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The celebrations for the Spring Festival started early. The entire hacienda was agog with excitement at seeing Sergio use his godly gifts and worship him even more than they did year round.
Noelle was alone watching from the sidelines since Lucero had been ordered to help set up the outer courtyard so it could accommodate all of the villagers that would be joining for the holiday.
With everyone so busy, it meant that Noelle’s actions were not as scrutinized so she could accomplish the first part of her plan.
She’d grinned the shrooms she’d stolen to a fine powder, and the next step was to dump it into the stew that would be served to all the guests. She was still a little wary of the dosages, but from what she’d been able to research, if she gave them slightly too much, they would just hallucinate for longer.
She didn’t necessarily care how much they hallucinated as long as they did.
The opportunity arose the night before the celebration when the kitchen was left unattended.
Given the quantity of stew the cooks had had to prepare, they’d cooked everything the day before and had left the pots in the main kitchen. It was infinitely easy for Noelle to sneak inside and heat them up while stirring the ground shrooms inside until the contents became homogeneous.
With that part out of the way, she needed to prepare for her following step.
For months, she’d practiced the words in the ancient language with Lucero’s help and she was sure she would succeed. But while she’d thought of all the details, there was still the element of surprise.
She would be putting on the performance of her lifetime, and she would be doing it in front of Sergio and his faithful villagers, which made it the ultimate risk. If it didn’t work according to plan… She was going to die.
She knew that. Lucero knew that.
She either succeeded in her ruse, or she would die for it—there was no in-between.
Yet her life was at risk for every moment she breathed in his foreign land. Whether she died by her own folly or because Sergio caught her unawares, she knew the end would still be death.
Now, if she succeeded… That was another story altogether.
If she managed to pull off her plan, she would not only get away with her life intact, but she was sure that everyone would give her the same reverence they gave Sergio, if not more.
She would finally have…power.
Was it for power that she was doing all this, or was it merely for survival? Noelle had asked herself that question numerous times as she prepared for the Spring Festival.
Deep down, she knew she could have found other ways—would have likely been able to contact her family if she tried enough. But a part of her didn’t want to.
She wanted to succeed on her own. She wanted to achieve poweron her own.Because at the end of the day what was it to her if she returned to her family? She would still be just as powerless, her life not her own, her choices nonexistent.
At least this way, whether she lived or died would have been her own choice.
She would have had the power to decide—something she hadn’t had the luxury of many times in her life.
And if it worked… She was certain she would be one step closer to finding her Blue.
The months might have passed. The seasons might have changed. But her heart remained the same.
Still hurting. Still yearning. Still…loving.
Blue never strayed far from her thoughts for she always imagined what he would say or do in a certain situation. He was in her dreams, both at night and during the day.
He simply…was one with her.
On the one hand, it gave her the necessary strength to plan and plot, to wait and bide her time. But it also made the chasm inside her heart deepen every time she realized she still did not know how he was—if he was still alive.
Despite that, Noelle lied to herself.
She convinced herself he was still alive, thinking of her just as she thought of him. She convinced herself that one way or another, she would find him and he would fall for her as he’d been meant to from the beginning.
It didn’t matter if it was delusional—if even Lucero thought her mad for entertaining such thoughts about someone she’d never once talked to in real life.
