Chapter One
The Letting
“If I forget what happened, does that make me innocent?”
Lily looked at Sabine again. This time her mentor gave no signal.
“The procedure changes what you can consciously recall,” Lily said. “It does not change what happened.”
“That isn’t an answer.”
“It is the answer the House can give.”
“What answer would you give?”
The eels whistled beneath the floor while Lily thought of her own silver scar, hidden beneath her left cuff. Three years earlier she had occupied the same chair and asked Sabine to remove the night her mother died. She still knew Anwen Vale was dead. She knew there had been an accident in the deep archive. She knew her brother had been blamed and had vanished into the western channel.
She did not remember her mother’s face at the end. For nearly a year after the procedure, that absence had allowed Lily to eat, sleep, and cross a room without finding blood on objects that had never touched it. She had called the emptiness mercy. Some days she still did.
“I would ask what you plan to do with the part that remains,” she said.
“What part?”
“The life around the memory. The people affected by it. Your body may keep reactions that no longer make sense to you.”
Lucan looked down at his turning hand. “Can you stop that?”
“Perhaps. I cannot promise it.”
“Then what exactly are you selling?”
“The House does not sell forgetting.”
His laugh was short and ugly. “Mother brought a bank draft.”
This is one page of twenty-six chapters.
Buy the EPUB — €19.99