Neva’s head hurts as she opens her eyes. For a moment she can’t place where she is. Then the void begins to fill and her whole world twists and turns, threatening to overwhelm her once more. She’s Fae D’Aragon. She’s Neva. She’s both. A burst of more agonizing memory brings her back to consciousness. The irony of this recollection is not lost on her. It explains so much about her life. Mother had given her away, but she had also helped her. She’d worked with Tracey. They were both involved in Neva’s conditioning. Neva remembers it all.
She feels her mother’s arms around her, and accepts the cold caresses with the distance and unfeeling of the assassin she’s become. Fae is inside still but it’s far more complex than just having a dual personality, or being a sleeper. No – the sleeper is her ‘real’ self, trapped inside the killer of the Network Tracey and Annalise had made. She’s fragments of a whole that now merges into one cohesive being.
Her eyes fall on the back of a tall slender woman standing a few feet away. She searches her memory and the recollection returns with a painful vengeance.
‘Fleur?’
The woman turns, Neva knows now she’s right. It is her sister, fully grown. But she’s familiar. They’ve met recently and she can’t quite remember where. She feels that sense of disjointed confusion as her mind searches for the pieces of the puzzle, a jigsaw that slots together to bring all the details and knowledge into her control.
Fleur’s eyes are cold as she looks at Neva. This is not a happy reunion for either of them.
Neva’s arms ache and she realizes she’s in an unnatural position. She tugs at the bonds.
‘I’m not here to hurt you. We came for Mia,’ Neva says, remembering their mission. ‘Do you know who I am?’
‘You’re Neva,’ Fleur says.
‘Fleur… I…’
‘I’m Jewel now,’ she says.
Jewel. Neva remembers a Jewel. Yes. She remembers a war, an attempted coup to take over her reign in the house. Jewel had tried to undermine her – Neva had taught her a lesson. She’d triumphed over her. She sees the resentment that this caused, left inside Jewel all these years, festering like a pus-filled sore that is now ready to burst.
‘My sister… you were her and I didn’t recognize you. I’m sorry. I wasn’t myself… the house…’
Jewel gives a harsh laugh. ‘Your death is going to be beautiful, Neva. I think I’ll place the photograph of it in a frame, above your achievements.’
Neva looks at the wall and the kill photographs. She recalls them now, remembers once more entering the room just a short time ago and the agony of her psyche breaking down. This break, worse than the first, had taken torture to a whole new level. Neva craves revenge now for all that was done to her. All that she’s been forced to endure. She lapses back into her cold killer self as her default mechanism kicks in.
‘This is your work?’ she asks and her voice is calm. Her pulse is steady. She has expected her own demise for years, and her mortality holds no fear for her now. Instead, she feels alert. Strong. Ready.
‘Mine. Oh no. This is Mother’s doing. She’s been following your career all along.’
Neva tests the bonds again; she can feel a slight give on the wooden bedpost she’s tied to. A hard tug might free her. She watches Jewel as she stalks around the room.
‘You’re my gift to Mother,’ Jewel says. ‘She’ll have to notice me then.’
Neva looks into her sister’s face and sees that her black pupils are dilated, threatening to take over the whole of her eye. There is darkness in there, but not the cold and calculated workings of a professional killer. There is something more, that leads Neva to wonder what Jewel has been through at the hands of her mother. Jewel is broken. But it’s more than that. A break can be recovered from, it’s more about establishing self and freedom. But not in Jewel’s case.
Even as Neva is struggling to bring the pieces of her own collapse back together, she feels Jewel’s anxiety. She senses the swirling void, the rage, the absolute abject loneliness that has brought this all to the fore. And more than anything else, she sees the pure insanity that might mean her once loved sister is now completely lost in a mind full of hate.