It was replaced by emptiness. The absence was deafening, worse than any noise.
The darkness started at Zara’s feet. Shadows pooling where there was nothing to cast them, dark and liquid, rising. Not falling — consuming. They moved like smoke and water, spiraling upward around her in a column that had no source and no end, and Zara stood in the center of it with an expression Ramona had never seen on her face before.
Fear. Real fear. Not the careful professional concern she brought to problems. Something older and more animal than that.
“Zara—”
The shadows were at her waist. Her hands.
Zara’s arm shot out through the dark, reaching. Her fingers stretched toward Ramona across the circle, certain and desperate all at once, and Ramona lunged for her — felt the air where Zara’s hand had been, almost, almost?—
“Ramona.” Her voice came from somewhere inside the dark, swallowed at the edges. “I love you. I promise?—”
The shadows closed.
Her hand was gone. The circle was empty. The air where Zara had been standing was perfectly still, as if nothing had disturbed it at all, as if she had never been there.
Ramona’s hand was still outstretched. Still reaching for nothing.
She was faintly aware that she was screaming Zara’s name as a pair of arms wrapped around her middle, pulling her back. She kicked and flailed, feral and broken, not caring, not able to care.
Her magic was free. Unfettered. Powerful beyond anything she’d imagined. She could feel it responding to her will, no longer fighting her, no longer sabotaged. The curse was broken.
She didn’t care about that either.
She was finally whole.
And she’d never felt more broken.
A hand was on her brow, and darkness came over her.
The last thing she thought was:
She’s gone.
Zara’s gone.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
Ramona wokeup in her childhood bedroom.
She knew it before she opened her eyes, just from the lavender sachets and old wood and that particular scent that belonged only to Greenbriar Manor. The mattress was too soft, the expensive kind that her mother insisted on. The sheets were a soft linen, cool against her skin.
She’d woken up here a thousand times as a child, as a teenager, during college breaks.
Never had it felt this wrong.
She opened her eyes. The ceiling was the same pale cream it had always been. The crown molding. The chandelier that was too fancy for a bedroom. Everything exactly as she remembered.
Everything except the silence.
The room wasn’t quiet — she could hear voices downstairs, muffled conversation, someone’s laugh.
The silence was inside of her, in the space where the tether used to be. Where she and Zara had been bound to each other.
For seven weeks, she’d had Zara’s presence constantly. A hum of awareness. The knowledge that she wasn’t alone.The feeling of another consciousness threaded through hers, separate but connected.
Now… nothing. An empty, terrible nothing.
