TRIGGER WARNING:

 “You and you,” Antoine warned his parents, “stay out of this. If you can’t, then leave.” He turned his attention back to Elana, pulling his gloves on. 

What was she supposed to make of him? An absentee older brother, a prodigy and legend in his own right, who had stormed in like a hurricane, upending the peace and order that had existed all of her life. “You don’t have to forgive me for this. In fact, you shouldn’t,” he said. “But you’ll thank me for it, one day.”

Something in the air seemed to shift and Elana took a half-step back. She’d just watched Antoine mount a fairly even defense against their father—if not for Marlena’s interference, it was impossible for her to say who would have come out on top—and now his attention was on her? 

He claimed to be here for her benefit, but she had little reason to believe that. Not with how cold his gaze was. 

“What are you talking a—” she broke off as her knees buckled. “What—”

Elana went down on her palms, hard. It was all she could do to stare at the ground in disbelief. Had her brother just kicked her knees out from under her? The loose stone grinding into her skinned palms said he had. 

She jerked her head to look at him, flabbergasted. “What on earth are you doing? Why—” she broke off with a sharp cry. “Ah! What are you—”

Antoine’s hand fisted in her hair and he began walking. She scrambled to break free from his hand, but he wrapped her hair around his fist, resecuring his grip at the roots. 

“Stop!” Elana cried, grabbing at his hand. “Let me go!” 

He wasn’t budging. She dug her nails in, clawing at him but getting nothing but leather. “Antoine, stop!” she protested, desperation cracking her voice. “What do you want? You don’t need to do this—”

The edges of her nails began to lift. Antoine didn’t speak, didn’t look at her, but kept walking. She was on bloodied knees, dragged in his wake. There were the sounds of a commotion on the sidelines, but she couldn’t attend to it. 

She couldn’t do anything, think of anything, but try to get away.

She struggled with all her might. 

Gravel scraped through the barrier of her tattered skirts, leaving raw, red stripes of torn skin from her knees to her thighs as she failed to regain her balance. 

One of her nails came loose. 

Her eyes watered. 

Her scalp was burning with pain, but it was the least of her problems. Both of her hands were on Antoine’s, digging crescent moons into the leather as she tried to pry his fingers away. 

“Let me go!” Elana swore, struggling to get back to her feet. What was he trying to accomplish here? Was he trying to seriously hurt her, or was he trying to show her just how far he was allowed to go without either of their parents stepping in? “You’ve proven your point!” she yelled, desperation straining her voice. “I get it—enough!” 

He stopped. For a brief, fleeting moment, she didn’t feel the pain. Only relief.

“Thank you,” she whispered, voice rough. She opened her eyes, glancing up at Antoine just in time to see his eyes harden. 

He resecured his grip in her hair. 

She saw the reason he had stopped a moment too late. “Antoine—” she began, pleading.

He knelt down to Elana’s level, his knee balanced against the edge of a water trough. His expression was cold, even as he met her gaze. 

“I need to see it in you,” he said, speaking as calmly and matter-of-factly as if he was describing the sun rising in the east and setting in the west. “If you don’t have it, there’s no point in sending you to the Academy.”

“Don’t, please.” 

He was taking this too far—he was going to end up killing her if she didn’t find a way to convince him. Her eyes watered with frustration, a half-sob escaping her. “Don’t—”

“Take a deep breath, Elana,” he said coolly. 

“Antoine, please, you don’t have to—” she was cut off, water running up her nose and down the back of her throat as she gasped, her head thrust into the trough. She hadn’t taken in enough air to hold, but she tried. She pushed and shoved against the trough. Kicked and scrambled to leverage her weight and pull herself out. 

Everything was burning. She couldn’t inhale. She couldn’t gasp for air. It wasn’t an option. She couldn’t, she told herself, willing her body to cooperate. Antoine had an iron grip on her, using the line of leverage from his wrist to his forearm pressed against the back of her neck to keep her down. 

She thrashed under him. She cried out, cursing herself when it made her lungs burn more. Her efforts were effective only in making herself hypoxic. She was going to die. He was going to kill her, in front of their parents, and they were going to let him. Tears stung her eyes, even underwater. 

She could feel the pressure building in her head, in her chest, in her throat— she wasn’t going to be able to suppress the urge to gasp for breath, but she needed to, she had to—

Antoine pulled her head up.

She broke, gasping for air, spitting and coughing up water. Snot and tears ran down her nose, her throat and lungs still burning, her chest heaving as she struggled to regain her breath. 

“I told you to take a deep breath,” Antoine said, as calm as ever. 

“What the hell is wrong with you?” Elana was choking on the words, lunging for him before she could collect herself. “You sick, sadistic bastard—” she swore, breath ragged, going straight for his throat. She needed to make him pay.  

He was stronger than her by far, effortlessly keeping her at an arm’s length as she reached and clawed for him. He looked down at her impassively, unflinching as she dug her nails into his forearms, swearing at him with a vengeance as snot and tears ran down her face. 

“Not even a whisper of mana, even now,” he muttered, searching her face for something. He didn’t seem to find it, because he shook his head. “Let’s go again. Deep breath.”

“You m—” She was face down before the end of the sentence, bubbles streaming from her mouth instead of the string of obscenities. 

"I can do this all day, Elana." Even underwater, she could hear her brother's impassive voice, clear as day. "If you want this to end, you'd better hurry up and grasp the lesson."

Lesson? His voice was starting to sound more and more distant. Her thoughts were getting muddy, her muscles progressively less responsive. 

Elana had lost her grip on the concept of time seconds, minutes, hours ago—all she knew was that, at this moment, every moment of consciousness was pure agony from which blacking out was a welcome reprieve from. But Antoine didn’t give her that luxury. When he pushed it too far, and he did, he didn’t let her stay down. Every time her lungs filled with water and her body began to fail, he would pull her back from the brink.

“Heal,” Antoine murmured the spell at the same time as he pulled her up from the water. 

Her body filled with warmth, her waterlogged lungs returned to normal, and her clarity along with it—and she glared up at Antoine, wishing death upon him.

The first she’d heard him recite that spell, she’d been as grateful as she was filled with spite—by the tenth she’d decided that the word “heal” needed to be wiped off the plane of existence. Because all it meant was that the torture was going to start all over again, from the beginning. 

She was proven right when he, without notice, shoved her face-first back into the trough. She was shoulders-deep now, but she didn’t fight it, because she had come to understand several things:

1) Screaming was ineffective, and a waste of precious breath. 

2)Thrashing, scratching, kicking—all equally ineffective. It raised her heart rate, burning too quickly through her oxygen supply.

3) The banished heir apparent was a psychopath beyond measure—and she had no doubt that he was the one responsible for his own estrangement from the family.

The inevitable conclusion she came to was that it was better to let go, to let her body become dead weight, taking small comfort in the knowledge that Antoine had proven at least a dozen times over that he wasn’t going to let her actually die.

He was just hellbent on simulating it, over and over and over again. 

Elana surrendered to the process. In the moments that she was awake, when her lungs were freshly filled with oxygen, when her head was first dunked under, before she was robbed of her ability to, she thought. If she could just figure out what he was after, if she could just find a goal in this madness, she could make it stop. 

Or at least, she hoped as much.