My hands are slick with his blood. They tremble so hard my fingers ache. I press down where the wound is. My breath is a ragged, convulsing thing. Sobs break free and rattle up my throat. They sound like the storm, wild and animal.
“I’ll fix this,” I promise. “I’ll—” I choke on the rest.
He squeezes my hand once more, thumb tracing the backs of my knuckles. “I love you, Amanda,” he breathes, voice tearing out of him like paper.
“I love you too.” I press my lips to his again, clinging, willing. “I love you.”
His fingers loosen. The squeeze unravels like a thread. A final breath trembles in his chest, small and brief, thenthe empty, sinking whoosh of it slipping away.
My brain offers me soft denials: it’ll be okay, this is temporary, you’re fine. But I’m not fine. I haven’t been for a long, long time.
The realization seeps in slowly, and I feel it like winter in my bones—cold, patient, impossible to shake. I broke myself. Not betrayal. Not abandonment. Not the universe turning its back.
Me.
I am the only one responsible for how my life has turned out.
Every betrayal left me wounded, but it wasn’t those cuts that left me bleeding. It was the armor I built after. The bitterness I spit before anyone could hurt me again. The walls so high no one could climb them.
It’s all here. It became this very storm. My fear transmuted into ruin.
The fear that I am powerless—so I clung to control in the form of affirmations and positivity until they burned everything in reach.
The fear that I am unlovable—so I created a smiling, love-and-light persona, and when that didn’t work, I lashed out, raged before rejection could land.
The fear that I will always be left behind and alone—so I forced others away thinking that if I could control how they left, it would hurt less, keep me safe.
The storm is every one of those fears made flesh. Alive now, tearing across the edges of the world with my voice in its throat, my fire in its veins.
“Remember!” The word lashes the sky, stitched into the throat of the storm.
“Nothing changes if nothing changes,” I whisper, andthe words aren’t an empty affirmation. They’re a vow.
I broke this—myself, this kingdom, Declan—and I am the only one who can put it back together.
The storm claws at the stage and the rest of the camp, a living wound roiling up from the sand. Fire threads through the funnel of dust like veins lit from within, and the sound of it makes my teeth ache.
“Remember!”
Fortune wasn’t asking me to remember one moment, one lesson, one fixed truth. She wanted me to remember all of it—every scar, every joy, every sharp edge and soft place. A lifetime. My history. The collection of broken and burning pieces that made me into who I am.
And that’s what this kingdom needs too. Not a script or a performance. Not a single, polished story. It needs to remember itself—the whole of it. The fire and the ruin. The beauty and the grief. The truth it buried long ago.
Declan’s hand slides from mine as I push myself to my feet. The storm shoves me back, but I stay upright. My hair whips across my face, and sand bites at my skin like shards of glass. I know what to do.
I turn toward the storm and hurl my voice in a command that blazes a trail through the sky. “Hear me! I remember!”
Twenty-Five
“I know what you want from me! I know what to do now.”
The queens and their court watch from the safety of their platform, waiting for a miracle or a spectacle. I’m still not completely sure which they would prefer. Either way, they’re going to get the truth.
I climb down from the stage, and the moment my soles kiss sand, the ground answers. A shiver ripples out from my bare feet, concentric rings thrumming under the skin of the desert.
The Kingdom of Wands has been waiting. So have I. Every moment of my life has been preparing me for this one.
I reach up, visualizing my hand stretching through the clear, glassy eye of the storm to the heavens beyond.
