Page 55 of Dark Flame

“You should pick a hair colour and stick to it. You’re exhausting to keep up with.”

“What’s life without whimsy?” She tugs on Harlow’s pyjamas hanging beside her. “This is disturbing, Alec. We should probably talk about your newest obsession.”

Her word choice hits a bit too close for my liking, especially after my recent conversation with the other witch. Harlow Sinclair will never be my obsession because I’ll never allow it. She’s passing entertainment while working toward a grander plan.

“Putting aside your invasion into my home, why have you come?” There have been too many uninvited guests today.

She gestures to the shoebox resting on the opposite seat. “Because the Goddess gave me permission to explain all this to you. So before you run around with your head cut off, chasing your tail and all that jazz, trying to figure this out, we’ll save you a step.”

“So you know what that is?” I nod to the box.

“Question is…” She kicks one leg over the other, propping it straight up into the air because…well, I’m learning Freya is weird as fuck. “Do you?”

I cross to the box, lifting the lid and retrieving both IDs and the wedding photo. “When Lorraine Sinclair birthed only one child—Harlow’s mother, Emily—I left them alone. Then Harlow was born. I’ve been following the Sinclairs close enough to know this”—I jab my finger into the wedding photo—“is not Emily. Never in history has a Sinclair witch been born with anything but red hair.”

Freya barely spares the photo a glance before she makes an unamused noise. “Recent generations of the Sinclairs have a grim history.”

“What does that mean?”

“Why, Alec? Sounds like you care.”

Fisting the IDs hard enough they bend under pressure but don’t crack, I state, “Anything to do with Harlow is my business. Who are these people?”

Freya swings her legs to the side to sit up and reaches for the IDs. Reluctantly, I hand them over. She glances at the names, her lips pursing, a seriousness settling over her that I didn’t realize her capable of.

“Witches are supposed to be there for one another. There are few things witches value above all: their coven and their magick. What Violet and Arthur Hartman did was a betrayal unlike anything our community has ever seen. They turned against the Highridge Coven, killed their own, and kidnapped that girl when she was only eight-years-old.”

“So they’re not her birth parents?”

Freya shakes her head and flicks the tip of one of the ID cards. “No,” she murmurs, “they’re not, but they raised her as such after murdering Emily and John, then stealing their identities before disappearing into the human world.”

Shit.I don’t know why I care…but I do. This is…fuck.

“Why doesn’t she know any of this?”

“They wiped her memory of everything before she was eight. That was right after binding her magick, something they continuously did over the years, to ensure she could never overpower them.”

A rage settles in the base of my stomach with the picture of my little witch as an even younger witch; a child, terrified of being taken from her real family and then forced to forget them entirely.

“She had her powers, though.” Enough to burn a house.

Freya smiles sadly, shaking her head. “Not all of them.”

I drop into the second chair. “Tell me everything.”

* * *

At the endof Freya’s story, everything makes fucking sense.

Everything.

Her confusion over the marks on her wrists.Theydid that.

The shoe box. All their hidden secrets.

Why Harlow doesn’t live with her coven; they never kicked her out.

The fact her “parents” weren’t able to save themselves from the fire. They were never the powerful Sinclairs they feigned being.