I chose not to tell Alyssa about my choices, about the repercussions, because I thought I had managed to spare her. But all that time in the asylum away from my husband and child didn’t matter. Neither did the vow Morpheus made not to contact Alyssa again. Because he’d already planted memories of their moments together in her mind, counting on her inherited Liddell curiosity to lure her into seeking him out. At the age of sixteen, she found the rabbit hole on her own, just as he planned.

My hand jerks involuntarily at the memory, and I pull a strand of hair too tight. It pinches my scalp, causing me to wince. Repositioning the curl, I pin it in place.

Morpheus tricked my daughter into winning the crown I once craved and had come to despise. He saved himself in the process. It was a responsibility Alyssa hadn’t asked for, although she came to accept and even embrace it. But still . . . he’d lured her into becoming queen without offering her all the facts.

The one thing that gives me satisfaction is that he didn’t go unscathed. He paid a price. One he never anticipated.

While “growing up” with Alyssa in her childhood dreams, while watching her meet every challenge he laid at her feet as a young woman in Wonderland, Morpheus—the solitary and selfish fae once incapable of love—fell head over heels for her. I wouldn’t have believed it, had I not seen it myself. He proved the depth of his devotion when he gave up his chance to have her at his side in the nether-realm. When he opted instead to wait, so the human half of her heart could heal until she’d be strong enough to reign over the Red kingdom eternally.

Because of this sacrifice, I’m starting to suspect that maybe he’s not the devil after all. That maybe, after all these years, I’m seeing a side to him bordering on vulnerable and caring. A side he kept locked away from me, other than a glimpse or two I might’ve forgotten over the years.

Still, I’m not ready to forgive him for using my daughter quite yet. Because to do that, I’d have to forgive myself for making her responsible for my messes to begin with. And as much as Thomas wants me to . . . I’m not sure I can.

Alyssa’s life will always be split down the middle because of me. She’s taken it in stride. No one could see her with her netherling subjects and deny that she was meant to be their queen. She loves the very world that I came to hate.

And because I love my daughter, somehow I have to learn to embrace that world again. Otherwise, I can never move past letting Morpheus and all of Wonderland’s lunacy into our lives in the first place.

My filmy reflection reels me back into the here and now. I spritz my favorite perfume across my collarbone and wrists—swimming in notes of passion fruit and blood orange—then blot my nose with powder, stepping out of the bathroom before the steam from Thomas’s shower can smear my makeup.

I slip pearl earrings and a matching necklace and bracelet into place, then sit on the bed’s edge and wiggle my toes, concentrating on our closed bedroom door. The sounds of cabinet doors and clanging pans drift in from the other side. The kids are in the kitchen, putting something together for dinner. I debate helping them while I wait for Thomas, but I’m not ready to force my feet into the pair of pewter heels on the floor next to me. The carpet feels too nice . . . plush and luxurious. Instead, I lie back on the fluffy comforter, spread out my arms, and close my eyes, relaxing muscles that still ache from our bout of fencing earlier.

Attuned to the rhythmic patter of water against the shower door, I allow myself to fall back into another day and hour, when I was thirteen, staring out at a rain-drenched world. When I embraced the nether-call during one of the bleakest and loneliest times of my life.

It was the day Morpheus came to me and offered power and vengeance in the palm of his manipulative hand. The day that would change who I was going to be, forever.

BOXED IN

Twenty-six years earlier . . .

Rain pounded the empty refrigerator box atop my head. I had turned it on its side and climbed in just minutes before the storm hit. The Dumpster beside me reeked of dead fish and decaying fruit, overpowering the fresh scents of wet asphalt and dirt. Puddles filled the uneven gravel street and water gushed out of the gutters that hung from the back of my eight-story apartment building on the other side of the alley.

A damp gust of wind blustered through my makeshift shelter. I hunkered down against the box’s back, tucking my canvas tote bag behind my neck like a pillow and holding the pages of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland so I wouldn’t lose my place. A few weeks before, I’d crossed out “Alice’s” in the title and replaced it with “Alison’s.” It was partly to make sure everyone knew the book belonged to me. But there was more . . . a part of me wished I could live those same adventures . . . that I could somehow be Alice and escape into a rabbit hole where a new world awaited—one where maybe someone as peculiar and mismatched as me might find a fit. A place to belong.

I’d never been good at understanding other people. Mostly because I moved around so much. At least that’s what I told myself. It had nothing to do with how hard it was to trust people, or my inability to relate to them on a daily basis.

Reading offered me friends enough, and my Lewis Carroll books were my favorite, being one of the few things my mother had left behind when she died right after giving birth to me. The stories made me feel closer to her, even though I never knew her. Maybe because I secretly understood how real the Wonderland tales were to her heart, considering our distant relation to the London Liddells.

Once, when I was staying at an orphanage while waiting for a new foster family, I broke into the office and read my records. It was the only way I could find out about my background. Alice Liddell, the real-life girl who inspired Carroll’s fictional tales, had a son who was involved with a woman before he went off to war and died on the battlefield. His lover ended up pregnant and came to America to raise their illegitimate child. That boy grew up and had a daughter: my mother, Alicia.

Somehow, all of this made my mom go crazy. My records stated she spent time in an asylum as a teenager after painting Wonderland characters on every wall of her home and insisting they talked to her in dreams. The day I was born, she jumped out of her second-story hospital room window to test the “fairy wings” the voices told her she had. She landed in a rosebush and broke her neck.

The doctor claimed she committed suicide—postpartum depression and grief over losing my dad months earlier in a factory accident. Whatever it was, one thing was never explained . . . the dime-size welts on her shoulder blades, too big and perfectly spaced to have been caused by getting pricked by thorns.

My opinion? She did have wings. Ones that never sprouted. If it made me crazy like her to think that, I could live with it. Because if I was off my rocker, it meant we had a bond. Something in common. As long as no one else ever knew.

My mother had also left behind a Polaroid camera—the kind that spits out completed pictures at the push of a button. I’d known how to use it since the age of five.

I snuggled deeper into the nest of photographs I’d dumped from my tote. It was something I’d become good at: hiding behind trees on playgrounds or parked cars at the mall to capture stolen moments of other people’s families and friends. I liked to surround myself with them—to cushion me from the absence of my own.

I lifted my denim jacket’s cuff to scan my watch. Only ten more minutes and school would be out. Then I could go to my apartment and pretend I’d been where I was supposed to be all day. I’d shown up at the beginning of my last class, long enough to be counted present, before “taking a trip to the bathroom” and never returning. With any luck, Mrs. Bunsby, my latest foster caregiver, would never know I’d skipped. I’d only been living with her for a month. I didn’t want to upset her and get thrown away again. Other than her being a forty-something-year-old vegetarian widow, she was the best keeper I’d had since I could remember.