Victoria flipped over the page of the novel she was reading for the tenth time. She just didn’t understand why Lady Pevensie was wasting her time with Lord Devereaux when she could be courting Sir Vera! The two of them were financially incompatible, but besides that it was clear that Sir Vera was actually the one that loved her and that Lord Devereaux was an absolute cad. If it were her, Victoria would have likely punched him in the face after his first comment about Pevensie’s sister, but maybe that was why she was in jail.

She sighed and looked around her little cell. It would be her home for one more night, maybe two if she was very unlucky, because her trial was tomorrow. She was under no delusion that she wouldn’t be convicted, but there was some hope that her prison accommodations would be slightly larger at least. These holding cells were horrific, cold, and so ugly. Would it kill the city to put a little colour in here? The only colour she ever saw was the blue sky through her tiny window and the food that could barely be considered food. 

One more night. Just one more night, and things would be better.

A door down the hall opened. Strange, it wasn’t dinner time yet. “Alright, Lady Thorneheart,” the prison guard said, “sorry to hold you in here like this. John, which cell is she in?”

“Three!” called the warden.

Victoria froze and looked out of her cell in anticipation for the new addition. Sapphire was being held in jail? Hadn’t she been critically injured? Wait, three? Cell three? The cell across from her own? She watched in horror as the large man came into view, unlocked the cell across from hers, and ushered Victoria’s mortal enemy into it. “I’ll try and get you some of those extra pillows, My Lady. The Doc said you need to rest still.”

“Thank you,” said Sapphire as she sat on the pathetic excuse for a bed. The guard locked the door again and walked off. At first, Sapphire didn’t look around. She just sighed heavily and rested her head against the wall while staring at the opposite wall of her cell. She looked tired and frail, but Victoria didn’t care.

“So,” she said, and she took satisfaction in Sapphire’s startle, “they really did arrest you properly? Small miracles.”

Sapphire wearily looked over to her and visibly seethed. “Oh. I’d forgotten you were still here.”

Victoria offered a bitter smile. “Hopefully only for the night. My trial’s tomorrow.”

“Good. One night sharing a room with you is a prison sentence in itself.”

“Weren’t you injured? I read you’d been involved in some sort of scuffle.”

Sapphire didn’t answer right away, which Victoria had expected. The woman was lucky there was magic binding sigils in this prison and that there were two iron walls between them because, if there hadn’t, Victoria would already be at the woman’s throat. She wasn’t sure, but from what the newspapers had said, she had a strong suspicion that killing her former coven-mate was now Victoria’s first priority when she got out of prison. It would land her back there for the rest of her life, but for what Sapphire did to Rosalind, it would be worth it.

“The physician ruled me well enough to spend the next week here,” answered the former Coven Leader clinically.

“Happy day.”

Sapphire scoffed. “Why are you so smug? You’re in here, just like me.”

“Which I’m shocked by. They actually let Lady Sapphire Thorneheart, saint of Honeyshore, sit in discomfort? Your crime must have been deplorable for such a thing to be allowed.” She slapped her book closed, threw it on the bed, stood, and took the three steps to the bars of her cage. “Would you like to tell the story, Sapphire?” she asked as a thinly-veiled threat.

“I’d rather not,” Sapphire droned as she looked back to the fascinating bricks of her cell wall. “I’m sure you’ve read all about it in the tabloids.”

“As if those are reliable sources. All they’ve had in them for the last few weeks is speculation on how Rosalind might have provoked you to strangle them in self-defence.”

Sapphire shut her eyes with a sigh. “Yes, well, your family’s reputation is-“

“Not for violence. And Rosalind wouldn’t harm anyone.”

“Maybe you don’t know your Heir as well as you think you do.”

“I know them better than anyone else does. Better than you. Did you put your hands on my child?”

Sapphire was silent as the rage bubbled in Victoria’s chest. The woman sitting across from her had always been cruel, but she’d never thought she was capable of such a physical form of murder. She knew that her childhood friend had killed people in round-about ways through magic, but with her own two hands? She would have had to be out of magic for that. Rosalind would have had to be incapacitated for the woman to be able to get her hands on them. Victoria didn’t doubt they’d gotten involved in something they shouldn’t have, Rosalind was too kind-hearted for their own good, but what she didn’t understand was how it would have provoked such violence from Sapphire. Regardless, nothing they could have done would have warranted a threat on their life, and Victoria knew, without a hint of doubt, that the speculation of Sapphire having acted in self-defence was utter bullshit.

“I’m not having this conversation with you,” Sapphire said, and she sounded like she’d aged approximately thirty years.

“You owe me that,” Victoria spat.

“I owe you nothing.”

“You attacked my child!”

“You nearly killed mine!”

Victoria snarled. “I didn’t mean to. Can you say the same thing? I, at least, was only trying to uncover the truth that you have insisted on burying for thirty years! What possible reason could you have for hurting Rosalind?”

“They were interfering with Frigga!” shouted Sapphire abruptly.

It took a moment to formulate any sort of response to that. “Interfering with Frigga?” When Sapphire didn’t reply, Victoria flopped back down on her own cot. “Are you talking about Marcus?”

 Sapphire scoffed. “They took after you, it seems.”

What… was she talking about? “Not in the slightest.”

She rolled her eyes. “Whoring yourself out to gain power, textbook Bloodswell.”

“What the hells are you talking about? Jun was an immigrant!”

“I’m not talking about your fucking recluse husband!” Sapphire snapped.

Victoria’s eyes prickled and her heart ached with the grief she’d been drowning in for a year. “How dare you?” she growled. “Never speak of Jun like that. You have no idea what he was.”

“If he’d shown his face ever, maybe I would.”

“Why would he? It’s not like you ever made him feel welcome anywhere. You treated him like an intruder, like he was some sort of parasite you wanted to cut off and burn!”

“If he bothered to speak more than two words, perhaps he could have changed that.”

“Your treatment of him, and Rosalind for that matter, is your own damn fault. Just because people don’t act the way you want them to, it doesn’t give you the right to mistreat them.”

Sapphire laughed bitterly and covered her eyes like she had a headache. “It’s normal to expect basic courtesy, something your beloveds have clearly never had an education in.” She finally looked back to Victoria. “Now that your gremlin is leading the coven, I’ll give them a year before the other Heads oust them for their incompetence.”

Pride swelled in Victoria’s chest and soothed some of the rage that was roiling. “I’m as surprised as you are that they actually accepted the job. It must be torture to know that the pride of the Bloodswell House is ruling the coven in your position while you’re stuck here with me: excommunicated, reputation ruined, and about to be convicted.”

Sapphire made a comical face of mockery. “It will always be us, in the end,” she said after.

“Maybe so, but right now it isn’t.” Sapphire didn’t answer, and Victoria let silence take up some space. She half-heartedly considered returning to her reading when she decided she wouldn’t. “If I find out you attempted to kill Rosalind, and they weren’t trying to do the same, I will kill you when next I see you,” she said quite calmly.

Another minute of silence. 

“Then do it,” Sapphire said simply. “If you can.”

Cold rage flooded Victoria’s blood. So it was true. Sapphire had nearly murdered Rosalind. Her childhood friend had laid her hands on her only child, the only family she had left, in an attempt to snuff them out. “You’re a monster,” she hissed.

“As I said,” Sapphire said cooly like she was talking about the weather, “if they hadn’t interfered with Frigga, I wouldn’t have touched them. But she’s gone now, and it’s their fault. I maintain it was self-defence.”

“Then why were you ex-communicated?”

She shrugged. “Perhaps they were able to convince the coven that they were the victim.”

Victoria burst with bitter laughter, but she couldn’t help it. The thought of Rosalind being able to con anyone into believing that they were a victim when they weren't was hilarious. “You know they’re not capable of that,” she wheezed as she wiped a tear from her eye. “They couldn’t convince anyone of anything if they didn’t truly believe it, and the coven wouldn’t believe them even if they did! Not without proof.”

“They weren’t alone. Perhaps their co-conspirator managed to. She was quite the charmer.”

Victoria narrowed her eyes. “Who?”

Sapphire waved her off. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is that my niece ran off, and it’s your imp’s fault.”

“From what I could tell, Frigga didn’t even want to be part of the coven.”

That got Sapphire’s attention, and she scowled at the cell wall. “Frigga didn’t know what she wanted. She just needed time.”

“And a marriage to a man she didn’t love?”

“She and Marcus would have been the best match in a century!”

“No, they wouldn’t. She would have been miserable, which would have made him miserable, all because of your ambition.”

“Love isn’t required for marriage.”

Victoria grit her teeth. “Spoken like a true non-romantic. You have no idea what it means to love someone.”

Sapphire clenched her teeth a few times. She swallowed. Victoria thought the woman was holding back tears, but it was hard to tell and she couldn’t think of what she said that would have provoked this sort of response. Sapphire had never shown interest in anyone, not that she could remember, so the natural conclusion was that she wasn’t a romantic person. Easy. But from her own conversations with Wade Morgansons, who was also that way, that didn’t automatically mean that Sapphire should assume everyone was like that. Wade understood that romance was important to most people, had even resigned himself to having to participate in it some day when he did decide to settle. It seemed that Sapphire refused to acknowledge that.

“You don’t know me,” Sapphire eventually said with a bitter bite to it. “You have no idea what you’re talking about, Vicky, and don’t pretend that you do.”

Vicky? Sapphire hadn’t called her that in years. More than thirty. Suddenly she was twenty-five again, and the two of them had just snuck out of Theodore and Rosalie’s reception to the garden. That night had been one of their last as friends, and Victoria remembered it with a bittersweet pain. They’d had at least two glasses of wine, and Victoria had always been a light-weight. Sapphire had teased her for being unwed. She’d teased the same back. They’d joked about what their parents would say if the two of them had gotten married. They’d looked over the swans on the pond and debated the names of each one.

If Victoria had been interested in women, it would have been such a romantic night.

“Regardless, I know one thing,” said Victoria with shaky calm. “Your niece has been miserable since the engagement was announced.” She snatched the newspaper from her side table and flashed the headline at her co-prisoner. It read: Magnus-Monroe Heir Engaged to Bloodswell Head of Household: Honeyshore Shocked by Twist. “And it seems like Marcus figured that out too.”

Sapphire scoffed as Victoria put the paper back on her side table. “I give that a year too. He will realize what a blood-sucking bore they are and come running back.”

“If there’s one thing Rosalind is not, it is boring. You know that full well.”

“They are indeed full of surprises.” She smiled with a wry anger colouring it. “They broke through a contract with siphoning of all things.”

Siphoning? A contract? How was that possible? “They’ve been working with a lot of siphoning lately. I didn’t realize it was possible to do that to a contract.”

“They’re more brilliant than you ever were.”

“They’re more brilliant than anyone ever was.” Sapphire rolled her eyes and groaned, but didn’t respond otherwise. But, “Wait, they siphoned a contract? A contract with Frigga?” Sapphire nodded, and Victoria’s jaw dropped. “You made a contract with your own niece?!”

“I did what I had to,” Sapphire bit back. “For the coven.”

“Would you have actually activated it if Frigga didn't do what you’d contracted of her?”

After a few silent breaths, Sapphire quietly said, “I don’t know.”

“Despicable, putting your niece’s life in jeopardy like that.”

“One life cannot outweigh the needs of the group!”

“She wasn’t part of the group yet!”

“She was as good as! If your brat hadn’t freed her, she’d still be here doing what was best for everyone!”

It was clear to her now. “You attacked Rosalind for freeing Frigga from a contract you forced her into to do something she didn’t want to do?” she asked sharply. Sapphire didn’t answer. It was an answer in itself. Victoria laughed and picked up her book. “Yes. Yes, I’m going to kill you.”

“Good luck.”