Chapter 61 Azalea
Azalea
My throat constricts. I want to scream, but there’s a vacancy in me where my voice once resided. I can only make sense of bits and pieces of what Dianthus is saying, leaving me utterly confused.
She’s right, though, I want to, no, I need to know what Braxton sacrificed, what he hasn’t been telling me.
Dianthus lifts her hand and snaps her long fingers, and I feel a warmth coat my throat before I break into a coughing fit.
“You bitch,” I choke out, as my voice returns to me. Before I can react, she grips the sides of my face, squeezing painfully tight. I refuse to wince when the sharp tips of her nails dig into my squishy flesh, but I can’t stop the layer of mist that coats my eyes from the sharp sting.
Yanking my face toward hers, she practically hisses, “Be grateful, or I’ll take it away again.”
She throws me back in my chair, and my head smacks against the wood backing, rendering me momentarily dizzy.
“The only reason your voice is back is so that you can tell your beloved prince exactly how you feel once you learn the truth.”
I push an exasperated breath out through my nose.
It’s an odd feeling, waiting to have something restored that I never knew I lost. More strange that this is the fact that it doesn’t feel like a gift.
My eyes meet Braxton, and I can see him give an almost imperceptible shake of his head as if either of us can prevent the inevitable.
My chest aches because even with the part of me that wishes to remain in the dark, a larger piece of me needs to know the truth. I deserve to know the truth.
“Also, don’t get confused. This won’t break the curse. It will very much still be intact thanks to the little clause that I added before I brought you both here. Time to really test those feelings of love.”
Dianthus claps gleefully, before bringing two of her fingers to my forehead and pushing gently.
My eyes find Braxton’s again. I wish he could be the one to tell me the truth, but I don’t trust that he ever would.
He looks so broken as his brows tilt. I thought I’d seen every version of Braxton there was to see, but I’ve never seen him like this.
His entire body is sagging with regret, or perhaps remorse, maybe a mixture of the two.
Dianthus’s smile turns vindictive as she presses her fingers further into my forehead, and a slight tingling begins scratching at the furthest corners of my brain.
At first, a warming, borderline pleasant, sensation fills my mind, but then an unimaginable pain consumes me, eating me from the inside out. I resist the urge to fight against it, and instead, welcome it, letting it immobilize my body.
It’s sharp, shooting through my skull and down my spine. When I can’t take it a moment longer, I throw my head back, barely registering that I smack it against the chair, and scream. My hands grip the armrests of the chair until I feel the wood begin to splinter under my nails.
“Please,” I choke.
It feels like my mind is being ripped open while a liquid pool of memories seeps into every crevice of my brain.
“You’re almost done. You’ll remember everything soon enough.”
Another cry leaves my lips, and I just barely hear the sounds of Braxton’s chair scraping against the floor. I try to look at him, but I can’t open my eyes. I’m not entirely sure when I closed them, but now I no longer possess the strength to pry them open.
Blurs of images slowly start coming back to me. My throat feels raw from the relentless screams ripping free from it. The first memories that surface in full are ones that I’m already well aware of.
It was the first day Phillip actually began courting me, but his chestnut hair is replaced with dark raven locks, and before long I realize it’s Braxton standing next to me.
Another memory comes into focus.
Phillip… no… Braxton had taken me to my favorite cliff. I was wearing a stunning red dress. It was the dress I wore when I tried to seduce Braxton in his study, and now I’m standing on the cliff with him. Not Phillip. Never Phillip. It’s Braxton. It’s only ever been Braxton.
My brain skips to our wedding day.
A gorgeous event in the castle’s ballroom, where all of our closest friends and family gathered.
No one knew about the bump I was hiding in my dress.
The tiny human life I was so excited to bring into the world, but it was still too early to tell anyone.
That hadn’t been the reason we got married.
We didn’t find out I was expecting until a couple of months after Braxton proposed.
Braxton proposed.
We were going to get our matching forget-me-not tattoos to celebrate our engagement.
It was supposed to be our statement that in this life and the next, we’ll always find each other.
We will always remember each other. The day we left to get the tattoos together, I hadn’t been feeling well, and I knew something was off.
That was the night I learned I was pregnant with Braxton’s child.
Braxton.
Braxton.
Braxton.
The warring between the truth and what I believed was my reality is making my head spin, intensifying the ever-growing ache inside it.
My stomach roils, and I fear I might lose whatever limited amount of food I have in my stomach.
I try to clap a hand over my mouth, but I’ve lost any sense of feeling in my limbs as another memory slams into the forefront of my mind.
I’m in labor. There’s blood everywhere. I can feel my fear in the memory, wondering if this is normal and knowing it’s not.
Scarlet paints the sheets and blankets, as well as countless towels I see being brought out from beneath me.
I feel so weak, and as each of my breaths become more labored, I start to piece together that I’m not going to make it.
I’m dying. Even now, my head grows woozy, but I force my eyes to stay open.
I need to know that my baby, our baby, mine and Braxton’s baby, is okay.
That’s when I hear them. I hear their beautiful, sharp cry pierce through the weighted silence holding the room captive.
I don’t know if they’re a boy or a girl, but I know that they’re alive, and that’s all that matters to me.
I’m unable to muster up the strength to turn to Braxton and tell him that he’s going to be okay, and that he doesn’t need me for him to be an amazing father.
Instead, I sink into a state of unconsciousness the moment after I hear our baby cry.
It was as if my body was holding on until I knew they were okay, and now it’s slipping away.
Braxton is crying and shouting. I can hear him so clearly, but my vision is black, and soon there’s nothing left at all.
That has to be the last of my memories, I realize. That was when I died.
I died.
And Braxton did something to bring me back to life.
I take a heaving breath, feeling as though I was just pulled out of the icy depths of the sea.
Suddenly, a new wave of memories is tossed at me, and I’m submerged all over again, drowned by the century’s worth of moments I shared with Braxton in the castle.
I watch helplessly as the light in him dims with each failed attempt at breaking our curse.
I’m able to understand my curse better than ever before, and it makes me want to scream at myself to stop looking so hard.
It’s almost laughable that in a castle filled with guards, knives, swords, and magical curses, the most dangerous thing to walk those halls was a woman with a curious mind.
I continue to watch Braxton endure my onslaught of hatred with every restart of the curse.
No matter what he endured from me, his love never faltered.
I can’t help but wonder if I do wish to know the full extent of what he’d done to bring me back, and I think maybe staying the dark really might be better for the both of us.
I can feel a wetness dampen my cheeks. My head and my heart are torn between needing to know the truth and trusting that Braxton kept it from me for good reason.
“It’s time for your last memory.” Dianthus’s voice sounds far away. “One that’s so faint, even the times you did regain your memories from the curse, you never got to this one.”
My stomach falls, and my shoulders stiffen. Regardless of whether I want the memory or not, neither my wishing nor my voiceless pleading can stop it as it slips into the cracks of my brain and floods my mind.
The first thing I notice is how I feel. My vision is blurry.
My throat is dry. And my body aches. I can’t place where I am exactly, but I can tell I’ve been moved from the room where I was giving birth.
Something isn’t right. I don’t feel right.
But before I can start to fixate on trying to figure out what’s wrong, I hear that sweet melodic music again.
The soft whimpering of a baby. Our baby.
I sigh contentedly, relieved to know I’ve done what I needed to do.
I brought our baby safely into this world.
But then, I’m surrounded by a deafening roar of silence. There’s no more soft cooing. No more crying. Nothing. In the next instant, I can feel my heart begin to beat. My pulse hums in my veins, and my lungs fill with a fresh breath of air.
And that’s where my final memory ends before I’m swept off to the castle for the curse to begin.
I swallow heavily, and my eyes become foggy with tears. Swallowing down the sob that wants to wrench itself from my body, I hesitate before finally finding the courage to look at Braxton.
“What did you do?”