the way you knew things that your body understood before your mind caught up.
Her breath came out in a sound she couldn't stop. Not quite a gasp. Not quite a sob. Something between the two that she swallowed immediately, pressing her lips together hard, because the one thing she still had — the only thing left — was that nobody in this arena knew yet what was in this bag and she was not going to give that up until she had no choice.
She was shaking. She could feel it. Her hands against the bag were shaking and her legs were shaking and the careful controlled breathing she had been practicing for hours had become something she had to fight for with every inhale, her chest tight, the spicy smell of the bag suddenly suffocating her.
She held onto it until she could hear the hissing sound of the bag opening.
The light on her face was so immediate, it was like a smack in the face. a force rather than a condition, slamming into her eyes before they had any defense against it. She flinched away from it, her hands coming up to her face. She could feel the presence of something on her face, a pair of hard eyes.
She forced her eyes open.
The world came in pieces. Canvas edge, The vast open ceiling of the arena. And above her, looking down, a face.
Her eyes found Hazel before anything else.
Before she had even fully understood where she was or what had happened or how the pieces of the last twelve hours assembled into the shape they were now assembling into.
She found her sister's face and she looked at it and she understood.
Not gradually. Not in stages. All at once, the way you understood things that your body had known for longer than your mind had been willing to admit. The plan. The bag. The van that was never coming. Her mother's hands cupping her face. Whatever it takes. And Hazel. Standing here.
The guard reached into the bag and took her arm and she became aware of her own body again — the stiffness of hours of compression, the legs that didn't cooperate when she tried to use them, the dress pulled into shapes it was never designed for, the hair falling across her face halfway, the other half molded to the back of her head. She stumbled as her feet found the arena floor and the guard held her arm while she steadied.
She stood in the center of the arena floor.
The crowd was around her and she felt the weight of every eye in the space settle onto her simultaneously.
She tried to make herself stand straight, but she could not stop shaking.
"Hoe dare you try to escape our marriage," Varder said, "folded inside a travelling bag in a storage room." He said it the way he said everything — without inflection, without visible emotion, the fact stated plainly as though its plainness was the most devastating thing about it. Which it was.
Ava said nothing.
"You had assistance," he said. "Someone in your family helped you arrange this."
The arena shifted. That collective discomfort moving through the tiers.
"It wasn't them." Her voice came out steady and she was grateful for that with a gratitude so specific and so complete it was almost funny. "My family knew nothing. This was my decision."
"That is not for you to determine."
"My family is innocent," she said. "Whatever you decide about me. My family is innocent."
"You will be punished for this," Varder said. "Severely. And your family"
Immediately, Rossana rose from where she sat and walked towards her daughter.
Her mother's hand came across her face so fast that she didn't see it coming.
The sound of a slap rang through the arena and Ava's head snapped sideways at the force of the slap.
she stood with her head turned sideways and the heat of it spreading outward through her cheek in waves.
She turned her head back slowly.
She looked at her mother incredulously, her mind going blank at what just happened, her eyes misty from the dirty slap.
"You are a disgrace." Rossana yelled at Ava.
The words landed in the silence of the arena.
"But mother..." She could barely get out the words from her trembling lips.
" How dare you", her mother cut her off sharply , " how dare you after everything I and your father have done for you, humiliate us this way ".