Page 39 of Little Witch

I didn't want to get used to it.

I didn't want to be stuck here forever.

I caught Rowan's eye across the table, his fingers tapping absently against the wood while he half-listened to Cian and Dad debate some old spell they'd dug up earlier that week. His eyes met mine, glowing faint even in the warm kitchen light, pink bleeding soft toward violet, and for a second I saw the same flicker of unease there that I felt sitting in my own chest. He was enjoying this — I knew that much, could feel it faint through the bond whenever he laughed at something Cian said — but he didn't want to be trapped here forever any more than I did.

When I glanced at Orias he looked the exact same and I almost wanted to cry.

"Amber?" Dad's voice pulled me back.

"Hm?"

"You alright?" He studied my face, brow creased.

I forced a smile. "Yeah. Just thinking."

He didn't press, though I could tell he'd clocked something was off. I was grateful he let it go. I didn't want to drag the mood down, not after a day that had actually felt good for once, maybe the first one since we'd fallen through that tree.

Hours slipped by after that, the pie long gone, and I found myself standing in the hallway outside our room with Rowan while Orias and Cian kept arguing over something in the library, their voices carrying faint through the door, punctuated by the occasional burst of laughter. Neither of us said anything for a while.

I broke the silence eventually. "It's turning into routine, isn't it?"

Rowan nodded, thoughtful. "It is."

"That scares me." My voice came out quieter than I meant it to. "I'm happy we're all together. I love having Dad back, and I know what it means to you guys having Cian again. But—"

"You don't want to be here forever," he finished.

"I miss my life. Aria's probably worn a hole in the carpet. Nobody's opened the shop in I don't even know how long. And this place — it's not real. Not in the way that actually matters. I don't want to grow old inside somewhere that isn't real, no matter how good the pie turns out."

Rowan's hand found mine, fingers threading through.

"We'll figure it out," he said. "I'm not going to stop trying. Neither's Orias, and neither will Cian or your dad, now that they've got real reason to."

I nodded, letting the words settle, though the weight of the unknown didn't fully lift. How long could we keep living like this before the comfort of it turned into a cage we stopped noticing was even locked?

That night, lying in bed between the two of them, I couldn't shake the thought. Rowan's breathing evened out steady beside me, Orias's arm heavy and warm across my waist on the other side, and the closeness of both of them helped dull the worst of the fear, at least enough to let my eyes stay closed.

But as I drifted off, I couldn't shake the feeling that time was slipping away from us faster than any of us wanted to admit, and if we didn't find a way out soon, we might stop wanting to look for it at all.

Chapter Twenty One

The library had a particular kind of quiet to it most afternoons — not silence exactly, just the low, papery hush of everyone too tired to talk much, buried in their own stack of books. Rowan had claimed the armchair by the cold fireplace an hour ago and hadn't moved since, one leg thrown over the arm, a spell theory volume propped against his knee. I'd given up on my own stack twenty minutes back and switched to watching Amber instead, which was infinitely more interesting than anything written in these books so far.

She sat cross-legged on the floor, surrounded by a small fortress of tomes, brow furrowed hard enough to leave a line between her eyebrows that I badly wanted to smooth out with my thumb. She looked exhausted. Worn thin in a way none of the pumpkin pie or family bonding in the world was going to fully fix, not while we were still stuck down here with no actual exit in sight.

Seeing her look like that did something ugly and restless in my chest. I couldn't fix the trap. I could, at minimum, try to fix her mood.

"Find anything?" I asked, already knowing the answer as I dropped down onto the floor beside her.

She sighed, shoving her hair back from her face. "Nothing. Feels like we've read the same book a hundred times and learned absolutely nothing new."

Her shoulders slumped, and I hated it, hated watching all that stubborn fire in her get worn down by a stack of dusty texts that weren't giving anything back. I leaned in, bumping my shoulder against hers.

"Maybe we're just missing the part that says, step one, escape magical prison, step two, live happily ever after."

That got a soft laugh out of her, small but real. "If only it were that easy."

"I'm nothing if not persistent." I leaned a little closer, close enough to catch the scent of her hair, cinnamon and something warmer underneath it that I'd apparently never get tired of. "But in the meantime, I think you need a break."