Chapter 21
Piper
Two days.
That’s how long I’ve been avoiding him—long enough that the air in the apartment feels stretched thin, as if even the walls are waiting for us to speak to each other again.
I pretend it’s because I’m busy with the shop, or because I’m tired, or because the curse still hums through my blood like an unsettled dream.
But the truth presses much closer to the surface.
I don’t know what to do with everything Slade told me.
And everything Rhea added. Or everything I felt at the ball that I’m still trying very, very hard not to think about.
Newt is furious with me. Which is impressive, considering he’s a twelve-pound cat.
He sits perched on the arm of the couch—Slade’s side—tail curled primly around his paws, eyes narrowed in a perfect imitation of parental disappointment.
Every time I pass, he flicks his tail like he’s pushing me toward the hallway where Slade has been staying.
“You’re being dramatic,” I mutter while bottling rosemary for the apothecary shelf.
Newt blinks with the slow, offended patience of an ancient god.
“I’m not apologizing.” Another blink. “And you can stop trying to guilt trip me with the silent treatment.”
Newt flicks his tail harder.
I sigh. “Fine. Maybe I should apologize.”
He hops off the couch with a triumphant little chirp and trots down the hall toward the guest room—Slade’s room—pausing once to glance back at me as if saying, See? You know what to do.
“Traitor,” I mumble. But he has a point.
The apartment still smells faintly of cinnamon, lavender, and lingering magic from the Christmas-tree flare-up. Every charm feels like it’s waiting to activate. Every candle flame leans toward whatever direction Slade happens to be in. The air thickens simply because he’s in the same room as me.
And for the first time since I summoned him, he hasn’t pushed. Not with words, or touch. And definitely not with that wicked patience that feels like a promise every time he looks at me.
He’s quieter now—present, but giving me distance. It’s the distance that hurts.
In the end I avoid it. Because that’s what I do best when I’m stressed.
Instead, I try to focus on the small tasks in my apartment—the mundane ones I usually love. Refilling herb jars. Straightening my shelves. Rearranging the earrings on my dresser as if their placement matters more than the storm building behind my ribs.
But my attention keeps drifting to the long linen-wrapped parcel waiting on the kitchen island.
It arrived an hour ago, delivered by a courier witch who looked far too relieved to hand it off and disappear.
The moment my fingers brushed the string-tied edge, I felt it—an old pulse beneath the wrapping.
Not alive, but attentive. As though whatever rests inside has been listening through centuries of dust, waiting for someone with my blood to wake it.
The tag reads:
FROM: Archivist Lyudmila, Prague.
FOR: Piper Bellamy.
No note. No warning. Just the weight of something carved out of my family’s past.
I haven’t opened it. I’m not sure I’m ready to.
A subtle shift of air behind me tells me Slade is standing in the doorway long before he speaks. The room warms the way it always does when he enters, shadows stretching around him as though he’s the gravitational center of even the light.
When I turn, snow melts along the shoulders of his coat. His hair is wind-tousled, eyes dark and steady, carrying that quiet heaviness I’ve been trying—and failing—to ignore.
“Not opening the shop today?” He asks, voice low and even.
“I didn’t sleep well,” I answer, shaking my head, and fussing with a jar that needs no fussing. “Or at all.”
“That makes two of us.”
It lands deeper than it should. He doesn’t sleep—not in the human sense—but the way he says it makes my chest tighten.
“Slade…” My voice softens. “About the other night. I shouldn’t have snapped at you.”
“You reacted to fear,” he says gently. “There’s nothing to apologize for.”
“But I hurt you.”
His gaze shifts—steady, open, unexpectedly unguarded. Something inside me stumbles at the look. “Piper,” he murmurs, “you didn’t hurt me. You frightened yourself. And that unsettles me far more than anything you said.”
My fingers curl against the counter, grounding myself in the familiar warmth of polished wood. “I wasn’t frightened.”
“You were.” His tone is calm, not accusatory. “And there’s nothing wrong with that. But ignoring it doesn’t stop the curse from moving.”
My eyes drift, almost of their own accord, to the parcel on the island. He follows the motion.
“What’s inside it?” he asks quietly.
“I don’t know. Rhea’s contact sent it.” My voice drops. “She said she’d found something connected to the curse.”
Understanding flickers through him. He steps closer, slow and deliberate. “You’re afraid to open it.”
“I am not afraid.” The lie rings clear the moment it leaves my mouth.
His expression softens—not pity, not triumph, just understanding. “You don’t have to be ready,” he says. “You only have to stop treating the truth like it’s something waiting to hurt you. You’re stronger than you think.”
The words settle in my chest with a warmth that feels like both comfort and challenge.
I reach for the parcel. My hand hesitates, then brushes the linen. The fabric yields as if warmed by countless hands before mine. Something hums beneath it—soft, patient, aware.
“Piper,” Slade warns quietly, “whatever is inside will recognize you. Your blood. Your magic. You won’t be able to undo that.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” His voice deepens—not ancient, not fearful, just thoughtful. “Because this isn’t Bellamy spellwork. It’s older. Wilder. Whatever Veda reached for when she turned from my ancestor—this may be the first clue to what it actually was.”
My breath cools in my lungs.
“Do you think she bound herself to something?”
“I think she reached for a force she didn’t fully understand,” he says. “Something outside the coven. Outside the realms. Something primal. And whatever it was… we won’t know until we read what she left behind.”
The word primal hangs between us like a distant storm.
I loosen the string and fold back the linen. Inside rests a journal—simple, cracked, softened by time. The moment my fingertips make contact, the faint pulse beneath the leather quickens in recognition.
Magic answers. Not violently—purposefully. The floorboards hum, candles brighten, and Newt lets out a startled sound from the bedroom as though jolted awake.
Slade steps closer, placing himself between me and whatever memory is rising from the past.
The journal warms beneath my palm, as though the centuries have been waiting for this exact moment. A presence stirs—not a voice, not words, but intent, brushing against my senses like the echo of a name.
Recognition moves through me in a slow, pulsing sweep.
Bellamy.
Not spoken, not heard—felt.
My breath stutters. I pull back instinctively, but Slade steadies me with a firm hand at my elbow. His voice is quiet, measured. “It’s responding to your lineage.”
I swallow hard. “Slade… what is this?”
He holds my gaze, thoughtful rather than fearful, the steadiness in him grounding the unsteadiness in me.
“We don’t know yet,” he says. “It could be a memory. A spell. A remnant of whatever pact Veda made. But it isn’t demonic, and it isn’t anything I’ve seen before.”
A low hum rolls through the journal again, warm and patient, almost like acknowledgment.
Slade’s expression shifts, the severity in it tempered by something gentler. “Whatever Veda offered herself to,” he says, “we’ll find out together.”
The journal pulses once more beneath its wrap—soft, deliberate. And for the first time, I realize—the danger here isn’t Slade. It isn’t even the curse.
It’s the story Veda left behind. And the truth waiting inside that journal has been reaching for me across five hundred years.
***
The journal—or what I thought was a journal—lies on the island between us, its leather cover warm beneath my fingertips. The pulse inside it has steadied, no longer a sharp summons but a deep, rhythmic insistence, like a heart that has waited far too long to be heard.
Slade stands beside me, close enough that I feel the heat of him along my arm, but he doesn’t touch me. He’s watching the grimoire with the kind of patient intensity that feels almost tender, something threaded between worry and restraint.
“It’s not just a journal, is it?” I whisper.
“No,” he agrees quietly. “It’s her book of shadows.”
The air thickens in response, as if the name alone shifts the atmosphere. A subtle weight presses against my skin, not threatening—simply present. A presence that has been trapped between pages long after its author vanished from the world.
I open the cover.
The grimoire opens easily beneath my hands, the leather soft with age, the pages sighing like they’ve been waiting to breathe again. There’s no glow, no dramatic flare—only a warm thrum under my fingertips, a pulse that answers something in my blood.
Slade stands beside me, close but not touching, as though he knows I need room to take in whatever waits inside these pages.
The writing is elegant, dark, a script that curves with emotion and precision all at once. I expect a story. A diary. Maybe a warning.
What I find instead steals the breath from my lungs.
The page pulls me straight to Veda’s most painful memory.
She begins with the night everything changed—the night she believed would bind her to love and power forever.
Christmas Eve. The old rites. The winter solstice still humming in her veins.
That was the night Lucifer promised eternity.
The night he told her she was his chosen, the one who would stand beside him as queen of every realm that touched shadow and dawn.
Slade stiffens when he sees Lucifer’s name scrawled in her looping hand, but he stays silent.
I read on.
Veda had loved him. Not blindly—boldly. Fully. Enough to let him shape her magic into something sharper. Enough to share the power he offered her. Enough to accept his request when he asked for a child—a son—to anchor their union. She believed their bond was real. She believed he was her mate.
I feel my throat tighten. “She really thought he loved her.”
Slade’s jaw shifts, a dark, controlled movement. “Lucifer can make anyone believe anything he wants. It doesn’t make it true.”
Veda writes of the moment everything shattered.
She bore him a daughter instead of a son.
Instead of holding her, instead of claiming them both, Lucifer tore the bond apart without hesitation.
Not gently. Not quietly. He rejected her daughter.
Rejected her. And because their magic had intertwined, because she had opened herself so completely, the rejection ripped through her soul like a blade.
The pain of it nearly killed her.
Slade’s voice softens behind me. “A broken bond like that… it would have felt like being torn out of herself.”
I swallow hard, eyes blurring over the next lines.
Veda describes how she screamed. How the bond snapped like a star dying. How everything she had built, everything she had believed, collapsed beneath the weight of Lucifer’s rejection.
And how she tried—desperately, recklessly—to use the very power he had given her against him.
Not a foreign force, or an unknown entity. His power.
She called upon the rites he taught her, the magic he’d anchored in her veins, the bond that still thrummed with the remnants of what they had shared. She reached for the shape of him inside her blood and tried to tear it out, to rip every part of him from her soul.
But she didn’t strike him. The backlash struck her. Her sisters, their daughters—everyone tied to Bellamy blood.
Her grief twisted the magic wild, and it turned inward, snapping tight around the family line like a snare designed by heartbreak itself.
Slade exhales, the sound long and steady. “It wasn’t Lucifer’s curse. It was the consequence of trying to use his power to wound him.”
I turn the page slowly, my fingers trembling. Even the parchment feels warm now, like it remembers the moment Veda wrote these words.
The next entry is frantic, the ink pressed too deep.
Veda writes that she tried to sever the bond by sheer force, to cut out the magic he planted in her, to make him feel the devastation she felt.
But Lucifer’s power was older than she realized, tied to laws she didn’t understand, and when she tried to shatter it, the magic recoiled.
Slade’s voice lowers, almost a whisper. “This is the moment everything shifted.”
“She was still bound to him,” I murmur. “Even after he rejected her.”
“Yes,” Slade says, expression grave. “The power he gave her didn’t vanish just because he broke the bond. She wielded magic that wasn’t hers to control.”
I swallow, eyes drifting to the next lines.
Veda writes that she begged the magic to take back what she had given. She begged it to punish him, to sever him as he severed her, to tear him from her the way he tore himself away. But Lucifer’s magic didn’t answer to her desire. It answered to its own laws.
“I don’t think she understood the power she was using,” I whisper. “Or the cost.”
Slade nods, slow and grim. “Lucifer’s magic obeys Lucifer’s rules. She tried to weaponize a bond that was already broken. It couldn’t strike him… so it struck everything connected to her instead.”
The grimoire warms again beneath my hand—not ominous, but aware. As though it recognizes me. A Bellamy descendant finally reading the truth its pages have held for centuries.
My voice softens. “Slade… if this really started because she used his power…”
“Then we need to understand the bond she had with him,” he finishes quietly. “Because whatever magic she shattered—it’s still echoing through your line.”
The grimoire pulses once beneath my touch. Warm… Patient… Intentional. And I know this is only the beginning of what Veda left behind.
The curse isn’t just a wound. It’s a history of love twisted into ruin. A story of a bond misused, broken, and turned inward until it swallowed generations.
And now?
It has finally opened its eyes for me.