“So you trapped her mind for nearly two decades?” I asked, disbelief apparent in my tone.
“If she hadn’t gone against the council, if she hadn’t unearthed our secrets, she would have never been subjected to that punishment.”
She spoke as if discovering the truth justified her and the council’s actions. Horrified was only a fraction of the emotion I now felt.
Nonna drew herself up, a stubborn tilt to her chin as she held my gaze. Her look said she was telling me because she wanted to, not because my twin was forcing her hand. It was difficult to imagine the tears in Nonna’s eyes the night I’d discovered Vittoria’s body. Where there once was love, hatred burned between them now, bright and all-consuming. I couldn’t believe she was capable of cursing her own friend, then using her as a cautionary tale all our lives.
“Now tell her about her prince,” Vittoria said. “Don’t leave anything out.”
“In the beginning, the Prince of Wrath was cursed to forget all but his hate,” Nonna said, her voice clipped. Not from anger, but pain. Her breath rasped with each inhale and exhale. “The First Witch told him whatever he loved would be taken from him. At that time, he didn’t care for anything, save his wings. That was before he met you.” Nonna sucked in another ragged breath. “He cursed her right back, promising to take something she loved in return if she didn’t return his wings. So La Prima Strega made a bargain with the devil. No one knows the exact terms. She’d set her spell using her blood, made a sacrifice to the goddess, and was overly confident in her abilities. She forgot whom she’d been dealing with.”
She let that sink in and settle. It was a tangled web with many threads winding and twining together until they were so knotted it felt impossible to cut through. Two curses converged, and our lives were caught in between.
“Our curse… part of it was because of the First Witch?” I asked.
Nonna nodded. “You know the first part of the story—that Pride once had a wife who was the daughter of the First Witch. La Prima wanted her daughter back, free from the demon prince, so she came up with a plan to pit Wrath and Pride against each other. She made a bargain with House Vengeance.”
“For a price, naturally,” Vittoria added, her tone cold.
A memory was rising to the surface. I still couldn’t remember who the First Witch was, but I had a strong sense of what she’d wanted. “We were pretending to be one person.” Vittoria nodded, encouraging me to push forward. To fight to reclaim memories that belonged to me. The magic binding me, it was struggling. I felt for the thread of power that belonged to Wrath and tugged it hard, allowing it to break a little more of the curse. It was stubborn, resisted, but my husband’s power was too strong. Another crack split open, freeing a memory. “I was sent to Wrath; my mission was to seduce him.”
Something like relief crossed my twin’s features.
“And I was sent to Pride with the same mission,” Vittoria confirmed. “At the Feast of the Wolf, Wrath was meant to walk in on me and Pride, thinking it was you. The First Witch wanted a war to break out. She wanted her daughter to see that Pride wasn’t serious about her, had never been, if he publicly fought his brother over someone else.”
“She wanted to break her daughter’s heart.” I felt sick. It was a cruel game. A scheme that had destroyed so many lives. All because the First Witch didn’t want to lose her daughter to a demon. And I’d played a part in it. I’d never hated myself more. “And Wrath? What happened?”
“He gave you his heart. He’d caught on to the scheme and didn’t care. The night you were meant to leave and let me finish our mission at the Feast, from what my spies have gathered, you sneaked back to him. You pulled him aside at the party, dragged him off for a tryst. When I was trying to seduce Pride, you were in the garden with him, where he confessed his love.”
Wrath had… Goddess above. Chills erupted over my body. Wrath, the fearsome general of war, had made himself vulnerable. Likely for the first time in his long existence. And then all hell had broken loose. I exhaled a shaky breath. All these years, he’d been cursed to hate me. Yet he’d fought against it. Tried to latch on to the good. No wonder he was hesitant to give me his heart now. The one time he’d given himself wholly, he’d been punished.
“Before he told me he loved me, I confessed everything that night,” I said, suddenly recalling the midnight garden. The night-blooming flowers, the crescent moon. I remembered thinking it was smiling down on us. Now I wonder if it was in mockery. “Somehow, during our game, my feelings changed. I couldn’t go through with the plan. I loved him. So I dragged him away before he could see you and Pride.”
“I’m not sure what happened between you two then,” Vittoria continued. “My spies weren’t close enough. All I know is that within the next moment or two, you were gone. There was blood. Some torn-out hair. But nothing else. Wrath went ballistic. He stormed into the castle and nearly destroyed his brothers, convinced one of them had been behind the attack. At that time, no one knew what struck you. Umbra demons were blamed, hired by someone. Envy was the prime suspect, though I know for certain he’d left the party well before the bloodbath began. Then Wrath focused on Greed, and finally Pride.”
Vittoria closed her eyes, as if reliving the memory of that night. I wasn’t there, but it was easy to imagine Wrath detonating. The chaos, the fear. The raw, unchecked power of his sin seeking to destroy as he unsuccessfully searched for me.
My sister looked at me, and maybe it was the memory of that night, or some mortal piece of her finally slipping through, but she signaled to Domenico—who I’d forgotten was still leaning against the wall—and he magicked my restraints away. They fell to the floor in a heap of metal. It was only through sheer force of will that I didn’t follow them down to the ground.
“While the bloodbath between princes continued to rage, I went to find you. Wrath had revealed to everyone that we were twins, so our scheme was over, and even if it wasn’t, I wouldn’t abandon you,” Vittoria said, her voice softening. “It didn’t take long to find you, but I’d been too late. Once the witches had you, they moved quickly. The twin witches who had been born? They sacrificed them immediately. Kept their hearts pumping through magic.”
“What?” Chills raced along my spine. Another realization clicked into place. I glanced at Nonna, who finally looked regretful. “The prophecy of the twin witches wasn’t about us.”
Vittoria shook her head. “It never was. The prophecy of the twin witches simply says that they would be sacrificed—we are not those witches. Yes, twin witches—babies—were born that night, and the Star Witches sacrificed them and took their hearts. They put those hearts inside of us and created our spell-locks. We were infused with their mortality.”
“Nonna raised them, raised us,” I said, still reeling. I gave my grandmother a horrified look. “You were in our earliest memories. You taught us to bless our amulets. You taught us to cook.” I rubbed my hands over my arms. The chill had turned bone-deep. Our grandmother had brutally killed two innocent witches. Witches she went on to raise. It was unfathomable. Looking at her now, I was unable to process the mixture of emotions swirling through me. She’d been the ultimate force of good in my life. Had hated everything to do with the dark arts. And all along she’d been the ultimate evil. “How could you? How could you do that to those girls?”
Nonna’s fists curled at her sides. “Duty. We all knew a day would come when we’d be forced to sacrifice. They gave up their lives, and we gave up our hearts that day, too. It is our destiny to watch the prison of damnation. To ensure the Wicked and the Feared don’t get out. Once the curse had gone into effect, you posed a great threat to our world. You are a vengeance goddess. We did not want to risk your fury once you’d discovered that a witch had taken something so precious from you. The First Witch wouldn’t—and couldn’t—break her curse, and we acted accordingly.”
“All to bind us? Because of hate and fear?” I saw the truth of that in Nonna’s eyes, but I also saw something else. Something more complicated. Like perhaps Nonna started to question her duty. Perhaps she’d grown to love us, her enemies. And maybe that was why she filled our heads with lies of the Wicked. With telling us who to fear. One of the warnings she’d told us repeated itself in my mind.
Whatever you do, you must never speak to the Wicked. If you see them, hide. Once you’ve caught a demon prince’s attention, he’ll stop at nothing to claim you. They are midnight creatures, born of darkness and moonlight. And they seek only to destroy.…
Knowing what I did now, I understood the true warning. They’d been hiding me from Wrath. They knew he would stop at nothing to claim me, to destroy what the witches had done. He’d bided his time; he’d searched. And even through his hate, he never let that ember of love die.
The story and warning weren’t lies. They just weren’t my truth. Those warnings only belonged to the witches. They did everything in their power to keep us apart. To break our bond. And they failed. I refused to meet my grandmother’s pleading stare another moment. I looked at my sister. She might be a monster now, but she wasn’t pretending to be anything else.
“I still don’t understand one part… how was this scheme to trick Wrath and Pride supposed to work? I know Envy said no spies ever made it to our circle. But didn’t the demons know of us, even if they’d never been to our House?”
Vittoria uttered a spell, then drew a map in the space between us. It glowed a soft lavender as it hovered before me. My twin pointed to the almost familiar continent. “The underworld bears many similarities to the mortal land of Italy. The upper region, corresponding to Piemonte, is where lesser demons and ice dragons roam.” She moved her hand, and a different area, roughly the location of Tuscany, glowed. “This region is where the princes of Hell reside.” She swept the magic along the southern border, approximately in the same location as the region of Campania. “And this is where House Vengeance is. There is a treacherous mountain range here that serves as a nearly impassable barrier to our domain—even for immortals. Within the mountains is a veil of sorts, one that erases memories. Except for ours, our mother’s, and anyone we choose to gift with true Sight.” My twin pointed out another section. “The vampire court is near the very tip, where Calabria is for humans. And the island of Sicily is nearly identical to the location of the Shifting Isles.”
The map faded into the shadows. At least I now understood how the princes—who seemed to know much about everything—were in the dark about us. “I don’t understand why we kept ourselves mysterious. For what, centuries? Is there a reason we didn’t comingle with the princes?”
Vittoria’s expression shifted. It wasn’t quite hatred, but there was a coldness about her features that surfaced each time I brought up the princes of Hell. “Demons—especially princes of Hell—cannot be trusted. And are beneath us. We had enough to occupy us in the southern region and had no cause to get involved in their squabbles.”
“We were here shortly after the underworld was created,” I recalled suddenly.
“And the princes came centuries later, when they were cast from their own realm.”
I sensed there was much more to that particular part of our history but left it be for now. Above all else, I needed to understand our current predicament—the curse and how it came to be—if I had any hope of breaking it.
My twin was in a rather giving mood, freely offering information without any magical restraints. I might not have many other opportunities to gather this much information, so I took advantage. “If I was torn away from Wrath, how did you get cursed?”
“Like I said, I came for you.” My sister’s gaze turned darker than the shadows that slunk into the chamber. She flung a hex at our grandmother, knocking her unconscious. “I hunted you down, and the Star Witches were ready. They set a trap. You were lying on an altar, blood dripping from your chest.”
She allowed that punch to land squarely in my gut. It was the exact way I’d found her body in the monastery in Sicily. Now I knew her pose had been by design. It hadn’t been a message to me, it had been a warning to Nonna and the witches.
The goddess of death remembered.