I pause, forcing a breath past the tightness in my ribs.
“And then she collapsed. All that energy, all that rage… it drained her completely. She could barely breathe. It was the first time in years I saw her powerless.”
I close my eyes for a moment, steadying myself.
“It was our only chance. Our one way out. I set the house on fire, grabbed her, and ran into the forest.” My voice drops lower. “We wandered for days. She barely woke. And then Locke found us in the Forbidden Forest and everything changed.”
Sebastian sinks slowly back onto his heels, all the fight bleeding out of him, replaced with something hollow and heavy. His eyes are glassed over, as if the weight of everything, the memory, the loss, the years, has finally crushed through whatever walls he tried to build.
“All those years,” he whispers. “She was right there in my mind. And I had no idea.”
I look at him, really look at him, and something in my chest tightens. He’s not just angry now. He’s grieving in real time for a past he never knew he had.
“And now she’s just beyond that door,” I say quietly, glancing toward his bedroom door. “Alive. Waiting. Still carrying all of that alone.” I swallow hard. “So go. Please. Go be with her. Before either of you get swallowed whole by what was taken from you.”
Sebastian rises slowly to his feet. He hesitates at the threshold, turning just enough that the lamplight catches the small downward tug of his lips, an expression I remember vividly from years ago.
“I think,” he says, voice nearly a whisper, “that I missed you, Liam.”
The confession hits harder than I expect. Pain tinged with something that used to be boyhood but isn’t anymore.
A smile tugs at my mouth without me meaning it to. “I know.”
He nods once, then reaches for the doorknob. The sound of the latch lifting seems impossibly loud in the quiet room.
And then he slips inside, leaving me alone with the ghosts we both just resurrected.
HARPER
I stand with my arms crossed and my foot tapping uncontrollably against the marble floor, the rhythm sharp enough to keep my nerves awake. The moon outside the tower window is barely visible, swallowed behind thick clouds that turn the night into a muted haze. It’s been nearly an hoursince Liam disappeared behind Sebastian’s bedroom door, the lock sliding shut with a finality that made even Theo flinch. The two of them had marched past me, well, Sebastian marched, Liam was dragged, burst into his room, and the slam that followed rattled the lantern hooks on the walls.
Now it’s just me and Theo occupying one of the quiet alcoves in the Vespera common room, both of us pretending we aren’t listening for every raised voice bleeding through that door. Liam has placed himself directly in the path of Sebastian’s grief, rage, and rediscovered memories, because of course he has. My ridiculous, self-sacrificing brother. Always first in line to take the blame for a storm that wasn’t entirely his making.
But the ache twisting through me doesn’t stop with him.
All those memories.
Taken from me as if they were nothing, as if the pieces of my life could simply be plucked away like frayed ends of a thread.
Even now, I’m not certain which pieces are real, which have been stitched together wrong, or which were shoved back into my mind when Blue Eyes cornered me earlier tonight. The blurred edges of what’s mine and what’s altered bleed into each other until I can’t breathe.
Behind the closed door, voices rise, sharp and impossible to decipher. Then silence again. Then another shout. My body tenses with each muffled spike in volume.
Theo sits beside me on the cushioned bench, tapping his wand against his palm in a nervous rhythm he probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing. His pale eyes flick toward the hallway every time the argument inside Sebastian’s room grows louder.
He’s anxious about something, and eventually it becomes too much to ignore.
“What’s wrong?” I ask, letting my head fall back againstthe wall. The stone is cool against my skull, grounding in a way my thoughts refuse to be.
Theo swallows, hesitating. “I know you saw something before you grabbed your brother.”
His fingers twist together in his lap, restless. It’s strange, seeing a boy who reads the world through senses sharper than vision appear so uncertain.
A faint memory surfaces: Liam on the floor, looking entirely caught off guard… Theo with flushed cheeks and a poorly tucked shirt… a moment I walked in on at precisely the wrong time.
Or right time, depending on who you ask.
“I saw him and you,” I murmur. “Though I feel like you think I witnessed something far more… ambiguous than what was actually happening.”
