Page 103 of When Storms Ruin

My voice was brittle as it left me.

Weak.

Breakable.

“How could you?” My voice was raw. “Why?”

I didn’t think there would beanythingthat could break me after everything that had happened in the Stormvault.

Everything Donika had put me through.

I had been wrong.

Across from me sat my mother, Annelise Kotova.

And she wasalive.

My emotions were battling for space within me, pushing me in every direction at once. My storm magic swirled in my core as I broke apart, but I tried my hardest to push it back down.

I wasn’t bound.

Not yet.

But I could be.

Because my mother…she was alive.

And she had been here with me thiswhole time. She had hidden her identity and broken me out of the Stormvault. Donika thought she was dead, but she had snuck into The Stone Palace right under her nose to free me.

Each revelation had more questions bubbling to my lips, but none of them would come free.

Tears streamed down my face, and I hastily wiped them away with the back of my sleeve, my eyes on Zion and Annelise.

Why did this feel more like a betrayal than a homecoming?

Why had they kept this from me?

“I can’t imagine what you are thinking right now—” Zion started, cutting off when he registered my bewildered expression.

“That’s right, you can’t,” I bit out, the backs of my eyes stinging with fresh tears.

“But we can explain everything,” Annelise finished for him, standing.

She held her palms out to me, as if calming a scared animal.

I backed away towards the door, my vision flooded by my tears. Nik’s jaw was set, his shoulders tense.

He hadn’t known, either.

I thought she wasdead. That Donika had killed her in The War of Siraleth. Had she been merciful? Had she not been able to bring herself to kill her own mother? Had Annelise been in hiding all this time, only to come out when I needed her help? Surely she hadn’t been in the castle this whole time, right under Donika’s nose…

Zion had known her true identity this entire time, and he had kept it from me. Isaac had to have known, too. Betrayal stung freshly in my gut as I shook my head back and forth.

A choked sob escaped me as I turned, reaching for the door handle.

“Diana, wait—”

But her words were lost behind me as I escaped into the hallway, greedily drinking in deep breaths of fresh air. I continued on, up and up the spiral staircase and out of the cottage underground.

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