He’s shaking now, whole bodytrembling under the weight of years he didn’t know he lost. The moment Harper saidWho told you you could take my memories, something cracked wide open between the three of us, him, Harper, me. A dam that had been reinforced with years of corrupted magic simply… burst.
Images, voices, pain, things that never should have resurfaced this violently, flooded into Sebastian. I saw it in the way he staggered. In the way his hand went to his head like he was trying to hold it all in.
And Harper,
Harper looked like she had been gutted.
“She kept defying him,” I say quietly, lifting a hand to Sebastian’s forearm, not to remove him but to steady him. “She kept trying to leave him. Even when she didn’t have the memories, some part of her always tried to find you. She saw you in flashes, in dreams she couldn’t explain, and I-”
I exhale shakily.
“I thought maybe she was going mad,” I admit. “Seeing pieces of a boy she couldn’t name. Hoping for someone she didn’t remember. I heard rumors, years ago, that your uncle took you and Anne away from Myrindale. It didn’t make sense to her. It barely made sense to me.”
Sebastian’s fingers loosen slightly. His gaze flickers away, then returns to mine, haunted.
“So when I saw you that first day at Vireldan,” I continue, my voice thinning under the weight of the truth, “all I could think was that I wanted to fall to my knees and beg you for forgiveness. For what our father did. For what Harper endured. For what we kept from you.”
The tremor in his hands worsens.
“Your parents-” he starts again, voice thick with something darker now, heavier.
And something inside me fractures.
All the years of silence.
All the years of fear.
All the years of protecting Harper from remembering him, when all she ever did was try.
Anger rises, not at Sebastian, but at the ghosts he’s naming.
At our ghosts.
“Don’t,” I snap, not loud, but sharp enough that he stops mid-breath. “Don’t say their names. Not like they hold any power now.”
His jaw locks. His hands fall away from my shirt, balling into fists at his sides. He looks like a man torn between collapsing and setting the whole room on fire.
His voice breaks again when he finally speaks.
“They took everything from us.”
I swallow hard.
“I know.”
The words claw their way out of me before I even realize I’m speaking, because once the memories start unraveling, they don’t stop. They rip through me with jagged edges, and suddenly I’m reliving it...not just telling it.
“She… she killed them,” I manage, though the truth is far more complicated than those three words. My throat tightens, and I force myself to keep going because he deserves to know, because she deserves to have someone else carry even a part of this.
“At least, that’s what we believed at the time. It was only a few years before Vireldan.” My voice drags, memories flickering behind my eyes like an old filmstrip. “She’d finally been getting a grasp on her magic again. Not perfect, not controlled, but enough that she could channel it even after my father took her wand for good. She was furious. Hurt. Exhausted. And she’d been living with pieces of memories I had ripped out of her mind. They haunted her, those flashes of you, of Anne, of what happened that night in the manor.”
Sebastian’s hands loosen fractionally from my shirt. He’s listening now, really listening.
“It was like one night… everything she’d bottled up finally became too much. Every year of pain. Every memory she wasn’t supposed to have. Everything she’d survived.” My lungs tighten as the scene returns with brutal clarity. “That night of the fire, I found her crouched over my mother’s body. Completely still. Her palms on her chest. Pulling life from her, twisting it, manipulating it. Her eyes weren’t even her own color anymore. They were… empty. Dead. Consuming.”
Sebastian’s breath hitches. His grip falls away entirely.
“It didn’t take long for my father to find her,” I continue quietly, staring past him now, back into the memory. “And in the state she was in… she didn’t stop. She went for him too. Jumped onto him with her nails, carving at his face the way he carved her back for years. She wasn’t even thinking, she was drowning in everything her mind was trying to remember.”
