Page 88 of Evermore

I felt the pressure in the back of my throat. The one that warned me tears weren’t far behind. I squeezed my eyes shut, trying hard to forget the man I’d known and loved for years, because as much as Thorne would like this moment when we were finally alone to be about him, it simply wasn’t.

“He didn’t even blink,” I whispered, forcing my heart to let go of the way I mourned him. “I gave him so much of myself. And he let go of that arrow.”

This wasn’t safe. These thoughts. These words. I didn’t want the emotions that came with them. I didn’t want the reality of being the Hunted. I had a mission. A goal. And Ezra wasn’t part of that.

“He will try again, Paesha. You need to understand that and be careful.”

I put a hundred walls up around the man I used to love in my mind. No more thoughts of him. I wouldn’t survive dwelling on the past. Instead, I looked to Thorne. Finally. Fully. Forcing the conversation away from his brother. “Are you afraid?”

He hesitated, something devastating and raw crossing his face before he masked it. “For you, perhaps, but you could stay. You could hide away,” he said softly, almost pleading. “Let me do this alone. I’ll find Irri and free you from Alastor, no matter what happens to me.” His thumb traced circles on my palm, the gentle touch at odds with the tension in his shoulders. “Go back to Quill, to your family. Let me do this one thing right.”

For a moment, for one heartbeat, I saw past the god to the man. The way his eyes held mine felt like a last desperate reach for something real, something true between us. As if he was offering me not just a choice, but a chance at redemption for us both.

He lies, the voices hissed in unison, rising like a tide of serpents in my mind.Always lies.

Stop this, Winter hissed.

Make him suffer, another whispered.

Do not be a fool, Sylvie commanded.

Their fury drowned out my own doubts, my own fears, and something else, something that felt dangerously like regret. I squeezed his hand, letting the vulnerability he needed to see shine through the cracks in my armor. “We go together. We leave together.” The lie tasted like ashes on my tongue. “No more running.”

The look that crossed his face then, a mixture of resignation and heartbreak so profound it stole my breath, was gone so quickly I almost convinced myself I’d imagined it. He couldn’thave known. If he knew I planned to find a way without him, he wouldn’t have committed to go.

Without another word, we stepped through the tear in reality. The sound it made as it sealed behind us sent ice through my veins.

“Can you reopen it?” I asked.

“I’m not sure,” he admitted quietly, removing his glasses as this new reality settled around us. “I’m guessing nothing works quite the same here, but that’s the hope. Otherwise, I’ve taken you away from your ward for eternity. And that’s a truth I cannot bear.”

At least he was being honest about this sadness. He might not admit it, but that came from fear too. Perhaps the god of gods and a thousand names was more human than he’d ever let himself believe. Or he was a really good pretender, playing the role of someone who cared. Likely the latter.

The Forgotten was a nightmare manifested. Towers of twisted black stone rose into a starless void above, their surfaces creeping with shadows that had weight and substance. The ground was neither solid nor liquid. It shifted and rippled with each step, as if we walked on the skin of some vast, sleeping beast.

Between the towers, paths wound like open wounds through the darkness. The air whispered of the damned. Fragments of forgotten souls drifted past like ash, their faces contorted in eternal screams.

I spoke before thinking. Before the mask could be firmly in place. “How did this place come to be?”

“It happened by accident,” Thorne said quietly, his eyes fixed on the darkness. “When I first became the Keeper, I didn’t understand the weight of what I was. Every beginning demands an ending. Every memory preserved requires something to be forgotten. Balance, always balance. The first time I neededto make something cease to exist in memory, I thought I was simply removing it from reality. But things don’t simply disappear. All those forgotten things, those lost moments, those ended stories, they had to go somewhere. I didn’t realize what was happening until I imprisoned my first god. Everything that had been forgotten, everything that had been broken, it all gathered here. A realm that exists in the spaces between memory and oblivion. A prison built from everything that reality needed to forget.”

“Great. Not ominous at all,” I said, hesitant to walk forward.

“No one has ever returned from here.” His voice dropped to barely a whisper. “I have no idea what we’re getting ourselves into.”

“Can’t be worse than dungeon torture, forced marriage and one-sided magical bargains. I think I’ll manage.”

My Remnants poured across the shifting ground. They twisted through the shadows, trying to anchor themselves to anything that felt real. But nothing here was truly real, it was all echoes and pieces of things that had been forgotten by time and people and apparently even gods.

The darkness pressed closer as Thorne caught my wrist, turning me to face him. His touch was gentle but insistent, like everything about him, a contradiction I’d never quite understood. “The last time we were alone…”

I hadn’t thought about it. Refused to remember his fingers on my skin. The way he’d settled between my thighs, the way he’d looked at me that night. “I should have told you everything then.”

“Stop. We don’t need to do this.”

His fingers tightened. “Yes, we do. We absolutely fucking do. I can feel the way you pull back. I can see the question in your eyes. I know you don’t trust me.”

“And why should I? If you broke my arm right now and apologized for it, would my arm be healed?” I bit back at him, knowing I was giving myself away.