The Devil's Broken Doll
Something inside Adelaide lurched, her breath catching as the words struck deeper than they should have, as though they had found something already waiting beneath the surface, something buried not by time, but by necessity.
“That’s not possible,” she said, but the certainty wasn’t there anymore, the protest weaker than she intended, her voice thinning at the edges as doubt threaded through it like fracture lines. “I would know if—”
“You would not.”
The Queen raised her hand, the gesture slow and deliberate, flame curling from her palm in soft, spiralling patterns that hovered between them like fragments of an unfinished prophecy. Each curl of fire moved with intention, not chaos, as though