Page 121 of The Unbound Witch

“Who killed me?”

Long fingers thrummed together. “It was your lover, of course. She was caught whispering with Nikos the night of the ball. After you’d had your… passionate moment in the hallway and said goodnight.”

The heart I didn’t have? Shattered.

Nym.

The golden witch that had snatched my heart had pierced it with a stolen blade and never found the courage to tell me. I wanted to crumple. To dive into the floor and never come up again. To let this pain consume me. Tears pooled in my eyes. Real tears.

Meliora moved toward me again, studying my face as I willed those fucking tears not to fall. To let my weakness be my own and not a strain of gossip around the world. But that fiery tear slipped down my face and landed on the floor in a splash, stripping me bare before a room full of beings I would never be like. Exposing the difference between us… that tear was my damnation. I didn’t belong here. Or anywhere.

I wanted out. I needed to soar. To move away from the walls that crept in on me, threatening to swallow me whole. To hide from the hundreds of eyes that watched me. But I couldn’t move. I was frozen in place and horrified. The spectacle. Always the spectacle.

The old wraith lifted her hands into the air. “Everyone out.”

On that single command, the rest of the beings left through the walls of the room, but I didn’t trust they were truly gone. The emptiness was a reprieve, though. If not from my own mind, at least the judgment of others. The knowledge that I’d come before them as a fool and they’d all known it when I hadn’t.

“Sometimes the most painful stories are the truthful ones. Gossip can be full of lies and twisted tales, but those that shock us the most are the ones of fact. You’ve come here to ask a different question, haven’t you?”

“No,” I lied, holding back every ounce of emotion I could muster. But I needed to know. If not for her, then for myself. “Yes.”

She simply stared at me with blank eyes, uninterested in my feelings.

“Can I become a witch again?”

She shook her head, something that could have been regret filling her face. “For years, I tried. Confident there would be a way. But there is no path that moves backward in this life or the next.”

“Then I am stuck here, like this… forever?” I could hardly manage the words as I begged her for a different answer than I knew she’d have.

“I wouldn’t think so. You are a wish. A wish fulfilled should be all that is needed for you to leave this plane behind and go on to the next.”

“But we tried.” Another tear fell and I raged inside at the betrayal of my own emotions. “I answered the question that brought me here and nothing happened.”

She lowered her head as well as her ethereal voice. “Then I am afraid that is your answer.”

“That’s no answer at all,” I whispered as I turned to leave the room, devastated beyond measure.

“One more thing,” the being said to me as I pushed the door open and glanced at Raven who’d been standing there waiting. “The Moss Coven leader is pacing outside of your little store.”

Her final words were simply a match to the pyre.

The race back to the entrance was winding, dark, and filled with more emotion than either of us wanted to process. Running, Raven looked over her shoulder to me several times before mustering the courage to pry.

“Everything okay?”

“Yes,” I lied. “It seems my killer will never be discovered. You?”

“All great. We got the answers we needed. They used Bastian’s mother’s blood. That’s likely why they killed her.”

“And you? Areyouokay?”

“Never better,” she lied, facing forward to follow our leading ghost back out of the tunnel.

It seemed we both needed time to process the truths we’d learned. She was destined to die. Soon. And I was destined to stay here for eternity, alone.

49

RAVEN