When Talia hesitated for the thirty-fourth time over whether to get out of bed, the scent drifting up from downstairs gave her willpower a vicious kick.
This was utterly ridiculous, Talia thought. Her room's location within Rodriguez Manor was roughly equivalent to Texas within the United States. There was no way in hell that scent could have drifted through layer upon layer of corridors to reach her.
Unless it had not drifted in through the corridors.
Talia pressed her still faintly aching forehead with her middle and ring fingers, then, disheveled and with her hair a mess, walked to the window. With a sweep of her arm, she drew back the heavy curtains, and an intense fragrance immediately rushed into her nose.
When she looked down, Schiller was standing by the edge of the flower pavilion's transparent glass door, looking up at her.
Talia let out a tiny, agonized groan. The most fucking infuriating part was that she knew perfectly well the large pot on that picnic table probably contained no fewer ingredients than a witch's cauldron, yet she still wanted to gorge herself because she was truly starving.
Normally, hunger was not a problem. Talia could remain perfectly still even with delicious food before her and her hunger nearing the limits of what the human body could endure, but not now.
She did not know why not. She did not know that the human body was more precise than she imagined, and its greatest precision lay in its adherence to the principle of elastic thread: an overly taut thread had only two endings. Either it snapped, or, after relaxing, it discovered it had lost its elasticity and could never be stretched so tight again.
The human mind had limits. If the mental torment Talia had endured in the past