AllFreeNovel
Share Us
Why don’t I remember these feelings?
This entire situation should feel like déjà vu. All of this almost happened before. If I got ready for a ball where I expected to meet the royal family and advisors, where I expected to dance with my betrothed in front of hundreds of people, then there should be a familiarity to this. Instead, there’s just a blank, dark space of nothingness. A shallow, shadowed place in my mind between Kirran giving me the dress and me running into the king on my way to the ball.
My throat tightens. I stare at myself in the mirror until my vision blurs. I told him of getting ready, but I shouldremembergetting ready. I should remember the nerves, the excitement, the disbelief that this was happening, that I was going to marry my best friend. Elation that he had chosen me to love forever.
I try. Strain my mind. Yet nothing lives within the hollow. No feelings arise.
Only a hole remains where my memories should be.
It has to be me. It’s my memories they tampered with.
Whoever “they” are.
I shudder and tip my head back. My nose still smarts. For the first time since Kirran summoned me to his chambers and told me my reality was not true, the weight of it all bears down on me again.
Someone took this moment from me before. From us. Part of me, part of him. Ripped from us both. A part we can never get back. My memories, my delirious joy, my hope —stolen.
Stolen and replaced with a lie.
But as the thought spears through me, another slithers in behind it, equally cold but more insidious.
What if they didn’t steal this moment because it never happened?
I don’t know yet if Kirran was able to gain clarity from my stepmother about when I left. There are so many pieces to this that we cannot decipher. So many questions that have no answers.
Kirran’s whispers from last night sear my heart.“What if there are never answers?”
Fear lurches up inside me, grappling for a hold.
Can I be with him, if we never know? Can I accept that I may never remember?
Can we truly just start over from here?
I close my eyes and will myself to calm. In the stillness of Reena’s room, my mind wraps around what I know of Kirran. He was once a wild boy, rebellious and passionate, deeply interested in military training and the kingdom’s history. I can only assume he still likes history. That he still loves maps as much as he once did. His years of war have darkened him, hardened his heart, burdened his mind. Yet he always sought the good of his people.
The marks on his hands and arms may claim otherwise. But he is fierce yet good, brave, and reaching for hope. Those parts of him are the same.
I meet my eyes in the mirror again.
A fresh start is a good thing. Maybe it’s what we need so we can truly heal.
With a steadying exhale, I tuck my hair behind my ears, shifting to readjust the waves over my shoulders. Several strands snag in my necklace’s chain, and I grunt as it pulls tighter. Pain ignites along the back of my skull. I shift to loosen the pull, fumbling for the clasp.
It finally unhooks, but it takes some more struggling to get it untangled from my hair. I watch my efforts in the mirror until there are only a few knotted strands left. Wincing, I rip it free. I pull at the broken hair, loosening the strands around the chain, and then hold it up to the light to make sure I got them all off.
The charm is gone.
My heart skips a beat. I spin my gaze to the floor. My heel sinks down. Something crunches.
No —
As my stomach plummets, the image of another room splinters through my head, too fractured and fuzzy to make sense of. Yet somehow familiar.
I lift my foot and scramble away from the thing beneath me. But I know before I even look. The charm of my mother’s necklace, the only remaining connection I have to her, lies on the stone floor. The pale blue glass glitters in the lamplight. A miniature replica of the glass slipper she wore — and lost — the night she met my father.
It’s had a single, hairline crack for years. But now several cracks spread out from that original one, like tiny spiderwebs.
“No.” My whisper peels between my lips. My vision blurs with it. “No, no, no.”
