“It shouldn’t be,” I mutter. “It’s just a bell.”
“That’s a Veda bell. It’s NEVER ‘just’ anything.”
I rub my temples. “I was hoping you’d say it’s fake. Or decorative. Or an antique someone misplaced.”
“Piper,” she whispers, voice softening. “It’s humming.”
I go still. “You can feel it too?”
She nods, expression sobering. “It feels… old. And stubborn.” She hesitates. “Kind of like you.”
I glare. “Not helpful.”
“Okay, okay.” She folds her hands. “Let’s take this one step at a time.”
I meet her gaze. “What do you know about Veda?”
Rhea sighs. “Not much. She’s practically a myth in our family. A name in a ledger. A sketch in an old book, if you will. The one who ‘broke the balance’—whatever that means.”
“Slade says she lied,” I mutter, staring down at the tarnished little bell.
Rhea lifts both eyebrows. “Oh, I remember.”
She waves a hand dramatically. “Veda wasn’t the victim, she was the architect,” she says, voice deepening into an overly dramatic imitation of Slade. “She ran from the bond. She wanted supremacy.”
I pinch the bridge of my nose. “Rhea—”
She softens, leaning forward. “Look, Pipes… I didn’t want to hear it either. But some of what he said lines up with the old coven rumors. Not the official stuff, but the things our great-aunts whispered when they’d had too much peppermint liquor.”
I blink. “What rumors?”
“That the curse wasn’t born out of punishment.”
She lowers her voice. “But out of a choice. A… break. A severing.”
My stomach tightens. “A severing of what?”
Rhea shakes her head helplessly. “I don’t know. A bargain? A sacrifice? A bond she didn’t want? But something this old—” She gesturestoward the bell. “It would hide itself until the right Bellamy came along.”
“And you think that’s me.”
“Iknowit’s you,” she whispers.
The words land heavy. Ancient. Inescapable. I swallow. “So what do we do?”
Rhea stares at the bell again, shoulders tense. “We investigate. Carefully.”
She unwraps the linen, exposing the tarnished brass. Nothing glows. It doesn’t rattle. Nothing hums. It looks like a trinket. Except when Rhea brushes her fingertips across the metal—a soft pulse of air ripples through my magic.
Rhea recoils instantly. “Okay. NOPE. That is definitely holding a memory. Or a message. Or trauma.” She shudders. “Probably trauma.”
“Fantastic,” I mutter. “Super reassuring.”
Rhea points at it. “Ring it.”
“ABSOLUTELY NOT.”
“Just lightly!”
