Chapter 11 We Both Got Screwed #2
That night, curled beneath my covers, I finally broke.
The tears came silently, and even alone I couldn’t escape the discipline they had forged into my bones.
But Mom must have heard—or simply known—because she appeared again.
Not as the precise, severe woman who corrected my posture mid-incision, but as something softer.
“I’m sorry, Aria,” she whispered, and for once her voice held something raw, something almost maternal.
She sat on the edge of the bed and brushed my hair back, the same hands that had taught me to suture sinew now trembling slightly.
“I wish things could be different for you. One day you’ll understand why they can’t. But tonight…”
Her voice changed then, less instruction and more song.
It startled me, how lyrical she suddenly became, how her clipped words loosened into something dreamlike.
She painted a world I’d never seen: phoenix flocks dancing beneath aurora-streaked skies, their wings scattering stardust and half-remembered lullabies; crystal deer whose antlers chimed melodies that could heal broken hearts; shadows that bloomed into constellations before folding back into dusk.
“Some creatures weren’t born from the world. They are the world,” she said, and I remember how her eyes had gone distant. “They existed in the spaces between reality, in the breath between moments. Their magic wasn’t contained in vessels or bound by rules, it simply was.”
I fell asleep with salt drying on my cheeks and stars blooming behind my eyes, my dreams riotous with impossible colors and creatures without names.
It was the only story she ever told me, the only time she allowed herself to be mother instead of mentor.
A single, flickering glimpse of who she might have been in a life where science and obligation hadn’t carved her hollow.
I never heard her speak that way again, and sometimes I wonder if I imagined it. But I remember the tremor in her hands, the way her voice snagged on certain words, and I know in the marrow of me that she loved me the only way she knew how.
My ruby pulses, drawing me back to the journal and I highlight another passage:
Some bonds do not form, they awaken. I’ve observed cases—rare, undocumented—where one half of a bond begins to shift inexplicably, and the other follows. Not always in tandem, and not always willingly. There’s no traceable spellwork or chemical trigger. Only evidence of change and influence.
Her journal brims with the theories and questions I used to overlook, and the guilt gnaws deeper. I’d been their perfect little scientist: precise, obedient, razor-sharp where it mattered. I was never meant to ask why. Only how and when. But now I have to ask. Have to know what all of this means.
My current theory is that these bonds carry something older than magic, a resonance rooted deeper than blood or intent.
When disrupted, they react, and when studied, they twist. I’ve spent years trying to measure the variables.
None remain stable. The moment I think I’ve isolated the source, it adapts, as if the bond itself refuses to be known.
Perhaps that’s the point. Not all power can be quantified.
Not all bonds are meant to be understood. Some are simply endured.
I never pushed beyond the lab’s clean surfaces to uncover what any of it was for. If I had, maybe I’d have more than these scattered puzzle pieces that refuse to form a clear picture.
And Alexander . . .
Why would he want them dead?
It doesn’t make sense. They were his brightest minds, his miracle pair. They weren’t just his researchers—they were his legacy. So why end them?
My stomach twists every time I circle back to the so-called “accident.” They wouldn’t just die, wouldn’t just leave me behind like this. Not without a reason, or without trying to tell me something first.
Their theories, their discoveries, their secrets—they’re laced through the veins of Eclipsera. Through the bones of this city. Through me. I’m not ready for any of it, don’t want the weight of their unfinished symphony echoing through my bloodstream. But choice was never mine to begin with.
The apartment door clicks open, and soft footsteps, hesitant but determined, make their way across the floor.
Only Luna walks like that, announcing her presence while bracing for rejection.
She stops in the doorway, outlined in golden lamplight, and even without looking up I can feel her eyes sweeping the wreckage of my workspace.
“You look like death,” she says flatly. “Worse, actually. Death probably exfoliated.”
I don’t glance up from the journal. “Nice to see you too.”
“I brought soup, and something that might’ve been bread in a past life.
” She crosses the room, frowning at the battlefield of coffee cups, ink-smudged notes, and half-eaten food containers scattered across my desk.
“Seriously, Aria. When was the last time you slept? Or, I don’t know, remembered you have a body? ”
“Hard to say. Time’s a circle.” I mutter, flicking my ruby. “Also, I’m working.”
Luna raises a brow and waves a hand. Containers drift into the trash with effortless grace, while diagrams align themselves beneath her touch. Her magic mirrors her: efficient, polished, and infuriatingly composed.
I sigh. “I was going to do that.”
“Mhm. Just like you were going to eat yesterday’s dinner? Or the day before that?”
Silence settles between us, taut but not unfriendly.
A silence only sisters know, balanced between annoyance and affection.
I meet her gaze and see it at once, the fatigue and the quiet ache of someone who longs to be useful but doesn’t know how to be wanted.
I’ve seen that expression before, written across her face, and I taught myself to look away.
She used to wait outside my bedroom door for hours, hoping I’d finish cataloging samples or finishing blood calibrations early enough to come play. I never did. I’d hear her out there, spinning stories to herself, her dolls acting out adventures in realms I never made time for.
I was too busy being exactly what our parents needed to realize she just wanted me to be her sister.
“Did Mom or Dad ever mention anything to you about bonds?”
She glances over her shoulder. “Contracts?”
“No, not those.” I wet my lips. “I mean the ones that came before regulation. The ones no one talks about.”
Luna’s cleaning spell falters, and a coffee cup drops with a dull clatter back to the desk. “No,” she says after a beat, too calm to be casual. “They didn’t talk to me about that stuff. You know they didn’t.”
“I thought maybe they did. Or you overheard something—”
“I wasn’t in the lab, Aria.” Her voice sharpens, but there’s something brittle beneath it. “You were the one wielding a scalpel before you lost your baby teeth. I was the one staring at the locked door.”
I glance down at the journal, suddenly unsure why I brought it up at all. “They trained me like I was going to save the world.”
“You mean like you were going to dissect it.” Her voice cracks on the last word. “They carved you into a prodigy and forgot all about me.”
“You had freedom.”
“I had silence.”
I look up. Luna’s arms are folded now, defensive, but her eyes are glassy.
“You got the lab,” she says, quietly. “You got their attention. You got to be needed.”
“I got nightmares,” I mutter.
“I would’ve taken them, just to feel like I existed to them.”
The words land with more weight than I’m ready for. We were both starving, but for opposite things. I drowned in their expectations and she withered in their neglect.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper.
She shrugs, but the gesture is all scaffolding. “You were just a kid too. It wasn’t your fault they picked one of us.”
I reach out, nudging the soup toward her with trembling fingers. “We both got screwed, huh?”
Luna exhales and takes a seat beside me. Our shoulders brush, and for once, neither of us pulls away. The journal lies between us, thick with the ghosts of our parents, their legacy pressed into every page.
“They trained me like a weapon,” I say eventually. “But I think I let them. I liked being needed. Even if it meant hurting things.”
Luna doesn’t flinch. “I know.”
“I think they broke something in me.”
“Then they broke something in both of us.”
She reaches out and rests her hand over mine and for a fleeting moment, the room doesn’t feel so haunted.
“I heard her, you know,” she says softly. “That night of your eighth birthday, when Mother told you that story.”
I blink. “You did?”
“I sat outside your door. Waiting to see if she’d come tell me one too.
” Luna smiles, but it’s sad. “She didn’t.
I used to do that a lot, actually. Sit outside your room while you worked, hoping that day would be different.
That maybe you’d finish early and we could play, or you’d need help with something, anything. ”
“Luna—”
“I’m not saying it to make you feel bad.” She exhales slowly. “I just want you to know I was there. I always was.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and mean it more than I’ve meant anything in a long time.
“She loved you, Aria. Even if she didn’t know how to show it. She loved me too, just… less efficiently.”
A wet laugh escapes me. “That’s the most Ellis thing you’ve ever said.”
“Tragic, really.” Luna smirks through it. “We turned out just like them.”
“Not quite.” I run my fingers over the cracked leather of the journal. “They didn’t break us completely.”
“Speak for yourself,” she murmurs. “I have a PhD in emotional repression.”
“Yeah, well.” I close the journal. “I’m doing a postdoc in magical trauma.”
Luna’s laugh is soft but real, and some long-coiled tension unspools inside me.
My sister’s hand lingers on the journal, her touch reverent against the worn leather. “Let me see it?”
The question hangs between us and I hesitate. Luna’s fingers retreat, curling back with the reflex of someone used to doors closing in her face.
“Never mind,” she mutters. “I shouldn’t have—”
“No. Here.” I slide it toward her. What right do I have to keep it from her? We both carry the hollow spaces our parents left behind. Scars stitched in different shapes.
Luna’s breath catches as she opens it, Mom’s elegant script spilling across the pages. She traces the loops and curves with trembling fingers, as if she could absorb twenty-two years of missing moments through the ink alone.
“Is this the one Mother left you?”
Guilt claws its way up my throat. “No.”
“Then where did you get it?” Her frown deepens, fingers stilling on the page.
“You have to promise not to tell anyone.”
Her gaze snaps to mine. “Aria—”
“I mean it.” I lean forward. “Promise you won’t tell anyone. Not your department. Not Alexander. No one.”
The silence stretches, brittle with decades of strained trust and unsaid things. Then, finally, she nods. “Fine. I promise.”
“Dom gave it to me at the gala.” I force the words past my teeth.
Luna’s magic lashes out, cold and immediate, making coffee cups rattle. The journal nearly lifts from the desk under the sudden pressure of frostbitten energy.
“You what?” Her voice is deadly quiet. “Are you completely insane?”
I roll my eyes. “Here we go.”
“No, seriously! Have you lost your mind? A Blackwood hands you a classified journal and you just take it?”
“It wasn’t stolen.”
“You have it, Aria! That’s theft. You don’t know where it came from or what kind of trap it is—”
“It came from them,” I snap, snatching the journal back. “Our parents. It’s ours. It shouldn’t be rotting in some dusty archive.”
Luna’s nostrils flare. “This isn’t about their legacy. This is about you spiraling again. You always do this! Dom shows up with some broken gift, a half apology, and a few sad eyes, and you forget how to think.”
“I’m spiraling?” I bark a laugh. “That’s rich coming from you.”
Her spine straightens. “Excuse me?”
“Oh, don’t act wounded. I saw your little performance for Whispersilk. ‘The Ellis Legacy Lives On.’ Tell me, does Alexander pat your head when you perform your tricks?”
Color floods her cheeks. “I thought you didn’t want it. Their work. Their legacy. I thought I was doing you a favor.”
“It’s not a favor,” I spit. “It’s a knife in my back and I don’t want you anywhere near him.”
“I’m not a child, Aria. I can make my own decisions.”
“Can you?” My voice turns sharp. “Because Alexander isn’t your mentor. He’s a puppeteer and you’re just another convenient string.”
Her chin lifts. “He’s been nothing but kind to me.”
“Oh, kind,” I echo. “Of course. Unlike the Blackwoods, right? At least they don’t pretend to be saints while gutting the world from the inside.”
“You think Dom’s some great exception? You think he gave you that journal out of the kindness of his heart? You’re not special to them, Aria. You’re leverage.”
The blow lands exactly where she meant it to.
I stand, my own magic sputtering weakly. “I’m leaving.”
“Where are you going?”
“Out.” My hand’s already on the doorknob. “Don’t wait up.”
She doesn’t stop me. Doesn’t shout or apologize, just watches me with that infuriatingly composed expression I’ve always hated.
“I never do,” she says as I open the door. “I learned a long time ago you only need me when something’s broken. When Dom fucks up or everything falls apart. I’m not just someone you come to when you need to vent, Aria. I’m not your cleanup crew.”
I pause. Half-turned. “I never asked you to be.”
“No,” Luna says softly. “You just expect it.”
The silence opens between us like a chasm neither of us knows how to cross.
“Fine,” I whisper.
“Fine,” she echoes.
And the door slams shut behind me.