Elara'S POV
“He has a half-form, just like me,” Lysander said, smiling at me with his eyes from across the dinner table.
We were eating in Xavier’s parlor just like old times—the four of us seated before the blazing hearth with a wealth of food on the table. In the past week, as I’d healed, I’d managed to put on enough weight that my cheeks were no longer hollow.
I’d told first Lysander, then Xavier about the memory 5th Circle had somehow corrupted and fed me. How they’d used Orion to deliver it, or maybe there’d been magic in that holding cell. Either way, the abbreviated version was a half-truth—a lie. A lie meant to break me. To make me hate myself and believe that I deserved to suffer punishment and then die.
I swallowed my mouthful of shrimp scampi.
“So, why is it that I can’t s
