Page 16 of Boundless

The pain, the panic, the fear sliced me wide open as if they had blades to cut with. The magic in me reacted, brightened up in my chest, pressing against my ribcage and spreading toward my arms like shards of ice—those, too, intending to cut me piece by little piece.

Everythinghurt, and everything was numb at the same time for the same reason—Rune was not with me and I was home and he was in Verenthia.

He was the King of the Midnight Court now.

He wasn’there.

I don’t know how I managed to grab the pillow underneath my head and hold it against my face before the scream ripped out of me. It was instinctual—I was home and if I had pain to let out, I hid so Dad and Fi wouldn’t see me, so thattheywouldn’t feel bad. I had pain and I wanted to disappear so as not to burden them with it.Because I already had, hadn’t I? I’d burdened them so much by telling the truth that made every person in town turn against us. Mock us. Make our lives a hell.

I’d burdened them.

The guilt of it had suffocated me every second of every day. I don’t know why I was just realizing in those very moments how small I’d tried to make myself every single day. I don’t know whynow,of all times, I was feeling sorry for myself for being so fuckingaloneand never realizing it.

Until Rune.

I stopped screaming into the pillow.

I sat up to find I still wore a dead queen’s dress, covered in holes and dirt and blood everywhere, while the apron I’d put on in the Midnight Palace was gone. The mirror, the queen’s mirror revealing my reflection was right there over my bedside table, next to the lamp. Fuck, I didn’t want to see it at all. I didn’t even pick it up.

Instead, I looked around the room—sotinyin comparison to the rooms in the fae courts. Another untimelyrealization—the fae really liked their space, and I’d gotten so used to football-field sized halls and bedrooms as big as the entire house floor so quickly. That’s why the walls of my old room felt like they were going to suffocate me for real any second now.

The thoughts in my head were a mess. I was crying, the tears continuously pouring down my cheeks, and I didn’t know how to stop. Whatever had come over me, I watched myself as if from afar touching my desk and my old laptop, running my fingers over the wood of the door, the bed frame, the window. I watched as if half of me wasn’t actually inside my body, which was moving on instinct still.

I opened the closet door and the smell made me cry harder—it wasmysmell, the smell I always had, that I never even noticed before, but now I did. It was the detergent we got—mountain springsaid the label, and it was fresh and slightly sweet and so very different from anything you could smell in Verenthia.

My hands shook as I picked up clean clothes, then somehow made my way outside into the hallway—so small!It was empty, too. I couldn’t hear anything from my own sobbing in silence, either. I just slipped into the bathroom and pressed my back against the door for a moment, then was naked and under the shower within seconds.

Ink on my arm, all the way up to my shoulder and the side of my neck. Even though I tried to ignore it, didn’t even look down at my body as I scrubbed my skin clean, Ifeltit there, humming with magic. Even though I knew it was foreign magic, it was cold. It was almost like Rune’s shadows, but I didn’t dwell on it too much.

Images flashed in my mind. The face of the Midnight King and Vair, Raja fighting those soldiers—Rune being held downby those shadows that wrapped around his arms, my own magic that had clung to the Midnight King for just a moment.

A moment that had cost him his life and had saved Rune’s.

Somehow, I didn’t break down in the shower, but I actually cleaned myself up and walked out. Somehow, I could put all of my clothes on, then pick up the old ones and carry them back to my room.

I didn’t look in the mirror.Anymirror. I didn’t want to see my face,couldn’t.Not yet. I didn’t want to see exactly how the mark on my shoulder looked.

I just sat down on the edge of bed with my eyes closed, and I focused on breathing for a long time.

Never before hadI found denim to be uncomfortable against my skin. Jeans were my favorite clothing item, but I guess back then I hadn’t gotten used to silk and cotton as soft as clouds. My jeans still fit me—which surprised me because I felt like a different person. The red shirt I’d put on, too. It had an extra high neck and long sleeves that I hoped would cover the ink on my arm and shoulder. I still hadn’t looked in the mirror, though, so I wasn’t sure.

The house I grew up in hadn’t changed at all, but at the same time it looked like a different world altogether to my eyes. The hallway on the ground floor, and the archways, and the sound of music coming from the living room or kitchen.

My footsteps were perfectly silent as I slipped into the doorway, half of me certain that I’d find the house empty.

It wasn’t.

Dad and Fi were standing in front of the kitchen counter side by side, as pale as the walls, their wide eyes on me.

Neither of us even breathed for a good moment. The iPad on the kitchen table played Dad’s favorite country singer in thebackground, and suddenly my mind was stuck betweenthis is home, I never actually left, all of this is perfectly normal,andI haven’t been here for possibly months, maybe years, and it all looks brand new to me.

Such a strange feeling.

Then Fiona ran around the dining table and wrapped her arms around me tightly.

Dad came to us, too, after a moment, and I remember a lot of squeezing and a lot of shaking and a lot of tears. Parts of it were lost to me—possibly too painful—but eventually, we settled. Eventually, we stopped crying and we were smiling, all three of us. Eventually, we could sit down in the living room and take a moment to get ourselves together.

They hadn’t changed a bit, Dad and Fi, which, again,shockedme. It felt like they should have been older or something, or just different in the same wayIwas different in all that time I’d been away, but…