Goosebumps break out on my skin, and a line forms between my brows. “That name… It feels”—I hesitate, trying to find the right words—“comforting. Am I feeling your emotions?”
Somehow, though there is nothing in front of me, I can see the faintest outline of her shadow in the corner of my eye. It’s gone when I try to look at it head-on. “I think perhaps spending so much time here has started to alter your magic.”
My body tenses in anticipation of her next words.
Selene senses it as she sighs heavily again. “I don’t think you have to go back, not yet, but we should talk about your magic and what you felt as you last wielded it.”
Suffocating anxiousness clogs my throat. What I did, what Ifelt…I’m not sure I want to remember who orwhatI became in those moments. The power that I could feel hadn’t just comefromme, but it hadovertakenme. Claiming free reign over my emotions and thoughts and body. I felt completely pulled under and overwhelmed and not myself—until I heard his voice.
I wanted to question Nox’s love for me, but his actions didn’t line up with the doubts that played in my head. He had still lied, still kept important truths from me, but he had also saved me. Kept me safe.Lovedme.
“Does it make me foolish?” I ask Selene. “Towantto forgive him? To want to try and start over without the lies? Without the confinement and secrets?”
“No, Rhea, it does not make you foolish. You both found love at a time and in a place that it was unlikely to blossom. One on a mission to ensure his kingdom’s safety. The other so sunken into her grief that merely breathing was a chore. Yet, despite everything working against you two, your hearts still managed to become linked to each other. That isnotsomething to balk at.”
Pressure pushes behind my eyes as I toy with the ends of my hair. Confronting Nox about where we went from here is, at the very least, not something I have to deal with right now. Selene huffs out a breath at that, but before she can lecture me on it, I quickly ask, “Can you see Bella?”
I have tried to avoid all thoughts of her, the pain so fresh that merely speaking her name feels like scrubbing salt into a wound. But, much like how I needed to know Alexi was with Alanna after his death, I want to know if the visions I picture of Bella—free and running through a forest—could be true as well.
“I can see her, yes. She still thinks of you.”
I can’t quite say it’sreliefthat I feel at that revelation, but my heart swells knowing that, even in the Afterlife, she hasn’t forgotten me. A warm tear traces down my cheek while tension of a different kind fills the spaces between my bones. It’s the kind that screams of my culpability and stupidity. My guilt and naivety.
“Do you want to talk about any of those things that plague you? I have an excellent listening ear.” Her playfulness doesn’t mask her earnestness, and though it’s strange for me to want to open up toanyoneabout the darkness I hold within me, with Selene, it inexplicably feels different. And I’m tired, so fucking tired, of having to keep everything held in. Even in the momentsbetween confessions of love and Bella’s death, Flynn and I were always trying to maneuver through an ever-changing maze of complicated situations. In our haste to leave the tower, I still hadn’t told him about all the things King Dolian had done to me. The abuse and mental torture, yes, but also the fact that he wanted me towedhim.
So easy it was to blame Nox for keeping secrets, and yet here I am, holding on to a malicious and barbed part of my history because of the shame I feel over it. But maybe here, in this space where there is both nothing and everything, I can begin to unravel the tangled mess of a person that I am. There is certainly room—and time—to do so. And, in all honesty, I have nothing else to lose.
“Where should I start?” I ask as red creeps up my neck and stains my cheeks.
But Selene sends a jasmine-laced caress over my shoulders, ruffling the silky black and white dress that I still wear. “Let’s start with something that is easier to talk about,” she suggests.
I close my eyes, forcing myself to pull up memories like one would go digging through an old dresser drawer. Brushing off the cobwebs of fragmented moments in time when I was not exactly happy but content. When the dust settles, I see Alexi, sitting in his green armchair across from me in the living area of the tower.
The glass balcony doors are open, glittering stars and glowing moonlight shining high above in the midnight sky. Candles flicker over the tea table, whole and not yet cracked from King Dolian’s abuse. Discarded playing cards lay in a messy pile covering it, and across from Alexi on the small black couch, an eleven-year-old version of me sits. Her hair is lazily pulled back from her face, her green eyes calculating as she looks at the cards in her hand and then back up at Alexi. He smirks, gesturing for her to lay her next card down. She gentlybrushes a fingertip over a card—what I remember to be the second highest card of the deck. Her smile grows as she lays it down, already basking in her impending victory.
“Little One, remember that playing cards is more than just being impulsive when you think you have a winning hand.” He folds his cards down on the table, his hands lingering on them as he looks at her.
I drink in every detail of Alexi in this memory—the salt and pepper of his hair and his broad jaw. The way he seems to have not aged from this moment to the last one I had with him.
“But there is only one other card that can beat mine. The odds are better that I will win.” Her voice is the higher-pitched cadence of a child, and her fingers tap on her knee as she looks at our guard. “I think you just don’t want to admit that I won.”
“I would happily lose to you, Little One, but there is a valuable lesson in this game too.”
Younger me rolls her eyes. Alexi was always trying to turn simple things into lessons, always trying to teach me something even when all I wanted to do was play. I miss that—misshim.
“I suppose you will delay my victory by telling me all about thislesson,” she groans, folding her arms over her chest.
“Such a brat,” he says through tilted-up lips. “Playing a game of cards can be just as multifaceted as life.” He lifts up the last card she played and flips it over so it’s now face down in a new pile. She opens her mouth to protest this, but Alexi shoots her a look over the candle flame that tells her to be patient. Sighing, she leans back against the couch. “It is easy to think that we can predict what will happen in life. That we can get enough information in the present to see the outcome of the future. But so rarely is that ever the case, as there are often things we can’t or don’t see.”
The child’s eyes drift out to the balcony, a calling to look at her little star friends drawing her attention.
“Little One.”
She snaps her head back towards his, “I’m sorry. Cards and life—I’m listening.” She gives him a big smile while tucking her long hair behind her ears.
“Gods above, this girl,” he says under his breath. She giggles, and though it is at his expense, Alexi softens under the sound. He leans back in his chair, his hands interlacing under his chin. “You think you have predicted the outcome of this game because of a single card—a single moment—correct?”
“Yes, because there is only one card in the entire deck that can beat mine.”
