“What is this? What are you up to? Why am I here, Winifred? Answer me!”
He didn’t.
He only circled me like a patient predator, his footsteps muffled against the ground. He stopped on my other side, his face turned upwards. The full moon hung high and round above us like an unblinking eye, its pale light spilling down the clearing in silver sheets.
But this moon wasn’t just full. Its light had a strange bright clarity. It glimmered almost white-blue, casting cold fires across Winifred’s face as he dropped his gaze back to me.
“It’s full moon. But this isn’t just any full moon,” he murmured, voice thick. “It’s a cosmic window, Sanora. Her light tonight reaches through the veil, light she hasn’t given in centuries but blessed us with tonight.”
“I don’t give a fuck. What does that have to do with me?”
“You see, Sanora…” Winifred stepped closer, palms flat on the steel slab, his breath ghosting across my face as he leaned in. “I wouldn’t be doing this if you’d just listened to me. Know that I tried every possible thing in my power to keep you alive.”
Saliva gathered hot in my mouth, and without thinking, I spat it at him, satisfied as it landed close to his mouth. “Release me and go fuck yourself. I didn’t ask for your help. I know you’re doing thissolely to save face. You just don’t want to fuck up the mission your bloodline has been carrying for centuries.”
“I see. He told you all about that,” Winifred drawled, wiping his sleeve across his face. “Now you know. I can’t fail the moon.” His eyes flicked upwards again to that white-blue disc above us. “That is why we’re ending it under her watch, so she can grant you an easy passing and bless our work tonight.”
I frowned, my heartbeat pounding against my ribs so hard it felt like it might burst through. “What work?”
“Giving you back to the one who made you.”
I froze. “You mean killing me?”
He nodded once. “I don’t have any other choice—”
“Are you sick? Thrax doesn’t even want the soul. If you watched him closely instead of hating on him for nothing, you’d know.”
“Did he tell you he doesn’t want it?” Winifred’s expression didn’t shift to relief, instead his features twisted further, his anger knotting deeper, dragging his face into an older, uglier mask.
“I think it’s quite obvious.”
“He’s manipulating—”
I screamed.
The sound tore up my throat like shattered glass, raw and uncontained. Birds hidden in the trees above burst into flight, scattering into the night sky. My heels dug into the slab beneath me, scraping metal as my body arched.
When my voice finally cracked and fell, I glared at him through heaving breaths. “I don’t want to hear that shit from your mouth when you barely even know him. He’s not manipulating me. He never had.”
“Oh, really? You think you know him? You don’t know anything about him, Sanora.”
I shook my head, recalling the nights we’d spent together, nights when he’d slowly tell me about himself, piece by piece, one story after another. We were getting there. I was getting to know all of him.He was letting me into his life. He’d told me the things he’d done all these centuries to keep himself busy, even for a while. He’d told me.
“I guarantee that I know him more than you do.”
“And your conclusion is that he’s going to let his only chance at becoming mortal again slip away from his grasp?”
“If the curse ends with your death, then let me suffer forever...just don’t leave me.”
He’d said that, and I’d seen in his eyes how much he meant those words.
Tears blurred my vision. “Maybe if you weren’t blind, you’d see it too.”
Winifred’s shoulders sagged as he moved back, circling to my other side. “Everyone standing here is here because they care for you. They walked for twelve days through dangerous and deadly paths. For you.Wewalked through a cursed and deadly forest foryou. Know that this was a backup plan, Sanora. I never meant to let you die at all.”
Cold settled in my stomach as realisation clicked into place. “You disappeared from Nimorran for weeks because you went to get them?”
He shook his head slowly. “Oh, no.” He gestured to the hooded figures surrounding me, their hands connected with strips of cloth. “I went to look for them. I went out of Nimorran to gather them, to prepare them in case there was a need for this option. They’re all of my blood. Distant blood, but still blood. When that cursed bastard broke my bones—bones that will never completely heal—I knew then I had to call them to Nimorran. You were hopeless. You fell in love with him.”
