Chapter Fifty-Six
LOLA
We take my father’s remains back to my childhood home and bury him under his favorite orange tree.
I visit the dance studio I used to practice in, draw my fingers along a bed-spread I once dreamed on, and fall asleep on the roof under the stars with both Sinclair brothers at my side until my grief recedes enough to breathe.
When we return to Aethera, the Brig feels like a tomb that shouldn’t exist anymore because the girl I was the last time I stepped inside certainly doesn’t.
Enzo leaves me in my room while he stows the new moonshard in the treasury, where it’ll stay safe for the foreseeable future, while Nic returns with Isla to the shore to see to Estelle, Soren, and Arden.
I should rest, but questions swirl like a raging torrent through my thoughts.
Where do I go, now that I can go anywhere? What do I do, now that I can choose? Who do I become, now that the world is wide open?
Or do I simply stay here? Be a Tentacle forever?
It’s what I wanted for so long I can barely remember what else I might have once hoped for. But now . . . I’m not sure anymore. All I know is that those dreams feel too small, this place too quiet, that future too safe.
A knock sounds on my door, and Enzo steps inside carrying a folder stuffed with papers and notebooks.
“Hey there,” he says, sliding the door closed behind him.
“Hi.” I try to smile.
“You’re leaving, aren’t you?” Enzo says, and it isn’t a question, nor is it bitter or angry. He smiles at me, lip rings glinting, and in that moment, I know he’s right.
“I can’t stay, at least not here at the Brig.”
He nods, and I close my eyes, remembering how it felt to have him there in my chest, his emotions beating alongside my own. A calm would spread through me now if we were still bound—one that says, I understand.
“What will you do?” he asks.
I shake my head. “I’m not sure yet.”
He nods, then perches on the bed next to me, grabbing one of my hands between both of his.
“I have something for you.” He meets my eye.
“Now that I’ve got that new moonshard you so kindly made for me, I’ve got the ability to give soullight the way I used to take it—though, now I can do it without cost, so .
. .” He pulls something out of his pocket and presses it into my palm.
I uncurl my fingers. A long golden chain like the one still around my neck nestles in my palm bearing a new piece of voratium pulsing with light the exact shade of green in Enzo’s eyes. I press my thumb against it.
Thump-thump, thump-thump, thump-thump.
“A bit of soullight from my heart,” he says. “Should you ever need it.”
Tears film over my eyes as I throw my arms around his neck.
I’ll always miss his heart pumping next to mine, the way he could send me fortitude when I felt weak, the way he’d come when I called.
And now here it is. His love, without bargain, without collateral, without price.
“There’s also something else.” He pulls away and hands me the folder.
I take off my glasses to scrub the moisture from my lashes as I flip it open.
Inside are all the journals he’d been studying. The lab notes. The diagrams and drawings and poetry that saved our lives in the end. Nell Lightsworn’s things.
My mother’s things.
At the bottom of the stack lies a copy of the photograph from my father’s office—my parents, immortalized in faded black-and-white— clipped to what appears to be a handwritten letter.
“That letter was in your father’s desk,” Enzo says. “From eighteen years ago.”
I pull it out and read:
Magnus,
How is our sweet Lola doing? Stars, but I miss her terribly. Please give her kisses from me. It is torturous to be away from her—away from you both. The missing is bone-deep, and sometimes it’s all I can do to keep from crying.
It’s difficult to be so far away, but it seems that sailing out here to Plithon was the right choice, because I’ve been able to locate the priest I heard about.
You remember me talking about him in my last letter, right?
The one whose research I studied in order to create the shard?
He, too, has been suffering similar symptoms, which confirms what we theorized.
I’m hoping that, between the two of us, we’ll be able to come up with a solution that will stop the lumonic decay. Hopefully soon, because I’m desperate to see you again, my love, and to hold our girl.
All my love,
Nell
Sounds like she was suffering from some sort of issue brought on by her work with the moonshard—perhaps side effects of having been altered by the starlight. Could she still be out there somewhere, searching for a cure?
“Thank you.” I pull Enzo close again. “For everything.”
“That isn’t everything.”
“Oh?”
“If you ever decide you want to be fully free—to not have to share your heart with anyone . . .” He licks his lips. “Just give me the word. I’ll make Nic a new heart. You can have yours all to yourself.”
“Oh,” I say again, a pit gnawing open in my stomach. “That’s . . . I see. I’ll . . . think about it.”
“Okay, Lemonade,” he says, pushing to his feet. “You let me know.”
I venture ashore a few hours later, following the tether in my heart to the Liar’s Den Casino.
Nic crouches on the floor where we danced during his tournament, blueprints and diagrams spread around him.
“Hello, little thief,” he says without looking up.
“Hello, sparkly bastard,” I reply, kneeling next to him. “What are you doing?”
“Making plans.” He stops. Looks at me with wonder in his eyes and shoots to his feet. “I’m . . . making plans!”
It’s a simple statement, but it shifts the world.
Because he’s telling me the truth.
For the first time.
The curse is truly broken.
He grabs me, pulling me against him, pressing his lips to my temple as he laughs.
“Since I don’t need to steal secrets anymore, I was thinking .
. .” Every “I” statement he makes is punctuated by a bolt of ecstasy through our pulse.
“What if I turned the Liar’s Den into a sort of circus act?
Cabaret, dance, whatever. Shows and games to delight and amaze.
I want to extend the east wing here and build out a bigger auditorium . . .” He points. “What do you think?”
“I think it’s brilliant.”
“Only thing is . . . Since you put all my magic back in that moonshard . . .”
“Enzo could give you a supply of illusions, I think.” My hand strays to the green pendant on my chest. “I think he’d want to, if you asked.”
“I’d be indebted to him, though.” Nic gives a mock-frown.
“Sounds like his dream come true.”
“Would you”—he pauses—“be one of my dancers? In the new show, I mean.”
My lungs squeeze. “Really?” I whisper.
“I’ve seen you dance. It’s a sight to behold.”
A giggle bursts out of me, and I fling my arms around his neck. “Yes! Yes! A thousand times, yes!”
This is the future I want. Him. Me. A stage. My dance shoes.
“Consider this your official audition,” he murmurs in my ear, swinging me into a waltz that has me laughing.
We twirl across the floor, our shoes scuffing through the dust. Our legs intertwine as we weave in time to the beat of our shared heart, and I see in my mind’s eye the way he looked that night that feels like an eternity ago when I challenged him to dance in an attempt to provoke him, and his face transformed to induce emotions in me. Pity me, he’d said. Fear me. Trust me.
Enzo’s offer earlier today hovers under my skin. Setting Nic free. Letting him be not mine, not his father’s, not Enzo’s, and not Laurel’s— but finally and fully his own.
It’s what I should do. It would be right.
But what do I want?
Should it matter?
I try to push it from my thoughts as we flit like phantoms through the shadows, his hand wrapped around mine, his other arm holding me so close his breath traces the outlines of my face.
No illusions. No deceptions. No secrets.
Just the two of us, clinging to each other like we once did in his pond, raw and open and wanting to be seen.
His heart thumps inside my chest, a soothing echo to my own, and it feels exactly as I thought it would, just as he is exactly who I imagined him to be when I glimpsed Donnic Sinclair beneath the Liar.
I’m not sure I can give it up now that it’s mine.
“Enzo offered to make you your own heart,” I blurt. “He said I could decide.”
Nic slows the dance and brings his palm to my cheek, smiling in that way that makes his scar sparkle. “If it were up to me, I’d keep your heart forever. But you’ve bargained it one too many times. I’ll be damned if I’m the one holding you hostage now.”
“You can have your freedom if you wish,” I say, halting and crossing my arms as I shoot him a scowl. “But don’t stand there and say it’s about me.”
“If I . . . ?” He raises a brow. “Are you being incorrigible on purpose, or . . . ?”
“I knew exactly what giving you my heart would entail.” I jab a finger into his chest. “I knew better than anyone in the world. I chose this. You, however, did not.”
“Ah. I see what this is.” He smirks. “What you’re saying is that I can only take it back because I want it back.”
“That’s exactly what I’m saying,” I snap. “I’m fed up with your self-sabotaging bullshit. What do you want?”
“I want what’s best for you.” His eyes glint, a teasing mirth playing at the corners of his mouth.
I shake my head. “No. Don’t want for me, want for your damn self, Donnic Sinclair. Own your future.”
He dips close, dragging his smile along my jaw. “You really do love to vex me, Lola St. James, don’t you?”
“You’re just so vexable. I can’t help it.”
He takes a careful step forward, and another, and another, until he’s pressing me back against the velvet-curtained wall.
“I’ve spent the entire time we’ve known each other dodging around the truth, unable to speak it,” he says, voice low and rumbling through my chest in the way that has made me tremble since the first day I met him. “But now that I can give it to you straight, you’re going to listen.”
He leans a forearm over my head. His breath gusts across my mouth, hot and tremulous.
I lean in close, let my lips ghost over his. “I’m all ears, Liar.”
“I have been imprisoned,” he murmurs, “since the moment I laid eyes on you. Tantalized and tortured by your beauty and your maddening tongue and your starsdamned fire. Take your heart, bid me farewell, travel to the ends of the earth, and I will never be free of you. You don’t want to imprison me?
Well, that’s just too damn bad.” He growls, dipping his mouth to my neck and trailing it up to my ear where he breathes, “Because I have never wanted anything more.”
His hand snakes around my waist and fists in the back of my dress, and it’s a good thing, too, because my knees have begun to wobble.
“Have Enzo make me a new heart. Or don’t,” he whispers. “It makes no difference; it belongs to you already, whether you want it or not.”
“I’ll always want it,” I gasp.
“Then bind me, mind, body, and soul,” he murmurs into my mouth.
“Only on one condition,” I say.
“Anything.”
I draw my finger along the brim of his fedora. “You let me set this on fire.”
His eyes twinkle. “I’m afraid that’s where I draw the line.”
Grinning, I cock the hat over his brow the way he always did. “What’s a girl to do, then?”
He wraps his arms around me and swings me over his knee, dipping me as low as he did so long ago, tracing his nose up my throat until his teeth catch tantalizingly on my ear. “Trust me,” he says, echoing that night. “Worship me.”
He does not have to command it. I already do. Not because he is a god or a seaspawn or a Liar.
Because I love him, devious as he is.
Finally, he presses his mouth to mine. A kiss that binds, that breaks, that remakes us both.
One heart, two souls, for as long as we choose.
And for now, that’s enough.