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She nodded once and waved a hand in dismissal. “Go. Before I change my mind.”

I walked out into the November night. The strengthened curse still gripped me, turning every step into a negotiation between my feet and the ground.

Jacqueline Fortman hadn’t apologized, repented, or admitted she was wrong. But she had agreed to reconsider.

From her, that was practically a religious conversion.

I made it down the steps without falling on my ass.

Two miracles in one night seemed greedy, but I took them.

Chapter Thirteen

The summons came at dawn.

I woke to the sound of ravens on my windowsill. There were three of them, black as ink, and each carrying a silver thread in its beak. The threads wove themselves into words against the glass: Come home. Choose.

My mother’s calling card. Dramatic, ancient, and utterly terrifying.

I stared at the message for ten minutes, my heart hammering against my ribs.

Logan had visited my mother the night before. He had begged, humbled himself, and tried to reason with her. Some foolish part of me had expected that to matter. I had expected a little compassion, a possible compromise, or at least some sign that she had listened.

But this was Jacqueline Fortman. She didn’t compromise. She commanded.

I dressed carefully in the formal robes of a coven heir. The black silk was embroidered with silver runes that marked the position I had earned.

If I was going to walk into the lion’s den, I would do it as myself. Not the daughter my mother wanted me to be, but the witch I had fought to become.

Logan was still asleep when I left, his face peaceful in a way it never was when he was awake. The curse she’d strengthened after our attempted ritual left him exhausted, his body fighting against magic that wanted him broken. I kissed his forehead, whispered that I’d be back, and prayed I wasn’t lying.

The coven house was silent when I arrived. No servants, no acolytes, no whispered conversations in the hallways. Just empty rooms and the weight of my mother’s power pressing down like a physical force.

Delia waited at the foot of the stairs.

She wore her formal coven robes, but one sleeve was inside out, and her nose ring was missing. For Delia, that qualified as visible panic.

“You shouldn’t be here,” I whispered.

“Neither should you.” She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the portrait gallery. “Your mother cleared the house because she doesn’t want witnesses.”

“That sounds reassuring.”

“I’m serious, Carrie. Something is wrong.”

She pressed a small object into my palm: an old silver locket, warm from her skin. Inside was a faded miniature portrait of a young Jacqueline standing beside a human man in work clothes. My mother was smiling. It wasn’t the controlled curve she used at ceremonies, but a wide, reckless smile I had never seen.

“Who is he?”

“I don’t know. I found it behind a ward in the archive. The spell around it carries your grandmother’s signature.”

The man had one arm around my mother’s waist. She leaned into him as if she trusted the world not to punish her for being happy.

“Mother said humans were liabilities.”

“Your mother says feelings are liabilities. That doesn’t mean she was born believing it.”

On the back of the portrait, two words had been written in my mother’s hand: My choice.