“I wish I could.” Her voice breaks. She slams her hand against the side table, the sound so sharp I flinch. “Imagine seeing someone you’ve known your whole damn life and being unable to say it. Imagine being forced to watch themforget you. Forget everything. It’s hell. We’ve been stuck in hell for years.”
Her words gut me. “Who can I trust?”
Instead of answering, she moves to a cabinet, cluttered and full of oddities. After rummaging, she pulls out a small wooden box. Without explanation, she presses it into my hands.
“You’ve never been senile,” Althea whispers. “Your memories have been tampered with. So have ours. So has his. Ares has spent years trying to untangle what’s real and what your father implanted.”
My stomach caves inward.
“He’ll wake soon,” she continues, wiping her eyes and stepping aside. “Hungry, furious, ready to kill the Fetch that did this.”
But her voice fades as I open the box.
A photograph stares back at me, five witches and warlocks in Shadeborne attire, arms slung around each other like they’re carved from the same joy. Liam’s grin takes up half the frame, Theo pressed against him with matching dimples. Althea stands beside them, red hair blazing as she flashes a thumbs-up.
And beside her is… me.
Laughing. Glowing. Leaning into a boy who holds me as though he’s always held me. His arm crosses over my shoulders; his fingers curl at my waist as though it’s the most natural place for them to rest. My hand is on his chest. My head is tilted toward him. My smile is nothing like the smiles I force now...it’s alive.
I lift the corner of the photo to reveal the face I somehow already know is there.
Ares.
Not Sebastian. Not a stranger. Ares, smiling at me withsoft blue eyes filled with devotion I’ve never seen on him in my life.
The world detonates.
The photo slips from my hands and hits his bed as I stumble backward into the wall. My pulse thrashes violently. Pain spikes behind my eyes, sharp and blinding, as if something inside my mind is trying to break out or break me. Althea lunges forward, gripping my wrists as I try to claw the pain out of my skull.
“What sick game are you playing?” The words rasp out of me, wild and broken.
“Don’t listen to the block,” she urges, hands trembling as she forces me to meet her gaze. “Navigate it. Push through.”
“I don’t have a block,” I protest, but the moment the lie leaves my lips, my vision splinters.
Warm fingers clamp around my arm. Althea jerks back instantly.
My hands fall away from my eyes.
Ares stands, unsteady and wounded, but fully awake. Fully conscious. Fully aware.
His gaze drops to the photograph, then lifts to me.
Horror widens his blue eyes.
My breath stops entirely.
“Ares-” Althea tries, but whatever soft horror sat in his eyes moments ago has reshaped itself into something sharp. Something furious.
“Get out, Althea.” His voice is a low command, brittle at the edges. She freezes, her brows pulling inward.
“I was trying-”
“I know what you were trying.” He cuts her off before she can breathe again. “And it could have killed her. Leave. And take her with you.”
The picture frame lies beside him, half-slid off the bed from where he shoved it away as though the sight of itburns. He won’t look at it; he won’t look at me either, not fully. I place a hand over his, and the immediate loosening of his grip feels like sinking into warm water after drowning.
“Ares…” My voice cracks open around the shape of his name.
