Page 40 of Evermore (The Never Sky #3)
He held me, and he watched me die, and I finally understood he’d never been mine to love at all.
I came back to myself with Winter’s dying sob still echoing in my head. She stood beside Alastor now, her bloody dress dripping onto the stone floor.
“Do you understand now?” she asked. “Do you see what love means to a god?”
Drip. Drip.
“Drip. No. Don’t say that aloud. She’s not really here.”
“How fascinating,” Alastor mused, studying me. “Tell me, what did you see when the Remnants took you that time? Mine were unable to see beyond yours.”
“I see the truth.”
She sees truth , Winter repeated, though he couldn’t hear her. She sees what happens when anyone tries to love gods.
“I see you,” I told her, ignoring Alastor completely. “I see all of us. All the lives he’s taken. All the loves he’s betrayed.”
“The voices grow stronger,” Alastor noted. “Good. Let them in. Let them show us what you truly are.”
Winter’s laughter filled the room, high and broken. We are all the same story, told over and over until the words lose meaning. All pawns in his endless game. Killed by one brother or another’s hand as they play with lives. Nothing but a game.
I nodded, head hanging to the side. Maybe. Probably. “Nothing but a game.”
The Remnants stirred beneath my skin, responding to her words. A thousand voices in my head. A thousand scorned.
“You want to see what I truly am?” I asked, my voice barely recognizable to my own ears as I grinned. “You want to know what happens when you break something enough times it stops trying to be whole?”
Winter smiled, her teeth stained red. Show him.
The Remnants exploded outward with a force that shattered the chair and snapped the ropes. They filled the room like a living storm, feeding off centuries of pain and rage and betrayal. Each shadow held a memory, each whisper carried a death. They were mine now.
“Nothing but a game,” I whispered.
Alastor stumbled back, his Remnants rising to meet mine. But they were nothing compared to the power of a thousand broken hearts, a thousand betrayed loves, a thousand deaths.
“Remarkable,” he breathed, watching as my shadows consumed his. “You’re not just channeling power, you’re channeling every life he’s taken. Every life he’s broken.”
Winter circled me as I rose from the shattered chair, her bloody footprints marking each step. Make him understand what it means to cage a monster.
The walls cracked as my power pressed against them.
The air froze and shattered at the will of the Remnants.
My mind splintered further, breaking apart under the weight of so many lives, so many deaths, so many betrayals.
“Nothing but a game.” But it didn’t matter anymore.
Nothing mattered but the rage and the pain and the desperate need to make someone, anyone, understand what it felt like to be unmade over and over and over again.
“Nothing but a game. Nothing left but shadows and screams.”
Winter’s laugh mingled with mine as darkness consumed everything.
Alastor shifted forward, rolling his sleeves in a slow and deliberate move as he stepped among the shadows on the floor, no longer caring which were mine and which were his.
“Believe me, Huntress, I learned that lesson long ago from the same man who taught you.” His voice was quiet, but it cut through the chaos like a blade.
“Love doesn’t redeem monsters. It reveals them.
It carves us open, laying our rot bare, and dares the world to look away.
” His eyes, smoldering with a flicker of something broken, locked on to mine.
“But the difference between us is I stopped flinching a long time ago.”
“The snow melts but never touches the ground,” I whispered, watching Winter trail her bloody fingers across the walls. “He promised her forever too. Promises taste like copper when they break.”
“Sit.”
My body obeyed instantly, a chair materializing beneath me as my knees buckled.
Break them all.
Break the world.
Break yourself.
“What do you see when they come?” he asked, circling me like a predator. “What voices whisper to you?”
“Stars fall through forever. Dancing in gardens that died in winter. His eyes were hazel until they weren’t. Until they burned with lies that tasted like freedom.”
Winter laughed.
“Tell me how it feels when they surface,” Alastor commanded.
“Like drowning in memories that aren’t mine, but are. Like breathing shadows that taste like betrayal. Like dancing with death over and over and over… Do you waltz?”
He stopped suddenly, head tilting as if listening to something I couldn’t hear. A slow smile spread across his face, the kind that made Winter hiss and my Remnants ripple over my arms.
“Well,” he said, straightening his tie. “This is an interesting development. Guards!”
Shadows materialized into the form of two massive figures, their edges rippling like smoke. I’d seen them before when they attacked Archer and I. Fancy. I’d gotten a sword that day. I missed my sword.
“I miss my sword.”
“Take our Huntress to her room. She has a visitor I think she’ll be very interested in seeing.” He turned to me, that cruel smile widening. “Stay there until I return. We’re not finished yet.”
“Can I eat?”
“For fuck’s sake,” he said with a huff. “Someone feed the mortal.”
My feet carried me toward the door before I could think, before I could fight. Winter followed, her bloody footprints marking our path through halls that twisted like snakes.
He’s playing games.
Always games.
Break the games.
Break it all.
The shadow guard things deposited me in my pretty, little gilded prison, taking up posts outside the door. I paced, trying to sort reality from memory, truth from lies, my thoughts from Winter’s whispers.
“Can I sword? No. Eat.”
I turned to study myself in the mirror, searching for the woman I knew was being swallowed by madness. But rather than seeing my own face, the entire reflection was filled with a thousand faces of women with the same eyes, but different expressions of pain. One of a thousand. I was only one.
When the door opened, my heart stopped.
Thea stood in the doorway, copper hair gleaming in the lamplight. “Hello, P.” She threw a handful of metal scraps from her pocket onto the floor. “You ready to bust out of this place?”