“A what?” she asked, her finger still between her teeth.
“This letter,” I flipped it over, “It was written with a quill.” My eyes snapped up to hers, and Fallon lifted her shoulders in an uneasy shrug. Any time I’d received an invite to the Order’s Chambers or any correspondence, it had always been with a quill pen and ink. But I didn’t recognize the handwriting. “Do you have the envelope?”
“No,” her shoulders sank, “No, I don’t.”
“I want you to think hard, Fallon. Did it have any seal on the envelope? Like a wax seal with the Norse Woods symbol? The star inside the circle?”
“No, I know the symbol you’re talking about. I would’ve remembered that.”
I folded the letter into a perfect square. “I’m keeping this,” I told her, leaning to the side to tuck it into my back pocket.
I knew no one else in Weeping Hollow who wrote with a quill pen and ink. It had to be from the Order, and if it were, I had every right to question Pruitt as to why someone lured Fallon back home, knowing her father never wanted her to return.
However, confronting them without solid proof could backfire or draw attention to Fallon. For now, the only option was to move forward with the plan to steal the books back from Sacred Sea, see if the answers I needed were there. It was a major risk … but I was going down anyway, may as well bring the Order down with me.
“You already have so much going on. This is my problem, not yours,” Fallon insisted.
I placed my hand over her bruised and purple throat, not thinking, but Fallon didn’t flinch. She tilted her head to the side, stretching her neck and offering herself to me, and I watched her as she closed her eyes in my touch as my palm slid up the length of her neck.
The small reaction from her made my mouth part behind my mask, words sprinting from my chest but never making it into the air between us. I’d choked her only nights before, and her trust in me was unconditional. At that moment, I almost told her I loved her, and the sudden thought caused my heart to splinter.
I couldn’t love her, so instead, I pressed my lips together, traced her sharp jawline with my thumb. “Please, it’s a distraction from my tragic life.”
“There’s something else...”
I raised a brow. “What is it?”
“I’m gonna sound crazy,” she started, shaking her head with her eyes downward.
I lifted her chin. “Tell me.”
“Remember Beth Clayton?”
I swallowed. “Yeah,” I said, and my voice shook. I cleared my throat. “Yes, what about her?”
“I can’t help but think someone thought she was me. Like they got the wrong girl. She’s the only girl I know in all of Weeping Hollow who has the same hair color as me. Same height as me. Same build, everything. What if whoever killed her thought she was me?”
My fingers dropped from her. The possibilities of my shadow-blood attempting to kill Fallon again fogged my head, fisted my heart. Would I ever have it under control? Was this all a crazy coincidence?
My eyes bounced between hers, wanting to believe I could never hurt her, but I already did once. What’s not to say I wouldn’t try again, and worse, succeed?
Fallon had this plea in her eyes, asking for me to believe her thoughts and that she wasn’t alone in them. She had these eyes that trusted I had nothing to do with it, and it made me feel like a traitor somehow.
“I believe you,” I told her, then tore my gaze away for a moment before hitting hers again, unable to lie to her. “But, what if I killed Beth Clayton? The possibility isn’t too far-fetched, considering …”
“No,” Fallon shook her head, leaning closer and grabbing my hand. “I know what you’re thinking, don’t go there. You didn’t send me a letter, so it couldn’t have been you. That’s ridiculous—” she paused, then, “Someone else was trying to get me here. Someone else did this.”
Clarence confirmed it was me who killed Beth Clayton, but I had a feeling there was nothing I could say to convince Fallon otherwise. “You have too much faith in me when you shouldn’t.”
We stared at each other for a long moment, then, “She came to me, you know,” she drew closer to me and rested her knee against my side, “Her spirit did. She was trying to tell me something, but she couldn’t because her lips were sewn shut.”
“Whoever killed her knows you can see spirits,” I concluded, trying to rack my brain for a memory of the incident for answers. Why couldn’t I remember?
“That’s what I was thinking too,” she whispered, looking at me but notreallylooking at me. Behind those eyes, her mind was somewhere else.
“Don’t act like you’re scared now, Fallon Grimaldi,” I told her. “You’re not afraid of anything, remember?”
“You know that’s not true.”
