He nods, but the hollow space beneath my breastbone squirms.
Damaged. Broken.Impure.
My instincts tell me those terms become subjective very quickly in a place like this.
My mind flashes back to the lantern I smashed over Luther’s head.
I always thought I was attuned to it somehow, that it contained my spirit, but it never gleamed with that otherworldly blue. Never betrayed the presence of a soul inside.
And I left it behind without issue.
My heart gives a forlorn squeeze, and for the first time, I finally believe that maybe,maybe, I'm not dead.
They've told me numerous times now, but a part of me kept holding back. Something in me shifts the same way my wings did—slow, insistent, impossible to ignore. It isn’t a clear memory, but a current stirring beneath the surface. A whole life lived and forgotten swirls in the black waters of my subconscious, splashes of recognition pulling at my gut in ways I can’t explain.
My father jolts me out of my thoughts, bracing a hand on my shoulder. “You could have it all back, son. Your name, your crown—” He stops abruptly and smiles. “Welcome home.”
Then he rises, leaving his chocolate mousse untouched. “We can pick this up tomorrow morning. I will make arrangements for the vow dissolution spell to be held at once, and afterwards, we will petition the Red Queen for your friend’s return, Miss Lorntre. Good night.”
Welcome home…
I have this intuition that, whenever I camehome, there were rules I obeyed without question. Truths that governed my life.
I can’t remember what they were.
I hate that my elusive past still has a hold over me. It keeps reaching into my present, shaping my instincts, pulling me in directions I don’t understand, making me feel like a puppet, its strings being toyed with by a stranger.
The intrusive feeling that I’ve forgotten something that changes everything lingers as though it’s waiting for me to catch up to it, whether I want to or not.
Max tears her gaze away from the lanterns and drops her silk napkin over her untouched dessert plate.
Her chair screeches as she stands.
“This is…macabre. Your father betrayed my mother, and yet he talks about her like he merely lost touch with an old lover and tried to take in her orphaned child. He’s dangerous,” she breathes.
Her warning echoes the unease inside me, and I nod.
“And we’ll get to the bottom of it, but he promised to save Nick. That’s a good start.”
She paces the dining room back and forth. “Only if I agree to dissolve your link to Willow. What if the old you wouldn’t want me to do it? You agreed to marry her, after all.”
I catch her in my arms and caress her bare shoulders. “Max. I married a gay woman who only agreed to link our fates to appease her family. I'd say that, out of all the scenarios we could have imagined, that one lets me completely off the hook.”
“You’re only saying that because you want us to be together. It’s too convenient.”
She folds her arms, luring my gaze down to her cleavage.
Her white dress molds her curves and flows all the way to the floor. Gold ropes trace the length of her bare back, crossing between her shoulder blades and cinching at her waist before falling over her backside, weighed down by heavy pearls. Her movements turn the white translucent and the gold molten.
It should make her look fragile and delicate.
Instead, it only draws attention to everything stubborn and untamable about her. To the freckles dusting her shoulders and the wild red braid falling to her waist.
Max carries herself like she's wearing armor rather than one of the most see-through dresses I've ever seen.
“It’s too convenient,” she says, shaking her head.
“You think he’s lying?”
