Page 128 of Stealing Tink

The life itself—it’s… Well, it’s quiet, which isn’t so bad. Except for when I hear a joke in my head that fills the silence and I wonder whether I made it up and gave it the Nomad’s voice, or if somewhere out there, in another world, he actually said it.

I still dream of him every night, but instead of violence and murder, it’s the quiet moments we had. The stolen kisses. The love confessions. The lives we lived together.

Our daughters, Adele and Madeline.

They shouldn’t be, but they’re the same every time. Some strange Fated magic, I assume.

I miss them with a hole in my chest that will never be filled. Even if I find a husband here. Even if we settle down and have children, I don’t know that I’ll ever get over losing the girls I never got to meet, the girls I can now only speak to, hold, in memories and dreams.

Sometimes I wish I could go back to sleep. That I could climb back on this dais and go under, though to where, I am not sure. There’s no world that currently exists where I could have my husband and my children. Not without writing me back into a reality I’ve already lived, which Nox and Blaise have discouraged countless times as dangerous.

So sometimes I come in this room, when it all gets too overwhelming, and I grab a tapestry, lie on top of the dais, press my back to the marble, and close my eyes. I run my hands across this empty tapestry and will something, anything, to appear.

So far, it has never proved effective.

When my back starts to ache from lying on the marble, I take that as my cue and fold up the tapestry, hugging it to my chest one last time before I leave it on the dais and turn toward the door.

“If you could be written back in, is that the fate you would choose?” says a deep, feminine voice I don’t recognize.

I halt, my hand on the door, the voice calling me back. I turn to face her and my stomach bottoms out.

The figure before me is formed of shadows. They dance around her, making up her skirts. I can’t make out the features of her face, and although I don’t recognize her voice, something about the shape of her face is familiar, something about the way she carries herself, and I can’t quite place it.

Although, I suppose it’s possible I’ve come face-to-face with a Fate in another life. It’s not as if I would remember it if I had.

“Which one are you?” I ask, which seems the most important question at the moment, given each of the three Sisters’ personalities and vices.

“You didn’t answer my question,” she says.

“It would depend,” I say.

“On what?”

“On who else was in that other fate.”

The Fate cocks her head at me. Her hands are folded in front of her. She’s holding something, a chain dangling from her fingers, but I can’t make out what it is.

“You have a family here. You would leave them?”

I turn and look out the window. I can’t see Nox’s house from here, but I can see the path. Just another curve down the road is my parents’ house.

My mother and I talked just a few nights ago, and her voice rings in my head. It was the first time I’d told her about the twins. She’d cried with me, held my hand in hers, and told me the pain she’d experienced at losing me when I was a child. How she would have done anything to get me back.

How now that she’s seen my face again, she would do anything to get me my daughters back.

“I have two families,” I explain. “To be with one is to abandon the other.”

“Mmm,” says the Fate, thoughtful. Pondering. “So which would you choose?”

“Do I get a choice,” I ask, spinning around to face her, “or is this just one of your cruel games?”

“I do not consider myself cruel.”

“Then why the intrusive questions?”

“Because I am going to offer you a choice, and I want you to be certain about your decision.”

“Why does it matter to you whether I’m certain? You’re one of the ones who let the Nomad chase me down all these years, putting obstacles in our way. Obstacles to our happiness. You could have made sure we were together, that I didn’t have to kill him over and over and over. That he didn’t have to—” I stop, not wanting to cry in front of this creature.