“Whatever that Fetch did to me,” he says, barely above a whisper, “whatever pain I’m in, it’s nothing compared to watching you stare at that photo with no idea what it means. Just go. Please.”
A plea from him is worse than a wound. Althea grips my wrist gently this time, understanding the difference between force and necessity. She leads me out and shuts the door behind us, the sound a clean severing of the air. She exhales, shoulders slumping as if she’s been bracing her entire spine against something she cannot name aloud.
The room around us feels smaller now, too warm, too saturated with herbs and secrecy. “Why can’t I remember that photo?” My voice arrives thin and trembling. My hand is still warm from touching him; everything else feels cold.
“Same reason Liam can’t,” she mutters, settling onto her couch with a glass of deep red liquid. “Same reason Theo can’t. Heaven bless those two.”
“Theo and Liam are together,” I say softly, sinking onto the seat beside her. “Have they always been? Did my father’s magic twist something between them too? What kind of spell is strong enough to fabricate an entire past like that photograph?”
The moment the question leaves my mouth, Althea jolts upright. Her eyes widen in full alarm. “What do you mean Theo and Liam are together?”
“They’re together,” I repeat, feeling suddenly foolish. “Like… together.”
She grabs my shoulders before I can lean away, forcingmy gaze into her own. Her fingers grip as though she’s holding the edge of a cliff.
“That’s not possible,” she breathes. “How is that possible?”
A throat clears behind us. Ares stands in the doorway, leaning heavily into the frame. His torso is still bare, the ink, the scars, the raw wound down his side, but he holds himself with guarded steadiness. His gaze flickers between the two of us before settling on me.
“He died,” Ares says, voice quiet but weighted. “And came back. That’s how.”
“Then do it to her,” Althea snaps suddenly, pointing at me as if she’s offering an obvious solution.
My heart lurches into my throat. “Wait-”
“I can’t,” Ares says before she can finish. His arms fold over his chest, and yet the posture feels defensive rather than closed. “I’m the only one who can use his magic to reverse something like death.”
“Then what’s the issue?” Althea demands, stepping closer. Every breath she takes shakes with urgency.
Ares’s gaze drags back to me as if reluctantly pulled. For a moment, something naked and unguarded appears in his expression, a truth he’d rather swallow than speak.
“If she dies,” he murmurs, the words scraping out of him like torn silk, “so will I.”
The world stops. My stomach drops. Every inch of me tilts toward him with a gravity I don’t understand.
“What do you mean?” The question tastes like dread.
Althea lets out a laugh, low and humorless, the sound of a wound reopening. Her head falls back as if the ceiling itself is a cruel revelation.
“Leave it to Andrew Shadeborne,” she says, voice trembling with fury and resignation, “to bind his daughter to the one man capable of saving her memories. A unity tie forged in blood and magic. Of course he would do this. Of course.”
She barely finishes the sentence before the world around me folds inward. The edges of the room blur, darkness rushing up like a tide. My knees buckle. My hearing tunnels.
Ares calls my name.
Althea grabs my arms.
The floor disappears.
And everything else, every lie, every memory, every impossible truth, collapses into black.
46
HARPER
Steam coils around me as I sip the tea Althea brewed, the heat doing nothing to quiet the pounding in my skull. I curl deeper into the corner of her couch, wrapped in a borrowed blanket, trying to recover from whatever memory-blackout storm tore through me. My pulse still flutters too fast. My hands won’t stop trembling. And Ares and Althea keep exchanging these glances that look like shared guilt or shared knowledge, something I’m apparently always last to learn.
“What the hell is a unity tie?” The words scrape out raw, my voice thinner than I want it to be.
