Page 99 of My Faire Lady

Frankie scoots closer. “What if she could?”

I furrow my brow and wring the duvet in my hands. “The what ifs don’t matter. The hydra took her memories, and she’s on the other side of the world. She made her choice, and I have to respect it.”

No matter how much it kills me. No matter that she’s my twin flame.

She made a choice.

“She loved you,” Boden whispers. “I heard it in her thoughts, on your birthday.”

I open my mouth, ready to deny the words.

Frankie puts a hand over mine. “It’s true. She told me, when she knocked on my door and asked me to take her to the hydra. She loved you, Scarlet, and I’m certain she still would, if you apologized. That kind of love doesn’t just disappear.”

Shifting, I pull my legs into my chest and rest my chin on my knees. “But it did disappear. Along with every memory she had of me.”

Boden and Frankie share a look, and he gives her a nod.

She pulls her hand out of her pocket, revealing a vial pinched between her thumb and forefinger. “What if I told you she could have her memory back?”

The world sweeps out from under me. I stare at Frankie, then the incandescent liquid swirling in the thin vial. My breath catches. “That’s not possible.”

She shrugs. “It is. And I’m not trying to tell you what to do. If you want to stay here for the rest of your life, or retrace your mother’s footsteps around the world, I won’t stop you.” Flipping over my palm, she presses the vial into my hand and closes my fingers around it. “But if you think, even for one second, that you love Lottie the way she loved you, don’t waste it.” Her eyes go misty, and she blinks, pulling her necklace out from her collar. A vial swings from it. “Trust me.”

Her tone is pleading, and this is the closest she’ll ever get to saying she wishes things could be different, for her.

I roll the vial over, nothing but a thin layer of glass separating my skin from every moment I shared with Lottie. I wish I could uncork it and peer into her mind, just to see the world the way she does. To see myself the way she does. Tears climb the back of my throat, and this time, I don’t swallow them down.

A single tear rolls down my cheek and drips onto the bed. Dread gnaws at the underside of my skin, spreading like thorned weeds between my ribs. Even if I did return her memories, there’s a chance that she wouldn’t forgive me.

That would hurt more than this.

“You just woke up,” Boden says, patting my shoulder. “Just think about it.”

Nesbit leaps from the mattress and pads out of the room.

“But if I decide to leave, where will you go?” I shift my attention between Frankie and Boden. “I don’t know what life looks like without you two.”

“You’ll never be without us,” Boden says. “Even if we’re across the world, oceans away from each other, we’re all bound by the same thing. Magic.” A lopsided smile pulls at his lips, and he backtracks toward the door, nodding for Frankie to join him. “And I was thinking about California. Last time I was outside of this land, it wasn’t even a state. I’ll have to see what makes the west coast so special.”

He opens his palm long enough for me to spot a vial in his hand, a sister to mine. Kelsey’s.

“I was thinking Paris.” Frankie smiles, her tail swishing behind her as she joins Boden in the doorway. “I’ve always wanted to see the Eiffel Tower. Or if the Seine is different from the last time I saw it.”

Boden raps his knuckles against the wood. “You’re free, Scarlet.”

With that, they leave my bedroom. Their footsteps pad through the living quarters, and I only know they’ve left by the soft click of my front door. But I sit still and wrap my arms around my legs, staring into the distance.

I’m free.

I thought it would feel different. But it’s bittersweet, if a little like mourning. A certain grief. I didn’t think freedom would accompany saying goodbye to everyone I love.

I twist the vial between my fingers, trying to pad the spaces in my body that are left hollow without magic.

Without Lottie.

36

The cobblestones are slick under my soles, and I chew on my lip, reading the street signs through the cloying fog. After a month and a half of living here, I should know my way through the streets.