Vera gasped at her expression: that of a cornered animal, knowing it’s finished. There wasn’t any fight in it. Arthur approached her accordingly, his hands out before him with his palms up.
“Please,” he said, reaching out toward her but not closing the last six inches between them. “Please, let me help you.”
It was Guinevere, her shoulders falling, who grabbed his hand like it was a life raft and pulled into him, stiff against his chest. Arthur closed his arms around her. He held her until she leaned back from him, the wild look replaced with something Merlin saw as being calmed but that Vera recognized more intimately as resignation.
Her stomach churned as Guinevere hooked her hand behind Arthur’s neck and kissed him, desperation in her taut limbs. She grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled for dear life. He yielded to the tug, sinking into her kiss as he stumbled forward.
Merlin’s relief came in a flood. He believed it was a show of love. He saw devotion. He inserted his interpretation of Guinevere’s feelings—love, gratitude, and yearning. But this woman who was so identical to Vera felt like she was a sister Vera had never met, and Vera knew better. It was wrong for Arthur, too. His eyes flickered open, and they were wrought with worry, not love. Not even arousal.
What Vera experienced in her body wasn’t pain at first. Discomfort, certainly. Nausea, absolutely. It wasn’t so bad, and if it worked to bring Guinevere’s memories in union with her mind, it would all be worth it.
It hit like a boulder dropped on her head from above; sudden, unexpected, and with blinding pain. It set fire to Vera’s lungs—every bit of her skin hurt. There wasn’t a place on her body that wasn’t in burning torment: eyes, scalp, even her tongue.
Then she understood why. Merlin was trying to combine this memory with the tender one of Vincent. He pressed them together as he’d done with the other. Maybe it was because the emotions of it weren’t even close to being genuinely parallel or because there was so much pain in both memories. It was agony beyond anything Vera had ever known. This was what torture felt like.
It only got worse. The memory wouldn’t stick. Merlin pushed harder.
“Stop!” she screamed, barely able to find the breath for it.
He paused but didn’t release her. Merlin maneuvered his memory around hers, prowling the edges and searching for a way in.
“We’re so close,” he mumbled.
He pushed, and Vera whimpered. “Stop, stop, stop,” she said frantically, expecting him to pull away as her tears flowed. He’d promised he would stop.
He began pulling the memory back. “Almost there,” he said.
Vera realized too late that Merlin was only moving back to build momentum. The calm lasted two breaths before the foreign memory came hurtling toward her own, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. It smashed into Vera’s memory with such force that she screamed in a way she hadn’t done since she was a child, with all the power she could muster from her aching lungs. The new memory shoved so violently against the old one that she thought she would shatter from the pressure. There couldn’t be a pain worse than this. In the midst of that unrelenting anguish, she would have been relieved to die.
But her chest continued to rise and fall. She tried to moan, but there was no air in her. Merlin relentlessly shoved against her memory.
And then it happened.
She didn’t shatter, but the memory of Vincent did. The shards of it exploded and impaled her mind in all directions.
Vera gasped in one agonizing lungful of air and shouted with all the force of her body a snarling “No!” as she snapped her eyes open. She heard a thud and clatter on the floor behind her. She hadn’t realized that she’d sprung to her feet in the same motion, freed from Merlin’s grasp. She spun to find him on his back on the floor behind her, uninjured and rising to his elbows. She took ragged, furious, horrified breaths and glared at him.
The implications of her shattered memory seeped into her. She knew what it was, knew she’d been in her bed with Vincent. She could remember his name, but the memory itself—the image, the details, the feelings—they were all rapidly fading like a dream that slipped away on waking. Water already down the drain.
Most horrifying, Vincent’s face was gone. Just gone. His image had been erased not only from this memory but from all of her memories. She knew who he was; she could even describe his features, but it was a poor rendition, a sketch an artist makes after a frantic witness describes the assailant. It was not him.
“Did you know?” Vera snarled. “Did you know what it would do to my memory?”
She hoped he’d say no. She silently begged him to, but he only stared at her. It was as good as a confession.
“Oh my God,” she breathed, her hands flinging to her head, gripping her hair. She’d never asked him if the procedure was safe. Never thought to ask if there’d be loss. “You’re a fucking psychopath!”
When Vera wheeled on him, he was rising to his feet and had the nerve to act disappointed. “I thought you understood how dire our situation—”
“I do! But all I had left of him was memory—” Her traitorous voice broke, and Vera clenched her teeth to steady her breath. “He was the only one outside of my parents who could slip through this fucking curse and know me.” She’d never wanted to hit someone so badly, yet her whole body quaked. Her fury took all her energy. She had to drop one hand to the top of the desk to steady herself. “What happened to stopping if I said stop?”
“It needed to work,” Merlin said without apology. “I didn’t want you to have to do that again.”
“Oh, I’m not doing it again. You want Arthur to connect with me? Fuck with his brain. I’m done.” Vera stormed to the door, feeling emptier than ever.
“Guinevere—”
Vera turned to glare at him from the doorway. “I thought being brought back to bear a child would have been the worst thing you could have done to me. But you gave me a whole goddamn life to fatten me up with parents who loved me and with Vincent, who—” She stopped and swallowed heavily. “And for what? So I’d have more to sacrifice in exchange for Guinevere’s memories?”
