She stops. Looks at me with polite confusion.
“I’m sorry, do I know you? How do you know my name?”
Of course. In this timeline, we haven’t met yet. I’m a stranger to her.
“I...” I trail off, my eyes catching on something in her basket. A newspaper. The date visible on the front page.
I read it.
Read it again.
The date is one day before I first appeared in Devyn’s chapel. One day before the wedding that started everything.
Which means Devyn isn’t married yet.
And Abigail is still alive.
Chapter Sixteen
THE OTHER KINGS WEREalready waiting when Devyn arrived.
The forest convergence point looked the same as it always did—ancient trees, mist curling between them, amber light filtering through the canopy in slanted columns. The kind of wild beauty that made humans feel small and insignificant. His soldiers had secured the perimeter. No hikers would stumble upon them today.
Quinn stood like a statue carved from ice, silver-blond hair catching the weak sunlight. Skye leaned against an oak with deceptive casualness, golden and warm, though his eyes were anything but. Wolfe paced at the edge of the clearing, a predator who couldn’t stand still.
They’d all felt it. The summons that wasn’t a summons—just a shared knowledge, bone-deep, that they needed to be here. Now.
“We saw it.” Skye’s voice was uncharacteristically grim. “She went back to her old world.”
Devyn’s blood turned to ice.
He had asked for this. He hadplannedfor this. Hurt her to keep her safe. Shattered her in front of his entire household so thoroughly that she would have no reason to stay, no hope to cling to, nothing left but the door Hewhay offered.
So why did it feel like his chest had been hollowed out with a rusted spoon?
“The Bailey here.” Quinn said quietly. “No one remembers her anymore.”
Of course they didn’t.
This was the cost of being marked by Hewhay. You didn’t even have the right to grieve, because the people around you had never seen what you lost. His staff would go about their duties with no memory of the queen who’d learned their names, who’d made Margueritewink,who’d defended him at Court with escalating tales of puppies and blizzards until even his enemies were laughing.
Bailey Sutton had never existed here.
Only to him. Only in his memory, where she would live forever—violet eyes and secret dimples and the way she saidyou’re blushingright before he kissed her to shut her up.
“Why did you send her away?” Wolfe’s voice was a low growl. “Did she turn out to be one of the others?”
The others.
Nameless beings that wanted to destroy worlds for the sake of destroying. Passages carved out of sacrificed blood. They weren’t like Devyn and his brothers, who’d been brought through Hewhay to fill a need, to protect, to serve. The others came through different doors—darker ones—and they left nothing but ruin in their wake.
Abigail had been killed by such a one. They’d known the moment they saw her corpse. The markings on her body weren’t just violence. They were ritual.
And whoever that man was—whatever he was—could have set his sights on Bailey next.
“No.” Devyn’s voice came out rough. Scraped raw. “She wasn’t one of them. She was—”
The pain hit all four of them at once.
