Page 17 of The Sweetest Lies
Because this room, like my room, is a shared space.
The odds of any number of hell fae opening this door are far likelier than Nyra opening it. And wouldn’t that confrontation be just what I need at the ass crack of hellish dawn?
The shining gold knob turns. The door slowly pulls open.
And the kindest brown eyes peer up at me.
“Cersia,” Nyra whispers with a pinch of her pale eyebrows. “What time is it? What are you doing?”
“I just wanted to talk. We haven’t had a moment to ourselves, and I just—wanted to catch up.” The stumbling words that fall from my lips are a confused muddle of syllables that sound like I pulled them at random from a hat.
The way she blinks at me for several seconds only confirms that that’s exactly what she heard too. “Right now?”
“Well, there’s just a lot. Like. How are you healing? Have you heard from Nathias or little Berline?” A nervous smile pushes to my lips, but the way she flinches at the sound of those names causes the half-attempted look of happiness to slide right off.
“Ravar had them killed, Cersia.” She says those words so harshly that I flinch at the sound of it.
“He killed Berline?” He killed my nephew. He killed a little fucking boy. He killed my sister’s husband.
Just to bring her here.
To punish me.
Nyra stares at me so hard, I can feel the animosity in her gaze. It’s heavy and it’s spiteful.
And it’s pointed at me.
“I’m so sorry, Nyra.” My voice quivers, and I honestly can’t get the sound of Berline’s laughter out of my mind. It’s crackled with the sound of youth in it. Sweet, gentle, unharming youth.
It’s gone now.
No one is more aware of that than Nyra.
“I’m so fucking sorry.” I feel like I can’t say it enough. I want to say it over and over again in hopes that it’ll sooth the ache in my chest that I know must be eating away at my sister as well.
But she says nothing.
“I didn’t know.”
“You didn’t visit me,” Her voice lifts and echoes around me in the hall, surrounding me with the sound of her hidden anger. She’s always so good at forcing happiness that it’s sometimes hard to remember that other emotions are there deep inside. “You would have known if you’d paused your own problems for ten seconds to check on your sister in the infirmary. But you didn’t.”
“I couldn’t! No one was allowed—”
“Vanitee came. Every day.”
My mouth is so dry, it just hangs open as that information sinks in. Creatchin let her daughter visit Nyra but not me.
“Mother always treated you like you were fragile, and it made me walk around you like the ground you walked upon was the fragile egg shells you were made of.” Her tone isn’t cold or even angry any more. Just sad and tear stained. “I just—I just thought you’d have made the same great effort for me as I made for you.”
Effort?
I don’t know why my energy changes so quick at that.
“What effort? I’m not fragile. I was never treated differently.”
The laughter that cuts from her trembling lips is loud and sudden.
Genuine, even.
