Page 18 of Evermore

“I know.”

Liar. Traitor.

Masks. Masks. Pretty little masks.

“Stop.” I pressed my palms to my temples, trying to block out the voices that swirled around me like smoke.

Their cruel words came faster, overlapping and tangling until they were nothing but noise, an ugly, disjointed noise that scraped against my mind like nails on glass. My breath turned shallow and uneven as the memories clawed their way back to the surface. I couldn’t even shut my eyes against them.

Thorne’s smile. Reverius’s smirk. Two faces layered atop each other like oil on water, shifting and distorting until I couldn’t tell where one ended and the other began. His promises echoed in my head. Sweet lies wrapped in silk ribbons. ‘You’re safe with me.’ ‘I’ll never let anything happen to you.’

Fucking liar. He wanted me to die, but only when he orchestrated it. For whatever reason.

I’d seen the truth thanks to Alastor. I just needed to move on from him. The man of a thousand faces and a million lies. He’d made me believe in impossible things, only to rip it all away. I thought he’d try to come back with me. Or at least try to help me. He did neither. As always. Betrayal after betrayal, lifetime after lifetime. The cycle never ended.

As if I’d summoned the fucking thing by letting myself feel anything but numbness, Thorne’s little, golden book appeared on the table, igniting a piece of anger I hadn’t felt yet.

“How did you find this?” I hissed at him, then cowered, staring around the corner to make sure no one heard me. I was sure the others already thought I was losing it. I didn’t need to fuel that fire. And he couldn’t hear me, of course. I’d have to write in his damn book to speak to him. Unless Ezra had the same book. Hadn’t he called it a family heirloom? Could they both use it?

The last time I’d seen it, it was in the hands of Ezra’s men. Not that it mattered, it would suffer the same fate, regardless of who’d sent it. Glaring across the room, I snatched a small oil lamp, tossed it into the fireplace, and waited for the dry logs to burst to life. Once the heat reached me and I was nearly vibrating with fury at the audacity of whichever brother had the nerve to send this, I threw the fucking book in the fire, confident the gold wouldn’t melt, but the pages could burn to ash.

Power, my new power, rose to attention with my pressing emotions. I watched with grim satisfaction as the flames licked at the golden edges of the damn thing. The paper curled and blackened, smoke rising in delicate tendrils, reducing Thorne’s lies to ash. A weight lifted from my chest as I watched it burn, feeling a savage joy at destroying this link to him.

But as the final page crumbled away, leaving nothing but a warped golden cover, I turned, hardly daring to breathe asthe fucking thing reappeared. Sitting innocently on the table, pristine and untouched. It gleamed in the firelight, mocking me.

“Neat parlor trick, asshole.”

My hands shook as I snatched it up, flipping through the pages. They were crisp and white, not a single char or burn mark. Only the godsdamned ‘two’ written on the top of the first page in my own writing.

I hurled the book back into the fire. The flames leapt higher, hungrily devouring the pages once more. I stood there, chest heaving, watching until nothing remained but ashes and gold. Slowly, dreading what I’d find, I turned around. There it was again, whole and perfect on the table.

With a scream of frustration, I seized the book and ripped the pages out by the fistful, crumpling them in my hands before hurling them into the hungry flames. The fire roared higher as I fed it page after page, a whirlwind of flying paper and sparks. My fingers tore at the binding, but I couldn’t split the gold cover, no matter how badly I wanted to destroy every last scrap until nothing remained. This was Thorne. Reverius. Thorne never existed. He was only a mask. A perfect performance delivered by an empowered god, taking a page directly out of Vesalia’s damn playbook. Fuck her cuckoo clocks and fuck this book.

Hot tears blurred my vision, but I blinked them away furiously, focused only on my task of annihilation. Not the way he’d lied. Not the way I’d fallen for it all. Not the shame and embarrassment of never figuring it out. How dare he send this to me, this mocking reminder of all his bullshit? Did he think I’d fall for this? Let him worm his way back in with a few charming words? Never. Never again. I’d sooner see him drown in the Lake of Lost Souls in the heart of Death’s court before I ever spoke another word to him.

As I flung the last handful of ruined pages into the fire, chest heaving, I felt a dark satisfaction curl in my gut. The same placewhere that strange new power had taken root, pulsing in time with the wild pounding of my heart. It reveled in my fury, rising to the surface like a shark scenting blood in the water.

I stepped back from the fireplace, swiping an arm across my damp cheeks, and turned slowly to face the inevitable. A strangled sound halfway between a sob and a snarl tore from my throat.

There on the table, flawless and shining in the flickering light as if I had never touched it, lay the golden book. The whispers followed me as I fled the room, growing louder with each frantic step. Their taunting words echoed in my mind, twisting like barbed wire around my heart.

Weak.

Fool.

He never loved you.

No one ever did.

Can’t you see they’ve all left you? Even your parents.

I burst out the front door into the moonlit meadow, gulping the cool night air. But there was no relief, no respite from the insidious voices that clawed at my sanity. They came from everywhere and nowhere.

I pressed my hands over my ears, trying in vain to block out the hiss of their voices. “Stop, please stop,” I begged, my voice cracking. Hot tears streamed down my face as I sank to my knees.

The Remnants,myRemnants, stirred to life, drawn to the surface by my spiraling anguish. They thrashed against my ribcage like captive beasts, dark tendrils of power snaking through my veins. Choking me. Consuming me. He’d made me angry, they’d made me lose it.

A scream built in my throat but emerged as only a strangled whimper when I curled in on myself, fingers digging into therich earth, desperately trying to ground myself against the maelstrom raging in my mind.