I won’t allow it, Mina promised herself, her hand tightening around the glass. All the thwarted love that had collected in her heart, stagnating there for years without any release, came to life now, transforming into something as sharp and dangerous as the piece of glass in her hand.
Her hair was still a tangled mess. There was blood on her hands and skirt. Her face was bare and stained with tears.
It didn’t matter. She had been too late before, but not this time. She clutched her weapon and ran from the room to find her father.
Felix was beside her in an instant, and she wondered if he had been waiting outside her rooms since returning from the crypt in case she called for him. “Mina, what’s the matter?” he asked as he caught up with her quickly. His eyes went straight to the blood on her hand.
She stopped and reached for him with her free hand, pulling him toward her by the fabric of his shirt. “I need you to take the guards—all of them—and stand watch outside the crypt. Don’t let anyone pass through the door, not even me.”
“But why—”
“Go the back way, from the servants’ door, not through the courtyard. I don’t want my father to see you. Please, Felix.”
He heard the note of panic in her voice, and he nodded, reassuring her that he would do exactly as she asked.
When he was gone, Mina continued down the hall, turning a corner and going to a window that looked out on the courtyard. Yes, there he was—Gregory was just stepping out into the courtyard, taking slow, labored steps. From the window, in the light of the early morning, he looked so small, and she was struck again by how feeble he appeared when he wasn’t looming over her, one hand gripping her by the wrist. She always felt like a child again in those moments, and so she had never believed that she could break that grip—never thought she could escape him, even if she tried. But she wasn’t a child anymore, and now, for Lynet’s sake, she had to believe that she was capable of stopping him.
With a fresh surge of determination, she raced down to the courtyard.
“Father!” she called, hurrying across the snow to block his path. She didn’t care that he wasn’t alone, that there were people watching.
He looked at her disheveled appearance in horror, and she heard a nearby gasp, probably at the trail of blood she was leaving behind. “Go back inside,” Gregory said in a frantic whisper. “What are you doing?”
She didn’t bother to lower her voice. “I won’t let you have her. I won’t let you have her heart.”
His eye twitched in response, but he simply put his hands on her shoulders and said, “You’ve had a trying day. Now go back inside before anyone else sees you like this.”
He tried to shove her aside so he could reach the arch that would lead him around through the Shadow Garden, to the crypt door at the base of the tower. But Mina shook off his grip and blocked him again. He was still looking nervously at the passersby who had stopped to see this spectacle of the queen fighting her magician father, and Mina suddenly remembered the night of her wedding, when he had tried to use the public eye to pressure Nicholas into giving Lynet over to him. He had lost, though, because that same crowd had made it impossible for him to argue when Nicholas had stood his ground. If Mina wanted to win, she had to keep him here, where everyone could see them. Her father was always at his most cruel when he had her cornered and alone.
But Gregory must have known that if he turned back now, he would never have another chance to step foot in the crypt. Mina would have him guarded day and night. “Mina, stop this at once,” he said. “You think you can turn me away by causing a scene, but you’ll do more damage to yourself than to me.”
“Only if I stay silent. I may have driven Lynet away and made her a prisoner, and I may have been too late to save her, but you—you’re the only one who killed her.”
The whole courtyard came alive with excited murmuring. More people were starting to gather now, including some who were watching from windows and balconies above. Once, Mina would have cared that they watched with something like glee at seeing their hated queen come undone at last.
Gregory was noticing the crowd too, and he shot Mina a look of absolute loathing, his lips curling to show sharp teeth. “You’ll regret that, Mina. Never put a man in a position where he has nothing more to lose.”
“You should have remembered that before you killed Lynet,” Mina shot back.
She thought that would have made him angrier, maybe even scared if she was lucky, but instead he was smiling, and she was the one who was suddenly afraid. “I’ll give you one more chance, Mina. Let me through.”
“I won’t let you near her.”
“Then you won’t have a choice.”
He lifted his hand, palm facing toward her the way Lynet had done not long ago in the tower, but then he closed his hand into a fist, and Mina felt a blinding jolt of pain in her chest.
“You’ve told my secret,” Gregory said. “Perhaps it’s time to reveal yours. Have you forgotten, Mina, that when I create something, I also have the power to destroy it? I made your heart out of glass—that means I can shatter it with just a thought.”
The pain forced Mina to her hands and knees in the snow, and she heard Gregory’s words echoing in her head. The truth was that she had forgotten—she had always thought of glass as hers. But her heart had always been her father’s creation, just like the mouse he had made from sand all those years ago.
Felix and the glass soldiers still guarded the crypt, but even weakened, Gregory could use his powers to strike them down, knowing that Lynet’s heart would restore him. If Mina wanted to keep her father away from Lynet, she had to stop him here, now. She tasted blood in her mouth, and she tried to stand again, but she sank back to her knees as her court continued to watch.
She was so tired of being strong, so tired of fighting enemies both real and imagined. And now she would die because in the end, she was as easily broken as a piece of glass. She wondered if Lynet would have appreciated knowing that her stepmother was the delicate one after all.
“Give up, Mina,” Gregory said from directly above her. “You have no other weapon to use against me. It’s all over now.”
Mina kept her head down, not wanting him to be the last thing she saw before her death. And instead, she saw—herself. A fragment of herself in a piece of glass. The pain had become so consuming that she had forgotten about the broken mirror shard that she had brought with her, which lay in the snow now beside her hand, still stained with her blood. That was the one secret she had managed to keep from Gregory over the years—and Lynet must not have told him either. Even when they were enemies, Lynet had kept Mina’s secret.
I have to keep fighting for her, she thought, for Lynet.
She kept her eyes on the piece of glass in the snow, and then with the strength she still had left, she concentrated.
“You’re wrong,” she said, choking on her own blood. She lifted her head to see her father staring down at her, a satisfied grin on his face. “I do have one more weapon.”
A flash of light passed across Gregory’s throat in the space of a single blink, and then the glass shard fell to the snow at Gregory’s feet as a red line formed across his throat.