Page 142 of Cruel Delights

“I was already following you… your whole life. I told you before I had looked you up. I just left out the part about how much. You were rich and powerful and someone. I was poor and invisible and no one. But I still made sure to keep track of you. Kaden Raskova, the boy who saved me… the son of Dmitri Androski Raskova. Sometimes only known as his musical name, Dmitri Androski. World renown pianist, the man my mother loved, and the brilliant man who was my piano instructor.

“I wanted so badly to reach out to you. But you were never within reach,” she explains. “After that day, we were separated, and I never saw you again. I returned to my family. We grieved the loss of my mother, but my family couldn’t handle my problems. So they gave me up to the system. A part of them… I think… suspected what I had done. The truth of what happened to my mother. I wasn’t a normal little girl.”

“My father… he abused you.”

Her gaze lowers to the floor, a sudden darkness about her. “Every practice. Every time my finger slipped. Every time I made a small mistake. My mother allowed it. She was in love with him, and they believed they could train me into a world-renowned prodigy.”

Anger consumes me at the memory of what my father was doing. I had suspected, I had known deep down, and yet I had felt powerless. I hadn’t intervened sooner…

Another thought occurs to me and cuts my rising temper short.

“Your medications,” I say. “I could never find much on your medical history. I looked extensively in all the systems. Are they…?”

“For my mental state,” she answers, raking her teeth over her bottom lip. “I was too poor growing up to get help. I’m too poor now. I get everything on the black market. Just like my weed dealer. I cope in ways you’re not supposed to. It seems you blocked out what happened.”

“I did. I erased it from my mind. I convinced myself it was my mother’s music I was hearing.”

“I do that too… sometimes.” She releases a shuddering breath as if dreading the thought of telling me any more. “Other times… I struggle with what’s real. I go to the cemetery and visit my friends. Mymom. I can still hear her sometimes. And others. I invent people. It helps me do things I never would. It gives me courage, like the night of your party. I didn’t take my meds and I got high, then I convinced myself to go. Jael was never real. She was just a figment of my imagination that gave me the courage I needed. I know that now.”

“Lyra…” I say slowly with a shake of my head. “I don’t even know what to say. None of this is what I thought it would be.”

Hope shines in her eyes. “You were going to take me away, weren’t you? Tonight was going to be the night. Then we can finally be together.”

Yes… but that’s before I found out… everything.

“We still can,” she says, moving toward me. She reaches for my hand, curling her fingers around it. “Don’t you see? We have a bond. We always have.”

Peering down into her eyes, the core part of me recognizes the truth of her words.

There is a bond between us. There is a mutual obsession. Some kind of innate urge on my end to protect her… and on her end to do the same.

Tonight, Lyra outmatched me. In doing so, she provedwhyshe is my match.

Perhaps something I’ve sensed all along in my stalking of her, though I couldn’t put the pieces together.

“Before we do,” she says, bewitching me with her dark brown eyes, “there’s one last thing I think we should do.”

I understand immediately.

With the truth laid out and our connection reestablished, I know Lyra intimately. I know exactly what is on her mind.

“Yes, we should take care of that. It’s what I call a loose end.”

She smiles. “I meant to that night years ago… but I never got the chance to finish him off. He had been abusing me so long. My mother was so in love with him. I snuck a kitchen knife into my backpack for our lesson. Then I attacked both of them. I wanted them dead, Kaden.”

“Neither deserved to keep living for what they did to you.”

“He has… he’s survived.”

“Tonight that changes. Come.” I intertwine our fingers in a tight handhold—a first time in my life—and I pull her toward the stairs. It’s as we come up to the top that it hits me what’s happening. That another wave of disbelief rolls over me. “Lyra,” I say, “you’re insane.”

She smirks at me, squeezing my hand. “Thanks. You too.”

35Lyra

Mad Hatter - Melanie Martinez

It took me a while to realize that it was happening again.