Page 58 of The Oath We Give

“Lilac, look at me.” I sandwich her head between my palms, lifting her face so that I’m looking down at her. “It’s really important that you tell me the truth, okay? Everything that happened. I promise you I won’t be upset.”

“I’m so stupid, Cora. I should’ve known better. You taught me better, but I thought—” A choked noise steals her breath before she speaks again. “It felt real. It felt so freaking real to me.”

I stay silent, letting her take the time she needs to speak. To get out the words the way she needs to. My teeth sink into my inner cheek, anticipating.

“I was supposed to meet Reece for the first time. We agreed to meet out here since we’re both fans of the beach. I was so excited that I got here thirty minutes early. But the person who showed up wasn’t Reece.”

My blood runs cold, the wind turning icy.

“Who was it?” I urge.

“Stephen.” Big, fat tears drop from her eyes as she looks at me. All I can see is pain. “Reece was never real. It was all a trick to get to you. All the gifts, the late-night conversations. It was a game. It was him.”

I’m feeling so much, yet not at all.

There is a numbness that overtakes me.

“What gifts?”

“Huh?”

“What kind of gifts did he send you?”

“Um, flowers,” she mutters, shoulders stilling as her body stops shaking, “An annotated copy of the bookCirceand a couple of charcoal drawings.”

That earlier sickness returns.

He gave her my drawings, the ones that hung on the walls of that concrete cell and watched every vile thing he’d done to me. He gave my little sister my trauma as a gift.

“Did—” I clear my throat, “Did the flowers look like upside-down tulips?”

As if I need more proof that it was actually him luring her. As if I didn’t already believe every word she’d uttered. My mind is still in denial. Maybe it had been since I’d heard the news of his escape. It needed concrete evidence.

That he truly had come back for me.

“Yeah, he said they were called snowdrops. Why?” she asks, looking confused, completely unaware that the gifts she’d been given were tokens for me.

Stephen is mocking me.

My charcoal drawings.

A book with my nickname.

The flowers he used to bring me.

“InHomer’s Odyssey, Hermes gave moly, a magical herb, to Odysseus to protect him from Circe’s magic. A biologist named snowdrop the real-life moly,” I say absent-mindedly, spitting out words he’d spoken to me in the night. “Stephen used to tell me when he tired of me and was ready to let me go, he’d make me choke on them.”

I wasn’t saying it out loud for her to know, for anyone to know. It just fell out like the memory needed to be spoken aloud.

It’s fitting for him.

To see himself as the hero, Odysseus, in our story.

I am the evil, cunning Circe who had tricked him into love, forcing him to stay with me. I gave him no choice, he used to tell me. It was all my fault, he’d say while he stroked my hair.

The curse in my blood, those witchy eyes, made it impossible for him to sell me. He had to keep me. I made him keep me there in that basement. He was a prisoner of my love, my body and soul.

It was because of my curse he couldn’t let me go.