“Maeve,” Reeve called her name as she turned from them both.
She looked over her shoulder, and his heart froze.
From just the look in her eyes, Reeve knew at once what she had done. Her Magic didn’t move towards his. She hadn’t merely altered reality where Antony was concerned. She hadn’t just fabricated his death in everyone’s mind except his own.
As she looked up at Reeve with uncertainty and curiosity, he knew without a shadow of a doubt that she remembered none of their time together. Not a single stolen glance or kiss.
She’d erased them completely.
Chapter 37
The snow beneath her should have soaked her shins in a freezing grip. She should have been shivering, shaking. Her bones should have seized up, prevented her from breathing.
But she was warm. So warm.
Reeve’s hold on her face remained, keeping her from collapsing completely, but he did not force her gaze up at him. His thumbs moved in slow, caressing motions across her cheeks.
But she hardly felt it. His presence before her was distant and fuzzy. Comprehending the overload of information she had just received was impossible, even for a Witch as clever and instinctual as Maeve. As Reeve’s memories settled over her, as her mind verified them as real and as matching the ones she was now remembering, she concluded that she was, indeed, mad. Only a madwoman would have done this to herself more than once.
“How many times?” she asked, in a hushed voice meant only for Reeve, as if he had the answer. As if the answer could ever be in her grasp.
She searched her mind for any trace of her previous knowledge of her Shadow Magic. For any understanding of why her. There was nothing besides the argument she’d witnessed between her father and Reeve.
It was you who came to be terrified of her mother.
It was too heavy. All too much.
“Let go, please,” she muttered.
A queasy sensation settled in her stomach, further blurring all thought. Reeve obeyed her request and dropped his hands from her face. She looked to her side until her eyes found Antony. She reached for him, and the black wolf stepped towards her, towering over her kneeled form. Maeve wrapped her arms around his thick neck once more, burying her head in his smooth fur.
Reeve stood from the snowy ground and turned to one of the wolves, one of many that had transformed into humans again. It was a painful sight.
“You can’t change freely, can you?” she mumbled into Antony’s neck.
The sound was small, but it confirmed her words were true.
She wanted to judge him for giving up, for abandoning her and their family. But as her own repressed memories surfaced and showed her the agony Antony endured for so long, the half-life he lived, she couldn’t find it within her to be so selfish.
His decision to choose the life that was best for him wasn’t about her. And so she just held him tighter as his head tucked into hers in a comforting manner.
She allowed Antony entry into her mind. His voice was so much like their father’s as he said,I’ve missed you so much.
She didn’t pay much attention to the conversations that happened next. Even if she had wanted to soak in the plan that developed between Reeve and Antony’s pack, she couldn’t have. Her mind drifted through thoughts almost sleepily, and she was certain at one point she had drifted off against Antony’s warm body.
Ambrose’s voice drifted into her senses, as though he stood before her.
“Please, calm down, Maeve,” he said lovingly from behind his desk.
“You told him to stay away from me, didn’t you?” Her accusation came with an edge.
“What makes you think that?”
“Because there’s only one loyalty I can think of that would keep the most powerful being alive away from me. And that’s to you.”
“There’s so much you don’t understand, my darling. We are in the middle of a war, and Reeve is—”
“Are we? Are we the ones dying? I believe the humans are in the middle of a war, and the Double O has done nothing. You have done nothing.”
