Chapter 38
Chapter thirty-eight
The night stretched endless and hollow.
Briar lay on her bed, staring at the ceiling, counting each sound from the room next door.
Eliam's footsteps pacing—seven steps, turn, seven steps, turn.
The scrape of a chair. The creak of his bed when he finally lay down.
Every sound proof of how close he was and how utterly unreachable he'd become.
Her lips still ached from his kiss. She touched them with trembling fingers, feeling the slight swelling where he'd been deliberately rough.
Her body remembered even if he didn't—the way she'd melted into him for that brief moment before reality crashed back.
The way he'd made that confused sound, caught between want and rejection.
She pressed her palm flat against the wall that separated them. The stone was cold, solid, real. On the other side, he was probably sleeping peacefully, unburdened by memories of her. No dreams of gardens or moonlight or the way she'd gasped his name. Just blissful, empty sleep.
Her chest hitched with a sob she wouldn't let escape.
She'd cried enough. Been weak enough. But the pain kept building, wave after wave of it, until she couldn't breathe properly.
Her throat burned with suppressed sounds.
Her eyes burned with tears that wouldn't stop coming no matter how many times she wiped them away.
She touched her neck where the marks used to be.
The skin was smooth now, unmarked, ordinary.
As if he'd never claimed her at all. Her fingers searched for any trace, any raised line or roughness that would prove it had been real.
Nothing. Just soft human skin that would never bear his thorns again.
The bargain was complete. Allegra was healed. The bond was gone.
The thought kept circling through her mind as the hours crawled toward dawn. She had no reason to stay. No claim on him. No place here.
By the time pale light crept through her window, she knew what she had to do.
She found Thaine in the weapons hall, running a whetstone along a blade with mechanical precision. The scrape of metal on stone stopped when she entered. He looked up, and his expression crumbled slightly before he caught himself.
"You're leaving." Not a question.
"The bargain is complete. The bond is gone." The words came out steady though her chest felt like it was caving in. "I want to leave on my own terms."
"Briar—"
"Don't." Her voice cracked. She pressed her hand to her mouth, fighting for control. After a moment, she tried again. "He kissed me yesterday to prove a point. To show me I don't belong here. And he's right. I don't."
"He doesn't know what he's doing. If we just give him time—"
"Time for what?" The words burst out, too loud in the quiet hall. "Time to maybe remember? To watch him look through me every day? Time to see him find someone else because he doesn't know I ever existed?"
She sank onto a bench, her whole body shaking. Thaine crossed to her, crouched in front of her, his usual stoicism cracking.
"I can't do this anymore," she whispered. "Every time I see him, it breaks me a little more. He's right there, Thaine. Right there. And he doesn't know me. Doesn't want to know me. I need to leave before there's nothing left of me to save."
"Where will you go?"
"Back to my life. My family. My world where things make sense."
"You belong here too."
"No." She met his eyes, and she saw him flinch at whatever was in hers. "I belonged to him. Without that, I'm just a human in a world that wants to eat me. I want to go home. Please."
Thaine's jaw worked. She could see him fighting for arguments, for reasons to make her stay. Finally, his shoulders dropped.
"When?"
"Now. Before I lose my nerve. Before he wakes up and I have to see him look through me again."
He stood slowly, like his bones hurt. "The veil is thin near the western border. I can take you through."
The walk through the castle was agony. Every corner held a memory. Here, where he'd pressed her against the door after the first dinner. The dining hall where he'd fed her from his own hand. The corridor that led to gardens she'd never see again.
At his door, she stopped.
Her feet wouldn't move past it. Her hand rose without permission, palm flat against the wood. On the other side, she could hear him stirring. Waking. In moments he'd rise, dress in his dark clothes, and go about his day without a single thought of her.
"Please," she whispered to the door, to him, to any power that might be listening. "Please remember."
She waited, just for a moment. Just to torture herself with the possibility that it might open, that he might remember, that this might not be the end.
The door stayed closed.
Thaine's hand settled on her shoulder, gentle but insistent. She let him guide her away, each step feeling like tearing off pieces of herself and leaving them behind.
The forest paths opened reluctantly for Thaine. The journey felt both endless and far too quick, her body moving while her heart screamed to turn back, to try one more time, to fight harder. But she was so tired of fighting, so tired of being strong.
Before she knew it, they were at the veil, that shimmer in the air that separated worlds.
"Your car is just beyond," Thaine said quietly.
She could see it through the shimmer. Her dusty, ordinary car in an ordinary parking lot in an ordinary world where magic didn't exist and neither did Forest Kings who forgot the women they'd claimed.
"Thaine." Her voice broke completely. "What if he never remembers?"
"Then he's lost something precious." His voice was rough. "And he'll never know it."
That broke her. The tears came hard and fast, her shoulders shaking with the force of them. She covered her face with her hands, trying to muffle the sounds, but they tore from her anyway.
"I have to go," she gasped between sobs. "If I don't go now, I never will."
"I know."
She stepped toward the veil, then stopped. "Tell him—" She stopped. Tell him what? That she loved him? That she'd chosen him even when he'd been cruel? That losing him like this was worse than if he'd died? "Don't tell him anything."
She stepped through.
The transition was jarring, as everything magical, everything otherworldly, everything that had made her feel like she might be more than ordinary, fell away.
She stood in a cracked parking lot beside a car covered in two weeks of dust and bird droppings, wearing clothes that smelled of the fae realm but were already losing that scent in the mundane air.
The car door handle was cold under her fingers.
She got in and turned the key. Nothing. The engine clicked but wouldn't catch. Of course. Two weeks of cold had killed the battery. She turned the key again, and again, each failed attempt feeling like another small cruelty.
"Please," she whispered to the dead engine. "Please, just work."
Still nothing.
She folded forward, her forehead hitting the steering wheel, and screamed. The sound filled the car, raw and broken and terrible. She screamed until her throat burned, until her voice cracked, until there was nothing left but harsh breathing and the taste of copper in her mouth.
The engine suddenly roared to life, magic giving her this one last gift.
Through blurred vision, she saw Thaine's hand lowering in the space between worlds.
Then he was gone. The shimmer was gone. There was just trees and sky and the normal world that didn't know she'd been gone for months, that didn't care that her heart was shattered, that would expect her to just continue as if nothing had happened.
She put the car in drive, but her vision was too blurred with tears to see.
She had to pull over after barely making it out of the parking lot, sobbing so hard she couldn't breathe.
Her chest hurt. Everything hurt. She beat her fists against the steering wheel until her hands ached, needing the physical pain to match what was tearing through her chest.
A couple walked by, glancing at the woman having a breakdown in her car, then quickly looking away. The normal world, where people politely ignored visible grief.
Briar drove home through tears that wouldn't stop, taking wrong turns because she could barely see, having to pull over twice more when the sobs made it impossible to continue. By the time she reached her house, she had nothing left. No tears. No voice. No energy.
Just an emptiness that she was convinced would never be filled.
She sat in the car for a long moment, staring at her ordinary house in her ordinary world, trying to remember how to be ordinary again. Trying to forget the feeling of thorns and shadow and a possessive voice whispering her name in the darkness.
The keys were heavy in her hand. Real. Cold metal with worn edges from years of use.
She turned them over once, twice, then finally climbed out.
Each step toward the house felt heavier than the last, her feet reluctant to carry her back to this life.
What would she say when Allegra asked where she'd been?
How could she explain the things she'd witnessed, experienced, lost?
She couldn't.
Briar climbed the steps to the porch and stopped. She stared hard at the peeling paint on the door frame, at the doorbell that David had promised to fix a lifetime ago, and the welcome mat that said "Home Sweet Home" in faded cursive.
Everything was exactly as she'd left it months ago, no, two weeks ago—time was a broken thing now, fractured between worlds—but everything about it felt distant.
It was too small, too bright, too simple.
As if she were seeing it through different eyes, eyes that had seen impossible things and could never quite focus on the mundane again.
She still had her key but using it felt wrong, so she knocked instead, the sound sharp in the quiet afternoon.