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I nod. “I understand she made you do things, and you didn’t have a choice in the matter.” I suppress the shiver that wants to work its way through me. “But you do have to atone for what you’ve done—to me and the other supernaturals who you’ve hurt.”

“I didn’twantto hurt anyone!” she says sharply. It sounds like a line she’s been silently telling herself to feel better. I cannot imagine the horrors she’s been exposed to before now.

She opens her mouth to say more, but I wave it off. “It doesn’t matter. Whatdoesmatter is that we weren’t the only supernaturals forced into bonds, and Juliana—or Lia, depending on how you knew her—wasn’t the only one making those bonds. The murdered witches found on campus were bonded before their deaths, just like you and me, but something happened to them in their final moments, and I want to know what.”

“Why are you telling me this?” she asks.

My eyes scan the morbid decorations of Olga’s room. “In your ledger, did you record any of the last words given by the murdered witches?” It’s a long shot, but she’s obsessed with that thing.

Olga’s eyes brighten. “I have two of them—but they are not public knowledge, and I’m not allowed to share those lines.”

Oh, so now she wants to be a law-abiding citizen?

I place a hand on her arm and lean in. “I am not one to make threats, Olga, but I had a rough fucking night. So please make an exception for a friend, or I’ll start destroying your room one decoration at a time.”

Wisps of my pale orange magic drift out and move to her shelves. Her jars rattle and clink as my power descends on them.

“All right, all right!” she says begrudgingly, giving me a disgruntled look. “I’ll do it, just this once—to make amends for…last night.”

I withdraw my magic as the witch gets up, muttering under her breath as she crosses to her bookcase.

From it, she pulls out her Ledger of Last Words, her fingers lovingly trailing along the spine. It reminds me of how much I adored my own notebooks, back when I relied on them. An aching sense of nostalgia rises in me. I hadn’t realized how much I missed paging through them until now.

Olga settles back down on the ground beside me and opens the book. She flips through it, and I catch glimpses of names and dates and quotes—the final words these various individuals spoke before they died.

She stops on a page with a redacted row, the name, date, and quote blotted out entirely with black ink. There’s another blacked-out row on the following page as well. I stare at those omissions. I’m sure they hold the key.

A bit of wine-red magic slips out of Olga. She taps a finger on the open pages of her ledger. “What I’m about to share with you was only shared with me because the Politia hired me on to pull last words from a couple of the bodies.”

“Theyhiredyou?”

“Yeah. Not everyone can coax information from a body. It’s a rare gift,” she says matter-of-factly.

I mean, I might not use the wordgiftwhen it requires handling dead bodies, but sure, it’s rare.

My attention drifts to her mutilated, stuffed cat. “I … understand.”

Olga follows my gaze. “That’s Mr. Whiskers. He was my first cat. Odessa is fond of him.”

As she speaks, the vulture—Odessa, presumably—pecks at the poor thing again.

I take in the rest of her surroundings. “You really like death, don’t you?” My eyes touch on a row of animal skulls resting behind her bed, then linger on a set of mounted shadow boxes that house pinned butterflies.

“It’s the ultimate mystery,” Olga says. “One even us witches only get a few glimpses of.”

With that, she holds her hand over the open book. More of her magic sifts from her palm, small plumes of it billowing out along the surface of the book. When her magic clears, the blotted lines have vanished, and in their place are rows of writing. The first one reads:

Katherine Thompson | Age 22 | Death Date: September 25, 2023 | Last Word(s): Oh Goddess—[screams]

I grimace at the entry.

“This next one, I find particularly interesting,” Olga says, tapping on the second entry. As soon as I see the name, I have to steel myself.Charlotte Evensen.

I knew her, as did Olga, not that she gives any indication of it now.

I don’t really want to read the entry. These are no longer just words on the page but the last and likely agonized words of a former friend.

Charlotte Evensen | Age 20 | Death Date: October 10, 2023 | Last Word(s): Damn you and your kind to the farthest pits of hell. May you rot there.