EMMALINE
It has been five days since the linking.
I know this because I have been counting — carefully, deliberately, the way you hold onto small facts when everything else is slipping. Five days since Davina pressed that blade to her palm and made my body a hostage to her heartbeat. Five days of waking up feeling like I’ve been poured into the wrong container. Like the skin I’m in belongs to someone else and I am simply borrowing it, poorly.
I don’t feel like myself.
I’m not sure I remember what that feels like anymore.
Dante has made the garden walks a daily ritual. Every morning, without exception, a guard comes to my door and I am escorted out into the pale light of his compound’s grounds and made to walk the perimeter at Dante’s side like we are something civilized. Like this is
