Like he’s trying to convince himself he wants it.
I pull away, mortification heating my cheeks.
Fears I’ve been harboring for months assail me all at once.
Nox, living another life, his arms wrapped around another woman. Nox, cradling a child who only exists in another realm.
Apology paints his beautiful features, and again he rubs at his temples. “Blaise…” he tries to explain, but I’m already crawling off of him, shame threatening to suffocate me.
“Please, you don’t have to explain,” I say hastily. Because I don’t think I’ll survive it if I hear the reason escape Nox’s lips. If I hear his heart belongs to another. If I hear he returned for one girl, only to realize the Blaise he thought he loved never existed.
That he’s returned for a liar who betrays her friends.
Nox shakes his head. “No, it’s not…I don’t think it’s you.”
I suck in a breath. “Nox, please.”
“No, there’s something wrong with me, Blaise. Something that’s different about me. It’s like I woke up in this realm, but with something missing. I don’t know if it got lost somewhere in the eyelet. But there’s something…” He grasps at his chest, then looks up at me.
It’s then that the memory of the Old Magic’s voice returns to me.
My dear, why do you assume it’s you I’ve chosen to curse?
CHAPTER 51
MARCUS
My daughter is amazing.
My daughter is amazing, and I hate that I’m leaving her.
I watch Amity as she swaddles Evander and Ellie’s baby, keeping the child tucked in close against her chest as she whispers absentmindedly to her.
She likes to hold the child while Evander and Ellie sleep, both of them having a tendency to pass out from exhaustion despite attempting to take shifts awake with their daughter.
But they need not worry. Their little girl is in the best of hands.
Amity, of course, isn’t capable of single-tasking, and I watch her rifle through her grimoire with one hand as she lays the child gently down in her lap.
My heart aches as Amity flips through the pages, underlining and circling sections with her quill.
She searches for a cure, and I don’t quite have the heart to tell her there is none.
That’s the thing about the Rip.
There’s no flax here. At least, no flax that hasn’t already been harvested. Amity reminds me that this means there’s someone out there selling the flax, and that we need only locate those merchants to find the cure for my illness, but even if that’s true, I know better than to think I’ll make it that long.
My body is failing me.
It’s a strange sensation, given I’ve always been so adamant about training it, bending my muscles into submission, disciplining my body rigorously to endure whatever is thrown my way.
But my strength is wilting. I managed to hold my bow while Ellie was in labor, but I was running off the thrill and necessity of the moment. Now I feel the consequences seeping exhaustion into my very bones.
I’m never quite rid of the urge to cough, which has only worsened since that mere pounced on me, crushing at least one, if not multiple, ribs.
I wish Piper were here. It’s ripping my soul to shreds that I’m spending the last of my days without her. It’s not that I want her to see me like this. The idea of her watching me wither away makes me sick. But I miss her laugh, her morbid sense of humor. If she were here, she’d poke me in the shoulder and make some comment about how she likes seeing my vulnerable side.
I can’t stand the thought that one of these days, someone, Lydia probably, is going to bring her the news that I’m gone.
I can’t stand that I won’t be there to hold her in that moment.
I find myself dwelling on this thought often, mostly because my mind can’t handle the alternative. That once Abra is done with her, there will be no one left to bring news of my death to. That Amity will find herself an orphan, parentless, and not for the first time.
It’s that thought that keeps me fixated on the image of Piper mourning my death.
Because then at least she’s alive.
At least she and Amity will have each other.
The Thornwall baby stirs, struggling against Amity’s expert swaddle.
It hurts me to look at her sometimes, that baby.
I’m abundantly happy for Evander and Ellie, grateful to the Fates for that little bundle of hope they’ve granted us amid so much turmoil.
But when I look at the infant, I don’t see her. I see the child that won’t get to exist, the one I’ve been dreaming of since that night in Evaen when I couldn’t stop searching for Piper in a crowd of dancers. Swaddled in terrycloth is the little sister Amity will never get to hold, even though Amity should get to be a sister. She’d be the best, most attentive older sister in the world.
Amity would be much better at having a little sister than I had been.
