Chapter 22 Liam #2
“What’s wrong?” I ask, letting my head fall back against the wall. The stone is cool against my skull, grounding in a way my thoughts refuse to be.
Theo swallows, hesitating. “I know you saw something before you grabbed your brother.”
His fingers twist together in his lap, restless. It’s strange, seeing a boy who reads the world through senses sharper than vision appear so uncertain.
A faint memory surfaces: Liam on the floor, looking entirely caught off guard… Theo with flushed cheeks and a poorly tucked shirt… a moment I walked in on at precisely the wrong time.
Or right time, depending on who you ask.
“I saw him and you,” I murmur. “Though I feel like you think I witnessed something far more… ambiguous than what was actually happening.”
Theo stiffens, and then slowly deflates, a soft embarrassed sound caught in his throat. Before he can say anything, I place my hand gently over his to stop the nervous twisting.
“You don’t need to explain,” I say quietly. “He didn’t have to tell me.”
Theo’s hand closes around mine, tentative but warm.
A stretch of silence settles between us. Not uncomfortable, just heavy with all the things neither of us can quite articulate.
Finally he asks, “Sebastian and you… you suddenly have years of memories just appearing in your mind. How does that feel?”
I shift, letting my head tilt until it rests lightly against his shoulder. For a moment, I simply breathe, letting myself search for the answer inside the ache and the warmth spreading across my chest.
“It feels like remembering the shape of a home I haven’t lived in for years,” I whisper.
“His favorite color is blue, though he lies and says it’s green because he thinks it sounds more dignified.
” A small, reluctant smile tugs at my lips.
“Anne’s favorite flower is wisteria. My mother used to grow it before she became too busy breaking us. ”
The next memories come unbidden, soft but sharp.
“When he laughed too hard, he used to cover his nose because he hated how much it scrunched. Once, when we were twelve, he tried scrubbing off his freckles because some older boys made fun of him. Liam and I covered ourselves in powdered moonstone the next day to match him. The dye stained us for months, but at least no one looked at him that way again.”
Theo exhales shakily, the breath hitting the top of my head.
I continue, my voice low, breaking at the edges.
“He laughed when people needed it most, even if he was hurting. He protected everyone he loved...even me.” My throat tightens. “And my family took everything from him. They destroyed his entire world.”
A tear slips down my cheek before I can stop it, soaking into the fabric of Theo’s shirt. He doesn’t pull away. He doesn’t say anything. He just shifts a little closer, letting his arm brush gently against mine, offering silent companionship in the one moment I desperately need it.
“You have a scar down your left leg.”
Sebastian’s voice comes from the doorway, quiet, almost disbelieving.
He leans one shoulder against the frame, arms loose at his sides, as if he isn’t sure whether he’s allowed to take another step.
His gaze finds mine immediately, and there is no hatred there.
No confusion. No distance. Only recognition, bone-deep and devastating.
“When you were ten,” he continues, “you got cut there chasing me through the orchard. You fell so hard I thought you’d snapped your entire ankle.
” A breath leaves him, soft and uneven, as if speaking the memory aloud is physically unwinding something in him.
“I remember kneeling in the dirt beside you, shaking because I thought I’d have to carry you all the way back before curfew.
You were crying, but you were still worried about me getting in trouble for being late for dinner. ”
He steps into the room. Each footfall feels measured, reverent, like he’s approaching something fragile.
Or returning to something holy.
“You told me I could leave you there,” he murmurs, “because you didn’t want your father to punish me too.
” His jaw trembles once. “But I stayed. All the way until he came storming out to find us. You were terrified, so I blamed everything on myself. I took every ounce of his anger because I couldn’t stand the way you shook when he looked at you. ”
My hands begin to tremble. Not because I’m afraid of him, but because feeling the truth of his memories settle into the empty spaces inside me is almost too much to bear.
All these years of trying to survive alone, of believing love was something poisonous and doomed, meanwhile this piece of me, this person, was out there grieving a childhood neither of us were allowed to keep.
Sebastian keeps moving toward me until he’s standing only a breath away. His eyes drink me in with a kind of reverence I’m not prepared for.
“Your favorite color is green,” he says, voice low and rough. “You love your brother more than life itself. You cry only in secret, where no one can see. And when you love…” His throat tightens visibly. “You love with everything you have, even when it destroys you.”
Theo shifts, silently giving him space as Sebastian sinks down onto his knees in front of me, slowly, as if this moment has been waiting for years. My breath snags.
Sebastian lifts his hands, fingers trembling as they frame my face. His forehead meets mine, a soft press of warmth that nearly buckles my knees.
“Harper Whitlock,” he whispers, voice breaking around my name. “I have loved you since the day I lost you. And I swear to you, I will never lose you again.”
The world tilts.
No...aligns.
I feel him. Not just his hands or his breath, but something deeper, threaded into my bones, tangled around my ribs, stitched into the very beat of my heart. The bond between us doesn’t form, it returns, as if it had been waiting beneath my skin this entire time.
His lips reach mine with a kind of desperate gentleness, lifting me into the kiss as if my weight doesn’t exist. His arm curls around my lower back, pulling me up until my toes barely brush the floor. The familiarity of his touch crashes into me, devastating and undeniable.
Tears fall before I even register them. Some are mine. Some are his. All of them feel like home.
Sebastian breaks the kiss only long enough to glance at Liam, breath shaking, eyes shining with something raw and human and heartbreakingly vulnerable. He reaches out one arm, an unspoken invitation. A bridge to the boy he never realized he had lost.
Liam’s face crumples. For a moment, he looks like the child he once was, the boy who carried every burden for me, who hid his own scars so mine wouldn’t feel alone. Theo steadies him with a gentle touch, guiding him forward until Liam’s hand meets Sebastian’s grasp.
The four of us fold into one another, Sebastian’s arms around me, my hand gripping Liam, Liam pressed into Theo for balance.
A knot of grief, love, loss, and something fiercely, painfully alive.
After everything our parents took from us, after all the years erased and rewritten…
this feels like the first piece they don’t get to touch.
“Y-You don’t blame me?” I manage, my voice splintering under the weight of it all.
Sebastian’s thumb brushes my cheek, wiping tears that keep falling faster than I can stop them. His expression darkens, not with anger toward me, but toward the man who tore our lives apart.
“We were children,” he says, voice trembling with conviction. “He hurt you. If I could go back, if I could rewrite any part of what happened-” His jaw clenches. “I would kill him myself.”
A sharp, pointed clearing of someone’s throat slices through the moment, snapping all of our heads toward the noise at once.
The world holds its breath.
“I was intending on telling only Liam,” Locke begins, voice strained as he stands in the center of the room, gaze flicking between each of us like he’s trying to take measure of our reactions before they happen.
“But given that not one, but all of you now share knowledge of… certain circumstances, I believe it’s best I address this with every one of you present. ”
There’s something unfamiliar in his face, worry bordering on fear.
His fingers tremble as he reaches into his coat and retrieves a small slip of paper, the edges worn as though he’s handled it too many times in too few hours.
Theo steps closer. Liam does too, arms crossed tight over his chest, posture protective, bracing for the worst.
Locke hesitates only a second before handing the paper to Liam. The silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
“Where...where did you get this?” Liam’s voice fractures, and before Locke can even form an answer, Liam snatches the letter fully, his eyes scanning the text so quickly the world feels like it tilts beneath us.
“It… it was on my desk this morning,” Locke says, voice quieting into something hollow. “It wasn’t there when I retired last night. It simply… appeared.”
My curiosity spikes, dread curling behind my ribs, and without waiting for permission, I step forward and tug the letter from Liam’s hand. The moment the handwriting meets my eyes, the slanted, cruel script I once watched drag across parchment as he crafted threats like artwork, my breath halts.
Eleazar Locke,
Clearly, killing your wife was not enough of a message for you to stay out of my affairs. My children are mine. I will see to it the Shadeborne stop at nothing to take back what belongs to me.
You stole them. You left me for dead. Did you truly think there would be no consequence?
Do you believe you can hide them?
Return them to me within one month. Otherwise, I will begin picking off Vireldan students one by one.
Consider this letter my final kindness.
—Andrew Shadeborne
I feel the room vanish around me. My pulse roars in my ears. The ink sways on the page as nausea coils up my throat.
“What is it?” Theo asks quietly, unable to see the letter but hearing the way air has been sucked from the room.
My gaze slowly lifts, finding Sebastian across from me. His eyes search my face, reading fear, recognition, devastation, every emotion he never should have had to see again. My hand trembles as I lower the letter.
“My father is alive,” I say, the words tasting like poison on my tongue.
Sebastian’s expression splinters. Liam goes utterly still. Locke’s jaw tenses, bracing for my next breath, my next thought, my next terrible truth.
“And I’m going to let him have me.”
Shock ripples through the room, Theo’s sharp inhale, Liam’s horrified stare, Sebastian’s eyes widening with something feral, possessive, devastated.
But I keep talking, because someone has to.
“He will not stop,” I say quietly, a truth etched into every painful memory I’ve ever lived. “And I won’t let Vireldan bleed because of me. If he wants what he believes is his, then I will give him myself.”
A hush falls so absolute that even the air feels afraid to move.
The devil is real.
And he has come to collect his belongings.