The Banned Daughter

The Dreaming

After Rowan leaves, I lock the door.

The click of the deadbolt sounds too loud in the enormous room, but I keep my hand resting against it for a second anyway. Not because I think Rowan will come back without knocking. He wouldn’t. He has never once made me feel like I need to protect myself from him.

No, I lock it because I don’t trust myself.

Not with Jace somewhere beneath the same roof. Not with the taste of him still lingering on my mouth. Not with the memory of his hands hovering close enough to touch me but never quite doing it. Not with Rowan’s anger still curling through the room like smoke after a fire.

I lean my forehead against the door and close my eyes.

I kissed Rowan’s beta.

The thought should have stopped me. It should have made me shove Jace away the second he stepped closer. Instead, I’d been the one to close the distance. I’d been the one who grabbed his shirt and kissed him as though seven years of grief and rage could be solved with one stupid, reckless decision.

My stomach twists.

Rowan doesn’t know.

He knows Jace and I have history. He knows Jace lied about who he was. He knows the man he trusted as his beta is connected to the worst heartbreak of my life.

But he doesn’t know I let Jace touch a wound I should have kept closed.

He doesn’t know I wanted him to.

I push away from the door and cross to the bathroom. The lights are too bright when I flip them on, turning my skin pale and unfamiliar in the mirror. I stare at myself for a long moment.

My hair is a mess. My eyes are too wide. My lips are pinker than they should be.

I touch two fingers to them before I can stop myself.

The memory comes back all at once.

Jace’s breath catching.

The rough sound he made when I kissed him.

The careful way his hands stopped before they touched me, like he was afraid I’d break. Or disappear.

I yank my hand away from my mouth.

“Get it together,” I whisper.

The woman in the mirror doesn’t look convinced.

I turn on the faucet and splash cold water over my face. Once. Twice. Then I brush my teeth until my gums ache, as if mint and toothpaste can erase the proof of what I did. As if I can scrub Jace away before Rowan looks at me tomorrow and somehow knows.

He will know something is wrong.

He always does.

That is the problem with Rowan. He sees things I work hard to hide. Not all of them. Not yet. But enough that lying to him makes me feel like I’m standing in the middle of a crowded room screaming.

I spit, rinse my mouth, and grip the edge of the counter.

My father told him not to call.

The words circle through my mind, becoming worse every time I replay them.

I try to picture it. Jace, sixteen and scared, calling my house after his family was forced out of the pack. My father answering instead of me. Telling him I needed an Alpha. Telling him to stay away because he was only a boy with a crush.

My dad had rules. Expectations. He believed in duty and tradition and doing what was best for the pack, even when it hurt people he loved.

But he loved me.

He had always loved me.

Hadn’t he?

I shake my head, hard.

Jace could be lying.

He had changed his name. Hidden his father. Hidden the fact that his past was tied to mine. He had stood in Rowan’s house, accepted Rowan’s friendship, taken a place beside him as beta—and never said a word.

Maybe there was a reason.

Maybe he was ashamed.

Maybe he was afraid.

Maybe he had spent so long being Jason Calloway that admitting he had once been Jace Weaver felt impossible.

Or maybe I was doing exactly what I did at sixteen.

Making excuses for him because I wanted him to be the person I remembered.

I leave the bathroom and pull on pajamas, then climb beneath the soft comforter Rowan had picked out because he remembered I liked fuzzy blankets. The room is quiet except for the distant groan of pipes and the occasional creak of the house settling around me.

It should feel strange here.

It does.

Everything in this room is beautiful. The dark wooden shelves. The oversized bed. The moonlight spilling through the windows and silvering the trees beyond them. Rowan had made it mine before I ever arrived, giving me space to breathe when my entire life had been ripped apart.

And I had thanked him by kissing his beta.

I roll onto my side and pull the blanket closer.

My phone sits on the nightstand, screen dark.

I reach for it anyway.

There are three messages from Grady, all sent earlier in the afternoon.

Grady: You there?
Grady: Harrison said you made it okay.
Grady: Call me tomorrow. I want details. And don’t let Rowan feed you takeout for every meal.

A laugh threatens, but it never makes it past the knot in my throat.

Under Grady’s messages is one from my mother.

It was sent before I left home.

Mom: I love you, baby girl. This isn’t forever. Rest tonight. Let Rowan take care of you. Call me when you can.

I stare at it until the words blur.

My thumb hovers over her name.

I want to call her. I want to hear her voice and make sure she sounds like herself. I want to ask if my father ever spoke to Jace. I want to demand the truth.

But it’s late, and she needs rest. She is recovering from surgery because of me. Because my claws had been buried in her throat and the fall had led doctors to find the tumor in her head.

The thought makes bile rise in my throat.

I set the phone facedown.

Sleep takes me sometime after that.

It doesn’t feel like sleep.

One moment, I’m in my bed with moonlight spilling across the floor. The next, I’m standing in my mother’s kitchen with flour dusting my hands and the smell of bread rising warm in the oven.

Mom stands at the counter beside me, smiling as she wipes a streak of flour from my cheek.

“You always make such a mess,” she says.

My throat closes.

I know this.

I know what comes next.

“Mom,” I whisper.

She tilts her head. “What is it, baby?”

I try to move toward her, but my body won’t listen. My fingers curl. Bones crack. Pain tears through me as my nails lengthen, darkening into claws.

“No,” I gasp. “No, no, no.”

My mother’s smile fades.

Then my claws are buried in her throat.

Blood runs hot between my fingers.

She chokes on a scream, one hand clawing at my wrist while the other presses desperately against the wound. Her eyes lock on mine, wide with terror.

Except she isn’t looking at me.

She’s looking over my shoulder.

“Elizabeth,” she gasps.

I try to turn.

I can’t.

“Run.”

The kitchen goes dark.

Not black. Silver.

Moonlight spills over everything, too bright and too cold. The cabinets disappear. The oven disappears. Even my mother disappears, swallowed by the silver light.

A woman’s voice slides through the darkness.

Soft.

Ancient.

Far too close.

At last.

Something brushes the back of my neck.

I try to scream, but no sound comes out.

The crown wakes.

I wake with a scream trapped in my throat.

For several seconds, I can’t move. My heart hammers so violently it hurts, and my hands fly to my neck as if I’m the one choking. Moonlight pours through the windows, turning everything silver-blue.

The room is empty.

No blood.

No flour.

No mother.

Just me.

I drag in one shaking breath, then another.

My phone says 3:17 a.m.

I am still trying to convince myself it was only a nightmare when a cold draft moves through the room.

The bathroom door is open.

I know I shut it.

Slowly, I turn toward the mirror.

The glass is fogged.

I don’t remember taking a shower.

I don’t remember fogging it at all.

Still, three words slowly drip down the mirror as though traced by an invisible finger.

THE CROWN WAKES.