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7
Bronywyn
Heart heavy with the weight of this particular memory, I slip down the stairs, avoiding the ones that creak out of pure self-preservation. Portraits line the walls, all of them bearing absolutely no familial ties. Instead, they’re pictures of places, landmarks, and paintings of forests boasting large, green trees.
Swallowing hard, I take my first step off the stairs.
Ahead, someone is cooking. The scraping of a spatula against the bottom of a skillet is a sound forever branded into my memory. Cautiously, I step into the kitchen and freeze in place. Window open, light spills into the room.
A man has his back turned to me, a perfectly pressed tunic stretched over a broad back. His dark hair is pulled tightly at the back of his neck, not a strand out of place as he prepares breakfast over the open flames of the hearth.
“Dad?” I whisper, my heart aching with grief and anger as I stare at the man who is the reason my mom is dead. The same one who force-fed—
“Papa, it tastes so bad.”
My gaze shifts to the young me—maybe ten—sitting on a wooden bench at the dining room table. Wearing a blue dress, she looks the image of a perfectly behaved child, exactly what it is my father demanded of me every single day.
My blonde hair is pulled up in a tight bun, face dotted with freckles that have since faded. My sister sits beside me, quietly eating a piece of bread. I smile, seeing her familiar face the only positive to this particular moment. She’s probably five here, so young, and still—the nightmares of her past lives already keep her up all night.
Her life should have been lullabies and fairytales, and yet her innocence was stolen by Lucy, just as mine was robbed of me from the man currently turning toward us, frustration evident in every line of his face. “You have to drink it.”
“I can’t.” The little girl’s bottom lip quivers, and in that moment, I feel exactly what she’s feeling. Her pain and anger are mine; her voiceless opinion is my own. So many years, I was forced to sit there, drinking the potions he crafted to make sure my magic came in the way it was supposed to.
Monster. Murderer.
Two words I’d used to describe him for my entire life.
“This is for your own good. When you get older, you’ll see.”
“It makes me sick. Every time I drink it, I spend the day hurting. Is that what you want, Papa? For me to hurt? Do you hate me so much? I’m sorry I’m not yours, I’m sorry I’m not a witch.”
A muscle in his jaw ticks. “You are a witch,” he snaps. “You have to be.” He moves closer to the table and lowers his voice. “I don’t hate you. Which is why you must drink it. I know what’s best for you, and should you miss even a single dose, it could mean—” He trails off because he doesn’t want to vocalize what we both already know.
If my magic hasn’t come in by the time I hit nineteen, he’s going to kill me.
“Fuck, I miss you.”
Tarnley’s voice is unmistakable and rips me from the past. I spin, searching for him, but he’s nowhere. “Tarnley?”
“You are everything to me, living without you—it’s as if a vital organ of mine is going into a consistent state of failure.”
“Tarnley!” I scream, but no one hears me. Not my father, the younger me, and not the man who invades every bit of me. “I’m here! I’m right here!” I race through the house, searching for him. “Tarnley!” Heart hammering in my chest, I trip and fall, managing to slam my forehead into the baluster of the stairs.
Contrary to what should have been possible given that I’m trapped in my own mind, it hurts like hell.
“You would kick my ass if you knew what I nearly did last night. It was so fucking stupid. Drugs. I’ve never done drugs before in my life, not as a human and certainly not now.”
I freeze in place as the weight of his words sink in. Tears burn my eyes, and I sink to the stairs. My mistake is killing him and destroying everyone I care for. What the hell did I do in my life to earn such loyalty?
The answer is easy: nothing.
“I just… after you nearly killed Delaney—shit, Bronywyn, I don’t know how much more of this we can take. How much more of you being gone we can take. Especially when we don’t know who’s going to wake up every time the sedative wears off.”
I almost killed her?What—how?
“Such a sweet memory this is.”
“You,” I growl at the woman standing before me. She looks like me. Blonde hair, same nose and mouth—but her eyes are what really gives the psychotic bitch away. They’re completely black, soulless.
