Page 3

Chapter two

G emma had matured over the past year. Her mahogany skin was more worn from the sun, which made me think she had been in the south. The sun was scared to show its face too often this far north, especially with winter looming.

I remembered her ebony curls, disheveled from the wind.

Now, they were longer and pulled into a loose, messy bun with stray strands framing her high cheekbones and striking caramel eyes.

She towered over me with long legs. Dirt blemished her otherwise bright and alert face, and she bore a crossbow on her back.

A few weeks before my father and Ollie’s deaths, Gemma had left us to seek new “living arrangements.”

She was a filthy-mouthed, relentless force of a woman that my parents had welcomed into our home. I only remembered a few months with her, but it had been enough time to form an attachment even stronger than any I’d formed with either of my parents.

Gemma was four years my senior at twenty-two, and the only friend I’d ever known.

She’d shown me the kind of bold fire a woman could brandish with her tongue.

Helped me teach Oliver how to read and write, how to practice arithmetic—all things my brain somehow recalled how to do.

Gemma had told me stories of our world in great detail.

Every story she told felt like a myth, if only because our history was something my parents never spoke about.

“There you are!” She reached inside to use her foot as a doorstop before I could close it on her.

I wasn’t going to close her out. I didn’t plan on allowing her in right away, either. She would have to earn it.

I was still processing her standing on my doorstep when she tried to step over the threshold. To her annoyance, I didn’t budge.

“You’ve got to be shitting me, Ary. I’ll only say it one more time. Let me in.”

“No.”

“ No? ” she repeated, eyes wide and disbelieving.

“No,” I said, but Gemma shifted forward to lean more of her weight against the door. “I said no. You can’t come in.”

“Ary—”

“What do you want?” I demanded.

She grumbled something unintelligible and with just enough force to thwart my balance, shoved past me into the house. “You’ve become such a gracious host.” She wiped her boots on the bare floor.

Irritation burned in my throat. I had just scrubbed that floor the day before in my desperate need to control… something .

“Thanks for the warm welcome. ‘What do you want?’” she repeated, scoffing as she moved toward my father’s dusty old liquor cabinet. “You don’t seem to be overwhelmed with options here, do you?”

“I could say the same for you.”

Her body was curved, defined, and strong, but I could tell she was tired. She tried and failed to hide the bags under her eyes with a smirk. It was clear she hadn’t bathed in days. She smelled a little, honestly .

“I won’t deny it.” She opened and closed the insulated chest and a few cabinets. “I haven’t had a drink since I stopped in Albertha, and that was two days ago. You can imagine I’m parched.”

I picked up my half-empty glass of water and held it out for her to take, even though I knew water wasn’t what she desired. She took it anyway, eyeing me carefully.

“You haven’t told me why you’re here.”

“Well—”

“Or why you left when I needed you.”

She abruptly paused with my glass to her lips. Her eyes narrowed. “If you think it was my choice to leave you, you never knew me at all.”

My damn mother.

“She forced you out?” I asked, indignance pressing upon my throat.

She nodded, then scoffed. “Said I was getting a little too mouthy . When exactly did she take off?”

“Three months ago.”

“Three months!” Gemma gasped. “Gods.” She went to the sink and used the pump to refill the glass, then leaned against the counter, waiting for me to elaborate.

“I found… something,” I began, uncertain whether to reveal the contents of the note, “and confronted her about it.”

“Good.” She pursed her lips and assessed me. “I hope you gave her hell.”

When she’d lived with us, Gemma worked to cultivate in me the biting wit she spoke of, but defiance and aggression didn’t come as naturally to me.

She said I was too timid, dangerously so.

In my defense, I hadn’t had much time or opportunity to practice fighting back, not while holed up in this secluded cabin.

“She’s not coming back,” said Gemma.

My heart sank. I knew it was true, but hearing her say it cut deep. “I figured as much. ”

“You don’t seem too devastated.”

“I’m angry, not devastated. I presume she left me for a reason.” I folded my arms over my chest. “Why are you here?” I mindlessly scratched my elbow just to keep my hands busy. “Why now?”

“Well, you weren’t supposed to be alone for three damn months !” she hissed. “I was originally given the order to come back two weeks from now, right after your nineteenth birthday, but the timeline changed.”

“Given the order by who?”

“Elowen wasn’t supposed to leave,” she said without answering my question. “She was supposed to stay with us, but that woman does as she wants.”

“She’s alive ?”

Gemma nodded. “Last I heard.”

Sighing, knees trembling with relief, I sat down across from Gemma. My mother and I hadn’t parted on the best terms. The bond between us was weak, and I may have not wept for long over her death. That didn’t mean I wished for it.

“I need to show you something,” I said.

I unfolded the letter to S and placed it in front of her. She glanced for less than a second, then covered it with her palm and crinkled it into her fist.

“Do you know who he is?” I pressed.

She took a swig of water and avoided my pleading eyes.

With a curdling stomach, I snatched the glass from her hands so she had little choice but to match my stare. “Gemma, who is this letter written to?”

“Damn Elowen for leaving me to do her dirty work.” With a reluctant sigh, she met my gaze and tilted her head at me. Her eyes held curiosity and pity that irked me. She gestured for me to return the water. “Did you ever wonder why Phillip was a drunkard? ”

My mother had never confessed to blaming me for my father’s drinking. She didn’t have to. The melancholic expression he’d often worn in my presence made it clear there was something about me that haunted him, and she resented that. Resented me .

“Of course I wondered,” I answered softly, sliding her glass across the table. I’d always wrestled with the suspicion that his issues began and ended with me.

“Did you ever wonder why you don’t look like him?”

I looked down at my fair-skinned hands. My father and little brother had tawny complexions with dirty-blond hair, a stark contrast to my pale skin and strange silvery locks.

“I never looked like Elowen, either.” Though I’d envied her stunning chestnut waves, high cheekbones, and hazel eyes. I rose from my seat and walked over to the counter and poured water from the kettle into a stoneware mug for tea.

“That’s because you look like your father.” Her fingers danced on the small oak table. “Your real father.”

I gulped and allowed the warmth of the mug to soothe the quickening chill in my fingers that had nothing to do with the temperature of the air.

“S?” I asked, barely whispering.

“Simeon. Simeon Whitlock.”

I thought I’d heard the name before. Maybe once or twice, my father— Phillip —and mother had mentioned him when they thought I wasn’t listening. Something about his wishes, his orders, and it not being “time.”

“My mother had an affair?”

Gemma nodded, apologetic.

I expected to feel more anger than I did, but a part of me may have suspected it. My father— Phillip —had always been a detached fixture in my life. We’d never formed a strong bond. Still, I’d defined myself as my parents’ child and Oliver’s sister .

But now I realized his detachment… I must have reminded him of my mother’s lover.

“What about Ollie?”

“Theirs,” she replied. “He was Phillip’s.”

A frigid numbness coated my throat. At least Ollie and I shared a mother. He was my brother. I could hold onto that.

My mother was right, though. It should have been me that died that day.

That I was theirs had been a thin thread tying me to them both, but that thread had existed. Until now.

In light of this revelation, that measly thread snapped. I recognized myself for the burden I was—a constant reminder of marital betrayal to Phillip.

“I know that look.” Gemma’s sharp, stunning features twisted with pity. “It’s not your fault Phillip drank.”

“That’s not—” I sighed, attempting to steady my voice. “I’m not so worried about that.”

Though I had no control over my birth circumstances, I couldn’t help but feel the weight of my existence and the trail of consequences left in its path.

My mother had always justified how we lived in solitude.

Conflict bred more conflict, she often said.

I took it to mean staying quiet and reclusive would avoid trouble, so that’s what we did.

But if I was the product of betrayal, then conflict had probably followed me.

It could have followed me here, to Phillip and Ollie.

The deep, dark parts of me—the parts of me that wanted to blame myself just to have answers—wondered if it had.

“Am I the reason they’re dead?” I spoke his name through the nausea. “Am I the reason that… Ollie is dead?”

Gemma’s lips parted, helpless.

Horror as disquieting as the gloomy winter sky minced my stomach to pieces. Nauseous, I turned my back to her. Breathing was difficult, like trying to force wind through a glass window just barely broken. The pressure threatened my composure, which I didn’t have much of to begin with.

“I don’t know,” she admitted softly. “I don’t know who killed them.”

Though I knew Elowen blamed me for their deaths. She’d never said it outright. She didn’t have to. Whoever killed them must have been there to kill me. She and I had been out in the forest collecting berries. Such an innocent, commonplace thing, but it had been me who asked to go that morning.