As the evening wears on, we make our way around the room, conversing with a thousand fucking people, most of whom I don’t want to speak to. But Arienna is keen to meet them all, and so I stay well into the night.
An hour to midnight, my eyes keep flicking to the clock. Jace stays by our sides, and my hand burns with the desire to be stabbed before Aurelia’s anniversary is over.
Turning to me while she’s mid-conversation with a noble, my wife frowns.
Then her eyes flick to Jace.
A sadness pooling across her face, she grabs my hand and says her goodbyes. Pulling me outside, she turns into my arms so I can fly her back to the castle. The fact that she noticed and realised what I need… My wings snapping open, I duck my head and kiss her for the entire way back.
Nicholas joins us sometime in the air. He lands beside us on the balcony to the royal chambers. The energy pouring off Jace is eating into the three of us, binding us with a memory that can never be forgotten.
But perhaps it is time to heal…
Turning to my brother, hating myself for what I’m about to ask of him, I say softly, “What caused your scars?”
I want to finally let the three of us heal, but I don’t want to live without the memory of what I did, without the only memento I have of my sister.
Nicholas stumbles as he turns to me, his face as pale as the moonlight shining through the balcony behind us.
“Helfire,” he rasps. “She threw a bottle at me before…”
He trails off, then looks away. Arienna wraps her arms around him, squeezing tight. Closing his eyes, he hugs her back, his muscles shuddering with a weight he no longer has to carry alone.
I clasp him on the shoulder as I look at Jace. “If you’re okay with it, I want it to scar permanently this time.”
His muscles lock tight as he nods at me. I can see it in his eyes, the desire to continue this tradition until one of us dies, but Aurelia would’ve wanted this.
She would’ve wanted me to look after him.
Would’ve wanted me to stop using him for my own pain.
Every year, I made Jace relive his ‘failure’ to save his Arienna. How the fuck he hasn’t killed me yet for that, I don’t know.
But it’s time to be a better friend than I have been.
“Soak it in helfire first,” Nicholas says, pulling away from my wife, his voice shaking as much as his body. She holds his hand still, refusing to let go, and his knuckles are white as he grips her.
“Thank you,” I say, my fists clenching with a need to kill his bitch of an ex-wife.
Turning from me, he continues down the hall. We make it to my chambers, where he immediately goes to grab a bottle of ambrosia from the kitchenette. Jace waits for him to move out of the way before he digs out the helfire and pulls a knife free of his belt. It’s the same one he always stabs me with, the one he always carries but never uses outside of one day a year. It’sthe same one he stabbed me with originally, a blade of guilt and pain.
I place my hand on the counter. He uncorks the bottle with his teeth. Arienna tries to take it from him, but he doesn’t let go. They stand there staring at each other for a few seconds.
Then with a sharp nod, he releases it. Turning around, he plays with the knife in his hand, twirling it with the same energy eating him up inside.
Facing me, Arienna gives me a small, comforting smile. Then she pours the helfire over me. After emptying most of the bottle, she moves over and holds my other hand. Jace steps up to the side she vacated, the knife still twirling, a gate over his eyes.
“Are you sure you’re okay with this?” I ask him, willing to let him stab me year after year if he needs to, if he isn’t yet ready to let go of this himself. Fuck. He watched me find my happiness while he’s still suffering the hole in his heart. For him, I’ll suffer until I die.
“She would have wanted this,” he rasps. His forgiveness. Him moving on. My sister loved him and never would have wanted him to stay this tormented.
But with our stabbing ritual gone or not, I know he’ll never move on. Every time Jace fucks someone, he punishes himself, carving his guilt into his skin. The only place he never touches is the thigh with Aurelia’s tattoo. He gave it to himself after she died – a mirror copy of the one he’d forced on her when they’d been children. It’d been payback for her getting him sixmonthsof latrine duty.
If she hadn’t been my sister, I would’ve helped him kill her for that.
But the bastard loved her even then – well before she loved him back. I didn’t notice that at the time, but looking back on it, all the signs were there.
Perhaps in his next life, they’ll be reincarnated together and he can finally have the happiness he deserves, that they both deserve.
