Chapter 14
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
The Dark King was gone.
And Sasha had sealed her fate.
She almost wished she’d left with him, all of a sudden.
The only evidence he’d been there at all was the warmth fading from the air, and the faint smell of old books and something darker that always clung to him.
She stood perfectly still for ten seconds. Twenty. Thirty.
Counting.
Making sure.
When she was certain—as certain as she could be, which was never enough—she let out a breath that felt like it had been trapped in her lungs for a century.
“Oh, fuck me.” She pressed both hands to her face, the linen falling to the floor. Her legs were shaking. Her whole body was shaking. The adrenaline crash hit her like a freight train, and she had to grab the edge of the cabinet to keep from sinking to the floor.
A creak from beneath her feet. Then another.
The trapdoor in the corner of the room underneath the carpet lifted an inch. Two eyes peered out from the darkness below. Sidney’s.
“Is he gone?” Sidney’s voice was barely above a whisper. Hoarse. Terrified.
“He’s gone.” Sasha nodded, wiping her eyes. She didn’t even realize they’d gotten wet. “Get up here. Both of you. Quickly.”
The trapdoor opened fully. Sidney climbed out first, her face pale and drawn, her eyes wide with a kind of fear that went deeper than anything physical.
Virtue came after her, pulling himself up through the narrow opening with an easy grace that shouldn’t have been possible given how cramped the space was.
He looked at her with an expression she couldn’t quite read. It wasn’t pity. It wasn’t suspicion. It was something quieter. Something that looked almost like respect.
“That was…” Virtue paused, as if searching for the right word. “…remarkably well done.”
“It was the worst experience of my entire life, and I’ve been dismembered.” Sasha slid down the side of the cabinet until she was sitting on the floor. “Don’t compliment me. I think I’m going to throw up.”
Sidney dropped down next to her, pulling her into a hug so tight it made the cut on her collarbone scream. Sasha didn’t care. She buried her face in her sister’s shoulder and let herself shake.
“You sent him to a place that doesn’t exist,” Sidney whispered.
“It does now.” Sasha let out a laugh that was ninety percent hysteria. “That’s how this works, right? Say it hard enough and the world makes it real?”
“It will buy us time,” Virtue confirmed, his voice gentle. He was standing near the desk, and his gaze had settled on the small bottle. The bruise-colored liquid caught the firelight and shimmered. “But not much. Once he realizes there’s nothing there, he’ll know you lied. And he’ll come back.”
“Then we need to talk about how we’re going to use it.
” Sidney pulled back, her hands still on Sasha’s shoulders.
The fear in her eyes had been replaced by something harder.
Something that looked like the sister Sasha remembered from before all of this—the one who charged headfirst into everything without hesitation.
“We have the spell. We have the blade. What else do we need?”
The bottle was gone. She’d hidden it. The next step…was the worst part. Sasha let out a long, heavy breath. “We need his book,” she said quietly. “The bottle’s contents will destroy it. But the spell has to make contact with the pages. We need the actual, physical book.”
The silence that followed was heavy. Sidney’s jaw tightened, already bracing for bad news. She was getting good at that.
“And it’s in the library, right?” Sidney asked.
Sasha didn’t answer. She looked at Virtue instead.
He met her gaze, and the sadness there told her everything she needed to know. He already understood. Maybe he’d understood before she had. “Yeah,” he said, and the word landed between them like a stone dropping into still water. “The library.”
Sidney looked between them. “The library. Okay. So we—” She stopped. Her expression shifted as the pieces fell into place. “The library is outside the stories.”
“Yes.” Virtue’s voice was barely above a whisper.
“And we can’t get to the library until—”
“Until the story ends.” Sasha finished the sentence for her. The words tasted like ash. “And stories end when someone dies.”
The cottage creaked around them. Wind moaned through the gap where the door used to be. Somewhere outside, something bubbled in the bog, thick and wet and indifferent to everything happening inside these walls.
Sidney’s face went white. “No.”
“Sid—”
“No. We’ll find another way. There has to be another way to end the story. Not every story ends with a death, right?” She looked to Virtue, desperate. “Right?”
Virtue opened his mouth. Closed it. He looked at the floor, and for a moment he looked less like the embodiment of every hero ever written and more like a man standing in a room with two women he cared about, knowing he was about to fail one of them.
“This one does,” he said. “It’s a high fantasy. The villain falls. The kingdom is saved. The hero defeats the darkness.” He swallowed. “That is the shape of the story. We cannot change the shape.”
“But Sasha’s helping us.” Sidney’s voice cracked on the word. “She can’t—we can’t turn on her, she’s—”
“The villain’s wife.” Sasha said it so Sidney didn’t have to.
“The Dark King’s witch. The evil that lurks in the bog.
The monster in the marshlands that mothers warn their children about.
” She let out a breath that shook more than she wanted it to.
“I know what I am in this story, Sid. You don’t know the terrible things I’ve done to people already. ”
Sidney grabbed her sister’s arm. “You are not a villain. You’re my sister. You’re—Sash, you work in a library.”
“And right now, in this story, I am the wife of the Dark King, and I live in a swamp, and I brew potions in a cauldron, and the hero’s quest will not be complete until every trace of evil has been purged from the land.
” She held Sidney’s gaze, and it was the hardest thing she’d ever done.
Harder than lying to Vile. Harder than cutting herself with her own blade.
“Including me. There won’t be any peaceful off-screen death for me in this story. ”
“No.” Sidney shook her head, tears forming. “No. Absolutely not. I refuse. We’ll—we’ll stay in the story. We’ll stay here forever if we have to, I don’t care—”
“And he’ll come back.” Sasha’s voice was gentle. “He’ll come back, and he’ll find the bottle, and he’ll destroy it. Then he’ll kill you two and we’ll have nothing. Our one chance, gone. Because I was too scared to die in a story. I’ve already died before. It’ll be okay.”
That shut Sidney up. Not because she agreed.
But because she couldn’t argue with the logic, and they both knew it.
“How bad could it be, right?” Sasha smiled halfheartedly. “I’ve been dismembered. Can’t get much worse than that.”
Virtue hadn’t moved. He was standing by the desk, the firelight casting long shadows across his face, and the look in his eyes was one she’d never seen on him before. Not guilt, exactly. Something adjacent to it. Something that lived in the same neighborhood.
“It won’t be permanent,” he said quietly. “You know that. It’s a story death. You’ll come back in the library.”
“I know.” She did know. She’d died before. She remembered what it felt like. The pain. The fear. The horrible, yawning moment where everything just…stopped. And then the library. Cold marble. Disorientation. And the knowledge that she’d have to do it all again.
“Where’s the bottle?” Virtue asked. “We’ll need to hide it. Somewhere Vile won’t suspect it.”
“I’m way ahead of you there.” Sasha smirked. “It’ll be there when we wake up. Just…don’t make any sudden movements when the story is about to end, okay?” Sasha shut her eyes and let out a sigh. “I just hope this works.”
“When this story ends, we’ll need to move fast.” Virtue cracked his neck from one side to the other. “We won’t have much time before he gets wise to what’s going on.”
Sidney let out a sound that wasn’t quite a sob. She pulled Sasha into another hug, crushing the air out of her, and held on like she was trying to memorize the shape of her. “I hate this,” she whispered. “I hate this so much.”
“I know.” Sasha squeezed her back. “But you need to go. You and Virtue need to keep moving—complete the quest. Slay the Dark King, find his mountain, do the whole heroic march. The story needs to feel finished. It can’t just skip to the end. You have to go earn it.”
“And you?” Sidney pulled back, holding Sasha by the shoulders at arm’s length. Her eyes were red. “What do you do?”
Sasha smiled. It was a terrible smile. The kind that only formed when every other option had been exhausted.
“I stay here. In my bog. Doing bog-witch shit. With my cauldron and spells and emotional support taxidermy and my organized chaos.” She laughed, and it came out a little more desperate than she’d intended. “And I wait.”
No one said anything for a long time.
It was Virtue who finally broke the silence, and he did so by moving to the ruined doorway and looking out into the mist. “We should go before he returns. The longer we stay, the more danger she’s in.”
Sidney didn’t let go of her sister’s shoulders.
“Sid.” Sasha covered one of Sidney’s hands with her own. “Go.”
“I’m coming back for you.” Sidney’s voice was iron. “In the library. The second we’re back. I’m finding you first.”
“I know you will.”
Sidney held on for one more second. Two. Then she let go, and it looked like it cost her everything she had.
Virtue offered Sidney his hand. She took it. And without another word—because there was nothing left to say that wouldn’t make it worse—they stepped through the broken doorframe and into the fog.
Sasha watched them disappear. The mist swallowed them in seconds, just as she’d told the Dark King it had swallowed them before. She stood in the doorway of her ruined cottage and listened to the sound of their footsteps fade into the wet, sucking silence of the bog.