When I finished adjusting the silver belt, I glanced at my mother.

All in all, Eris seemed to be remarkably accepting of the loss of her limb. She’d even gone so far as to say, “Losing my arm was a fair price to pay in order to have you in my life again, Persephone.”

It seemed like the simple show of a positive attitude. At first. After hearing it for the fourth or fifth time, the passive-aggressive tone became obvious. That sentence, as in “grammatical unit,” was becoming my sentence, as in “judicial determination of punishment.”

In a single afternoon I’d brought the two biggest regrets of her life into her tattoo parlor: me and Johnny. After sixteen years of separation, on the first day I’d spent with Eris, her home had been invaded. The top dog of the wærewolves, the Rege, had followed us to her home—led by a tracer he’d planted in my phone. In a hail of bullets, he’d forced his way inside, where the spell to unlock Johnny’s tattoos had been under way. The Rege had hoped to kill Johnny and eliminate the threat a Domn Lup would have on his power base, but Eris had caught two bullets playing human shield and protecting Johnny. That had led to the loss of her right arm.

For all her recent heroics, she’d also been the villain who, eight years ago, had tattooed Johnny in the first place. She’d used her magic and sorcery to hide and constrain the power of the Domn Lup. A mysterious man had paid her to perform the magic and create the tattoos, but she could remember nothing about him. Or that was what she claimed.

After my messy reentry into her life, she should have told me to get the hell out, to drag my dangerous destiny with me and never come back. Yeah, she should have abandoned me again. This time, at least, she had a legitimate reason.

Instead, she was using these events—and her consequent loss—as a means to keep me around. It felt like I’d been condemned for life, and my prison was the unending inclusion in her world. What is it with mothers and guilt trips?