ELOWEN
When they dragged me back into the mansion, I didn't fight and that was the worst part.
I had fought the guards in the square. I had screamed until my throat tore. I had clawed at iron chains and splintered wood and the executioner's sleeve. But when they marched me through the doors of my childhood home, past the marble foyer where my father used to stand to greet visiting Alphas, I felt hollow.
My legs moved because they were pushed. My body obeyed because it had forgotten how not to.
"Gently," one of them muttered, as if that word meant anything anymore.
They took me up the grand staircase. My heels slipped on the polished steps; I wasn't even sure when I had lost my shoes. My palms were still sticky with Barnaby's blood. It had dried in the lines of my skin, dark and flaking. I kept staring at it as if I could rub time backward.
Barnaby is dead.
The thought did not settle. It wasn't an ordinary death, either. How was I supposed to move on after this?
