Chapter 308

Elsie's POV

My voice cracked on the last word. The kind of crack that came before something bigger, something that had been building for months and finally found its way to the surface.

"I came back. You know I came back." I pressed my palm flat against the stone, as if I could feel her warmth through it, as if she could somehow hear me from wherever she was. "I had a plan—I had everything worked out and I was so sure, I was so certain I could do this, I could fix what went wrong, I could build something worth having. I thought I knew what I was doing. I thought I had prepared for everything. I thought I was ready."

I pulled my hand back and looked at my palm, at the dirt and moss that clung to my skin.

"And now people are dead. Good people, who trusted me to lead them somewhere they could survive. They followed me. They believed in me. And I led them straight into a trap I didn't see coming." My throat tightened. "Thorne is out there, I don't know if he's alive or dead. I still feel the pack link to him—faint, but it's there—but for how long? For how long before that fades too? Before I feel it go cold and distant and I have to accept that another person I love is gone because I wasn't strong enough, smart enough, good enough to protect them?"

The tears came properly now. The way they did when there was no one to be strong for. When there was no audience, no one watching to see if the High Fang would hold herself together or fall apart. Just me, kneeling in the dirt in front of my mother's grave, crying like the girl I used to be before any of this happened.

The tears traced hot paths down my cheeks and dripped onto the stone, dark spots that vanished almost as quickly as they appeared.

"I'm so lost." I pressed my forehead against the stone, the cold of it grounding against my skin. It was almost like being held, almost like having someone's cool hand against my fevered brow. "I'm sitting on a throne that feels like it's eating me alive, and I don't know if I'm strong enough for this. I don't know if I was ever strong enough. What if I was just angry? What if I mistook anger for strength and built everything on the wrong foundation? What if every decision I've made, every choice, every life I've sacrificed—what if it was all just rage dressed up as purpose?"

The questions spilled out of me like water through a broken dam. All the things I had been too afraid to say out loud, too afraid to admit even to myself. All the doubts that had been gnawing at me in the quiet hours of the night, when the castle slept and I was alone with the weight of everything I had taken on.

"I need you." My voice broke completely, shattering into something raw and unprotected. "I need my mother. I know that's not something I'm supposed to admit. I know I'm supposed to be the High Fang's daughter and stand on my own and be enough. I've told myself that a thousand times—you're enough, you have to be enough, there's no one else to do this. But I'm not enough tonight. I don't feel like enough tonight. I feel like a girl who was murdered and came back and got in way over her head, and I need someone who knew me before all of this—"

I stopped. My shoulders were shaking. My whole body was shaking. I wrapped my arms around myself, trying to hold myself together, trying to keep from flying apart into a thousand pieces that would scatter across this clearing and be lost forever.

"Tell me what to do. Please." The words came out broken, desperate, the prayer of someone who had run out of answers. "Tell me how you did it. How you carried all of this and kept going. How you looked at an entire realm counting on you and didn't collapse under the weight of it. Because I'm collapsing. I'm kneeling in the dirt in front of your grave and I'm collapsing, and I have nobody left to tell. There's no one I can say this to, no one who would understand, no one who could hold me together the way you used to."

I thought about her hands. The way they had felt when she held me, strong and steady and certain. The way she used to stroke my hair when I was little and couldn't sleep, humming softly until my breathing evened out and the fears slipped away. The way she had looked at me, always, like I was the most important thing in her world, like I was already enough, even when I didn't feel like it.

"I don't remember your voice," I whispered, and the admission was like a blade between my ribs. "I try so hard to remember what you sounded like, but I can't. I can hear the echo of it, the shape of it, but the actual sound is gone. And I'm so afraid I'm going to forget more. I'm so afraid that one day I'll wake up and I won't be able to remember what it felt like to be loved by you."

The wind moved through the trees, rustling the leaves in that particular way it did when the night was deep and the world was quiet. The moonlight shifted slightly, silver sliding across the stones in the clearing.

And then, soft and unmistakable, warm as a hand pressed to my cheek—

My darling girl.

The voice came from somewhere inside me, somewhere deep and safe, a place I had thought was closed off forever. It was her voice, the one I had been trying so desperately to remember, and it was there all along, waiting for me to stop trying so hard and just listen.

I lifted my head, my tears still falling, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my throat. "Mother?"