Chapter 22 Liam
LIAM
Sebastian has been pacing for so long I’m surprised the floorboards haven’t splintered beneath his boots.
He won’t look at me, not fully. His glare flicks to the walls, the windows, the furniture, anywhere he can anchor himself that isn’t my face.
His breath is uneven, slipping between sharp exhales and ragged silences, and every few strides his hand rakes through his hair until it stands on end.
The room feels too small for the amount of anger in it.
“Sebastian,” I try, keeping my voice level even though my own heart is pounding. “Let me explain, just calm down for a moment.”
His head snaps toward me, eyes blazing, and the force of it nearly knocks the words back down my throat.
“Calm down?” he spits, stepping forward with so much fury that the air seems to move with him. “I left her. I left her, Liam. And you-” His voice cracks into something raw and jagged. “Your parents...your parents murdered my mother and father right in front of us!”
Before I can brace myself, he grabs the front of my shirt and slams me against the nearest pillar.
His face is inches from mine, breath hot with grief and rage.
His fingers tremble where they grip my collar, not from fear, he isn’t afraid of me, but from the kind of emotional fracture that comes from remembering too much too fast.
“And your sister, Harper, those scars?” His voice breaks entirely. “Your father did that to her? He kept hurting her?”
He’s shaking now, whole body trembling under the weight of years he didn’t know he lost. The moment Harper said Who told you you could take my memories, something cracked wide open between the three of us, him, Harper, me. A dam that had been reinforced with years of corrupted magic simply… burst.
Images, voices, pain, things that never should have resurfaced this violently, flooded into Sebastian. I saw it in the way he staggered. In the way his hand went to his head like he was trying to hold it all in.
And Harper,
Harper looked like she had been gutted.
“She kept defying him,” I say quietly, lifting a hand to Sebastian’s forearm, not to remove him but to steady him. “She kept trying to leave him. Even when she didn’t have the memories, some part of her always tried to find you. She saw you in flashes, in dreams she couldn’t explain, and I-”
I exhale shakily.
“I thought maybe she was going mad,” I admit. “Seeing pieces of a boy she couldn’t name. Hoping for someone she didn’t remember. I heard rumors, years ago, that your uncle took you and Anne away from Myrindale. It didn’t make sense to her. It barely made sense to me.”
Sebastian’s fingers loosen slightly. His gaze flickers away, then returns to mine, haunted.
“So when I saw you that first day at Vireldan,” I continue, my voice thinning under the weight of the truth, “all I could think was that I wanted to fall to my knees and beg you for forgiveness. For what our father did. For what Harper endured. For what we kept from you.”
The tremor in his hands worsens.
“Your parents-” he starts again, voice thick with something darker now, heavier.
And something inside me fractures.
All the years of silence.
All the years of fear.
All the years of protecting Harper from remembering him, when all she ever did was try.
Anger rises, not at Sebastian, but at the ghosts he’s naming.
At our ghosts.
“Don’t,” I snap, not loud, but sharp enough that he stops mid-breath. “Don’t say their names. Not like they hold any power now.”
His jaw locks. His hands fall away from my shirt, balling into fists at his sides. He looks like a man torn between collapsing and setting the whole room on fire.
His voice breaks again when he finally speaks.
“They took everything from us.”
I swallow hard.
“I know.”
The words claw their way out of me before I even realize I’m speaking, because once the memories start unraveling, they don’t stop. They rip through me with jagged edges, and suddenly I’m reliving it...not just telling it.
“She… she killed them,” I manage, though the truth is far more complicated than those three words. My throat tightens, and I force myself to keep going because he deserves to know, because she deserves to have someone else carry even a part of this.
“At least, that’s what we believed at the time.
It was only a few years before Vireldan.
” My voice drags, memories flickering behind my eyes like an old filmstrip.
“She’d finally been getting a grasp on her magic again.
Not perfect, not controlled, but enough that she could channel it even after my father took her wand for good.
She was furious. Hurt. Exhausted. And she’d been living with pieces of memories I had ripped out of her mind.
They haunted her, those flashes of you, of Anne, of what happened that night in the manor. ”
Sebastian’s hands loosen fractionally from my shirt. He’s listening now, really listening.
“It was like one night… everything she’d bottled up finally became too much.
Every year of pain. Every memory she wasn’t supposed to have.
Everything she’d survived.” My lungs tighten as the scene returns with brutal clarity.
“That night of the fire, I found her crouched over my mother’s body.
Completely still. Her palms on her chest. Pulling life from her, twisting it, manipulating it.
Her eyes weren’t even her own color anymore. They were… empty. Dead. Consuming.”
Sebastian’s breath hitches. His grip falls away entirely.
“It didn’t take long for my father to find her,” I continue quietly, staring past him now, back into the memory.
“And in the state she was in… she didn’t stop.
She went for him too. Jumped onto him with her nails, carving at his face the way he carved her back for years.
She wasn’t even thinking, she was drowning in everything her mind was trying to remember. ”
I pause, forcing a breath past the tightness in my ribs.
“And then she collapsed. All that energy, all that rage… it drained her completely. She could barely breathe. It was the first time in years I saw her powerless.”
I close my eyes for a moment, steadying myself.
“It was our only chance. Our one way out. I set the house on fire, grabbed her, and ran into the forest.” My voice drops lower. “We wandered for days. She barely woke. And then Locke found us in the Forbidden Forest and everything changed.”
Sebastian sinks slowly back onto his heels, all the fight bleeding out of him, replaced with something hollow and heavy. His eyes are glassed over, as if the weight of everything, the memory, the loss, the years, has finally crushed through whatever walls he tried to build.
“All those years,” he whispers. “She was right there in my mind. And I had no idea.”
I look at him, really look at him, and something in my chest tightens. He’s not just angry now. He’s grieving in real time for a past he never knew he had.
“And now she’s just beyond that door,” I say quietly, glancing toward his bedroom door. “Alive. Waiting. Still carrying all of that alone.” I swallow hard. “So go. Please. Go be with her. Before either of you get swallowed whole by what was taken from you.”
Sebastian rises slowly to his feet. He hesitates at the threshold, turning just enough that the lamplight catches the small downward tug of his lips, an expression I remember vividly from years ago.
“I think,” he says, voice nearly a whisper, “that I missed you, Liam.”
The confession hits harder than I expect. Pain tinged with something that used to be boyhood but isn’t anymore.
A smile tugs at my mouth without me meaning it to. “I know.”
He nods once, then reaches for the doorknob. The sound of the latch lifting seems impossibly loud in the quiet room.
And then he slips inside, leaving me alone with the ghosts we both just resurrected.
HARPER
I stand with my arms crossed and my foot tapping uncontrollably against the marble floor, the rhythm sharp enough to keep my nerves awake.
The moon outside the tower window is barely visible, swallowed behind thick clouds that turn the night into a muted haze.
It’s been nearly an hour since Liam disappeared behind Sebastian’s bedroom door, the lock sliding shut with a finality that made even Theo flinch.
The two of them had marched past me, well, Sebastian marched, Liam was dragged, burst into his room, and the slam that followed rattled the lantern hooks on the walls.
Now it’s just me and Theo occupying one of the quiet alcoves in the Vespera common room, both of us pretending we aren’t listening for every raised voice bleeding through that door.
Liam has placed himself directly in the path of Sebastian’s grief, rage, and rediscovered memories, because of course he has.
My ridiculous, self-sacrificing brother.
Always first in line to take the blame for a storm that wasn’t entirely his making.
But the ache twisting through me doesn’t stop with him.
All those memories.
Taken from me as if they were nothing, as if the pieces of my life could simply be plucked away like frayed ends of a thread.
Even now, I’m not certain which pieces are real, which have been stitched together wrong, or which were shoved back into my mind when Blue Eyes cornered me earlier tonight. The blurred edges of what’s mine and what’s altered bleed into each other until I can’t breathe.
Behind the closed door, voices rise, sharp and impossible to decipher. Then silence again. Then another shout. My body tenses with each muffled spike in volume.
Theo sits beside me on the cushioned bench, tapping his wand against his palm in a nervous rhythm he probably doesn’t even realize he’s doing. His pale eyes flick toward the hallway every time the argument inside Sebastian’s room grows louder.
He’s anxious about something, and eventually it becomes too much to ignore.