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“I’m not afraid of him hurting me, nor anyone else.”

“No. What you fear is worse, isn’t it? Uglier. Deeper.”

My chest tightened, that annoying feeling twisting inside me as she dared to speak of it as if she knew anything about it at all.

“Tell me, are you aware you’re in love with him?”

I laughed. “You’re mad.”

“Yes. Obviously. But I’m not wrong. How else was he able to mark you?”

That was the question, wasn’t it? The one I refused to let myself dwell on too deeply. I hated Khorli for marking me. But mostly, I hated that he’d been able to at all. My own pathetic weakness had left me vulnerable. I should have known better by now.

“It’s more than that, though, isn’t it?” She continued, still smiling, like she already knew everything about me. “That’s the only scar you have. So tell me, is he the only being you’ve ever loved, or just the only one who betrayed you?”

“I don’t love him!”

“No, he doesn’t love you.”

Lights flickered, and then they burned, all my souls uniting in an inferno of power as I warned her of just what I was capable of doing with them.

The wench smiled wider. “You wanted his attention so badly you took the thing he wanted most just to get it.”

“You know nothing about me.” I spoke through clenched teeth.

“But it didn’t work the way you wanted it to. Did it? Tell me how you expected it to turn out. That you’d take his little human away, and he’d realize that you were actually the one he wanted all along?”

Brighter and brighter, until the light was blinding. And still she wouldn’t shut up.

“That didn’t work out for you, did it? Because he’d rather be a beast protecting a soulless corpse than return to you.”

“Silence!”

“If I put that soul back into the other world, he still won’t choose you.”

“You don’t know that!” My chest ached, my throat burned. The light grew brighter.

A scream pierced the air between us. Loud and frantic. Savage and distraught.

The light subsided, the anger compressing in on itself until it fit back inside me. But it was different now. Wrong. No longer buried where I could, for the most part, ignore it. It sat like a lump in my throat, in my chest, like a box barely closed, threatening to spring open at any moment and let everything pour out.

The screaming continued. It was coming from the human chained to the wall. It pulled at its hair, kicked its limbs. Chains rattled as it thrashed about until red seeped from its shackled wrists.

It acted like no more than a wild beast.

The witch sighed, approaching it and extending a hand to rest atop its pale locks. The screaming stopped immediately. As did the thrashing. The creature instead tilted its head into her palm, somehow finding comfort in the attention of its captor.

When the witch stepped away, the creature was back to staring vacantly at nothing.

“Feel better?” she asked me. “You can’t intimidate me, boy. So I’d try talking instead. Why are you here?”

“I told you. To put the soul back.”

“No, that’s just the treatment, isn’t it? It’s not the sickness. So again, why are you here?”

I exhaled heavily through my nose. I didn’t trust her. I didn’t want to play her games. But the alternative was leaving here with nothing changed.

“I just… I want this feeling to go away.”