Page 37 of Little Witch

"That's fair."

"It's extremely fair. You should be thanking me." She snarked.

"Thank you," I said, and meant that too, relief loosening something in my chest that had stayed wound tight for years.

She let out a breath, tension finally draining from her shoulders, and I leaned in and pressed a soft kiss to her cheek instead of her mouth, grateful in a way I couldn't fully put into words yet.

"You being mad at him," Orias's voice called through the bathroom door, muffled and clearly still half-asleep, "is about as terrifying as a cupcake with fangs on it. Just so you both know I can hear every word of this through the wall. And also... I'm sorry too, little witch."

Amber's head snapped toward the door, eyes narrowing into a glare aimed squarely at the wood between us and my brother.

I caught her eye instead, a grin pulling at my mouth that had nothing to do with the conversation we'd just had and everything to do with years of sibling instinct kicking back in at exactly the wrong — or right — moment. I winked, let a thread of wind gather low and quiet in my palm, and sent it straight through the gap under the door.

A beat of silence.

Then a startled yelp, followed by the unmistakable thud of a body hitting the floor.

Amber burst out laughing, the sound bouncing off the tile, bright and completely unguarded in a way I hadn't heard from her all day. I laughed too, harder than I had in longer than I wanted to admit, the two of us leaning into each other under the water while Orias's muffled cursing carried through the wall, indignant and entirely unsurprised.

"That's for eavesdropping," I called out.

"I live here! Well — currently trapped-here! Same difference! You could've warned me before launching me off a bed, you absolute—"

Amber pressed her face against my chest, still laughing, and I wrapped my arms around her properly for the first time since telling her the truth, feeling lighter than I had in years despite everything still waiting for us on the other side of that Sanctum door.

Chapter Twenty

Time had gone slippery. Days bled into nights and back into mornings, and I couldn't tell exactly how long we'd been down here. The Sanctum had a strange way of warping it. Some mornings felt like we'd only just arrived. Other times it felt like weeks had passed without any of us noticing. I couldn't remember the last time I'd seen a real sunrise, or felt actual wind on my face instead of the false, temperate air this place kept circulating through vents that led nowhere anyone had found yet.

I missed my life. My friends. Aria, who'd probably worn a groove into the floor of my old room by now , or keeping all the things in my home and life running for me. The bakery, sitting closed and quiet with nobody there to open it, the cinnamon rolls I hadn't gotten to make for the festival, the whole town wondering, probably, where the Halloway girl had disappeared to.

We were all trying to find our way out, but the answers kept slipping past us. Each day we gathered around the couches in the lounge, poring over old texts stacked three deep on every surface, Cian and Dad walking us through the spells they'd already tried over the years while Rowan, Orias and I threw in ideas of our own — half of them useless, most of them already attempted, but nobody wanted to be the one who stopped trying first.

"What about a blood binding?" Orias asked one afternoon, flipping through a book so old the pages had gone soft and brown at the edges. "You're both Thorne blood. Amber's got Rose blood. Maybe the door responds to something like that instead of a spell."

"Tried it a few years ago, remember," Cian said, not even looking up from his own book. "Three separate variations. Door didn't so much as flicker."

"What about combining it with the transportation spell you used for the journal?" I asked.

Dad shook his head. "Tried that too, actually. Took everything I had left that week and got us nothing but a headache each."

Orias slumped back against the couch, tossing the book aside with a groan. "We're just naming things at this point, aren't we."

"Pretty much," Rowan said, though he didn't sound annoyed by it, just tired in the same worn-down way we all were most days now.

There was always something that felt just out of reach, like a door we couldn't quite find the key to, no matter how many keys we tried making from scratch.

Between the research, we ate together, talked, tried to fill in years of missing time. The twins and Cian had started finding their rhythm again, the awkwardness of the gap between them fading a little more every day. I could see how much it meant to them to have each other back.

Even if we were stuck in a fucking tree like something out of a fairytale gone wrong.

"So," Orias said one evening, sprawled across an armchair with his boots up on the arm despite Dad's repeated, half-hearted objections to it, "what did you two even do down here for entertainment, before we showed up? Please tell me it wasn't just reading."

"It was mostly reading," Cian admitted.

"That's tragic. Genuinely tragic." I sighed. "I love a good book but I need my TV sometimes."

"We played cards sometimes." He said.