Avery
“Altered how?” I ask, barely able to breathe.
“Someone with powerful compulsion magic has been inside your head.” He meets my eyes, and there’s a weight in his gaze that makes my stomach turn. “They’ve been leaving gaps behind, smoothing the edges so well that I’m surprised you realized the memories were missing.”
I shake my head, unable to process what he’s saying. “That’s impossible. Witches can’t compel other witches.”
“I know what I saw,” he says, steadier and more certain than he’s been all night. “The work is subtle. Elegant, even. Whoever did this is extremely skilled.”
“Who are they?” The words come out sharp, anger brewing in my chest, and he flinches back as if I physically hurt him. “You’re on the Council. You have to know who can do this.”
“I don’t.” He leans forward, like he’s desperate to get through to me again. “But I’ll find out. For you, I’ll find out.”
His words should soothe me. Instead, I press my hand to my chest, to the empty space where the emberlink used to burn.
Violated.
That’s the word for what I’m feeling. Because someone reached into my head and changed my memories. They took a part of me, and I don’t even know what that part was.
“Can you restore what was taken?” I ask.
“Maybe.” He watches me carefully, as if it pains him to share his own limitations. “Memory restoration is delicate work.”
“Try.” I lean forward, my hands gripping my knees. “Please. I need to know what they took.”
He studies me for a long moment. Then he nods and reaches for my face again.
“This might hurt,” he warns, like he’s giving me a chance to change my mind.
“I trust you.” The words come out automatically, and his hands stop, his whole body going rigid.
He glances down at his lap, then returns his focus to me. “No one’s said that to me in a very long time,” he says, his eyes soft and pleading, as if he’s taking down walls and praying it won’t ruin him. “I’m not sure I remember what to do with it.”
I don’t know what makes me do it, but I reach up and cover his hand with mine, moving his fingers back to my temple.
“Start here,” I say quietly. “And help me find what they took from me.”
A breath shudders out of him as his fingers curl against my skin, and for a moment, neither of us moves.
Then the tenderness in his expression hardens into focus, and the man who couldn’t meet my eyes a moment ago is gone, replaced by the Council’s youngest memory specialist who carries eight centuries of borrowed darkness and uses it to help people like me.
My eyes flutter closed, and the warmth returns, but this time it’s sharper and more focused.
He’s not just exploring anymore. He’s digging with enough force that pain lances through my temples. It’s not unbearable, but it’s enough to make me gasp.
“Breathe through it,” he says, tight with concentration. “I found a fragment. Stay with me.”
I hold on, breathe, and let him work.
And then, like a bubble rising to the surface of dark water, a memory emerges of Oliver’s face, pale and serious. I don’t know where we are, but I can see him and hear him clearly.
“Avery, listen to me. This is important.”
“You’re scaring me,” I say, hating how small and afraid I sound.
“You should be scared.” He takes my hands in his, his fingers cold and shaking. “There’s something I need to tell you. Something I should have told you weeks ago.”
“What is it?”
“Revenants.” The word falls between us like a curse. “They’re real.”
Then the memory fractures, dissolving into static.
I gasp, my eyes flying open.
Tobias is breathing hard. Sweat beads on his forehead, and his hands have dropped to his knees.
“Revenants.” The word tastes strange on my tongue. I’ve never heard it before, but it’s like I remember having spoken it.
“There’s more,” he says. “I can feel other fragments. They’re deeper and harder to reach, but they’re there.”
“Then keep going.”
He reaches for me again, and I close my eyes.
The pain is like needles being driven into my skull. But I grit my teeth and bear it, because Oliver tried to warn me about something, and they ripped it out of my head. They violated a core part of who I am.
Another memory surfaces.
Oliver again.
“We need to get out,” he says. “Me, you, and Evie. We need to find a way off this island before it’s too late.”
“You’re not making any sense. What’s going on?”
“There are Revenants at the school.” He grips my shoulders tightly, more serious than I’ve ever seen him. “They’re walking around pretending to be normal, but they’re here, and I don’t know why, but we need to get out before they do anything.”
“What are Revenants?” I’m crying now, and I think I’m the one asking, not the me from the memory.
He opens his mouth to answer.
I’m wrenched back to the present before he can.
“That’s where it ends,” Tobias says. “I can’t find any trace of whatever he told you next.”
I press both hands to my face to try pushing down the tears, but the composure I’ve spent three years perfecting is cracking, and I don’t know how to stop it.
“Revenants.” I lower my hands and look at him again, searching his haunted, empathetic eyes for answers. “You know what those are.”
“I don’t” He shakes his head, watching me like he’s begging me to believe him. “But that’s not what concerns me right now.”
I wipe my eyes with the back of my hand. “Then what is concerning you right now?”
“The fact that someone has compulsion magic powerful enough to alter a witch’s memories. Before I entered your mind, I assumed your memories were fuzzy because of the trauma caused by the emberlink bond breaking. It’s been known to happen when the bond is particularly strong.”
I look down at my lap, my fingers tangling together. Because I know the subtext behind his words.
Trauma responses usually happen when one emberlinked partner is in love with the other. There are reasons why we’re not supposed to emberlink when romantic love is involved, and the intensity of the fallout is one of them.
“Avery.” His hand goes to my chin, lifting it so my gaze meets his.
The touch is barely there. It’s just his fingertips beneath my jaw, tilting my face up. But after an hour of him inside my mind, every nerve ending I have is calibrated to him. His fingerprints might as well be branded into my skin.
“This didn’t happen to you because of trauma,” he tells me. “It happened because someone did it to you. They smoothed over the gaps and made you doubt your own mind.”
The words settle over me like ice water.
Made you doubt your own mind.
I wasn’t imagining it. I wasn’t being paranoid.
This is real, and someone did it to me on purpose.
“You can’t tell anyone about this,” he says, harder now. “Not Alessandra. Not your friends. Not the other Council members. Because whoever did this is likely still here, and if they find out we know your memories have been tampered with, they’ll do it again—or worse.”
The implication settles over me like a second skin.
“I won’t tell anyone.”
Who would I even tell? Alessandra’s barely holding herself together. Callie and Evie are missing.
And Oliver...
He’s gone.
The grief hits me all over again. Because I just saw him. I heard his voice and felt his cold, shaking fingers wrapped around mine. Now he’s gone again, and I don’t even know what he was trying to tell me, because the memory was stolen.
“Hey.” Tobias’s hand lands on my shoulder. “Stay with me.”
I take a shuddering breath, forcing myself to focus on Tobias’s face instead of the vision of Oliver swirling behind my eyes.
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not fine.” His thumb traces a small circle on my shoulder, almost unconsciously. “But that’s okay. You don’t have to be fine right now.”
The kindness in his voice nearly breaks me. Because I’m so tired of holding everything together, of smiling when I want to scream and pretending my heart isn’t shattered into a thousand pieces.
The torch crackles. Waves crash against the base of the tower.
Tobias’s eyes drop to my mouth for half a second before snapping back up, and the air between us charges, as if the molecules in the room rearranged themselves around the fact that Tobias Cane just looked at my lips and had to force himself to stop.
I should thank him for his help, walk out the door, and never think about the streaks of silver in his perfectly tousled hair, those pale blue eyes that see into my soul, or his golden fire warming my skin when he explored the deepest, darkest parts of my mind.
Instead, I reach for his hand, and his fingers twitch against mine, but he doesn’t pull away.
“Sit with me,” I say, the words coming out before I can second guess them.
He stares at our joined hands and takes a deep breath. Then he releases my hand and rises from the chair, lowering himself onto the couch and keeping a careful six inches of space between us.
“Avery,” he says, soft and vulnerable. “I don’t think I should be this close to you.”
But the space between us is alive. I can feel the heat of him across the gap, can hear the careful, measured quality of his breathing, and can see the tendons in his hand flexing where he’s gripping his knee like he’s physically restraining himself from closing the distance.
Six inches is all that separates his restraint from my loneliness. And I could respect the distance. I’m good at distance, good at being the girl who doesn’t ask for more than she’s offered.
But I’m so tired of being good.
“You’ve been inside my head for over an hour. You’ve seen every embarrassing, dark part of me, and you didn’t run away.” I don’t move, softening as I continue. “No one’s ever seen me—the real me. No one’s ever touched me as genuinely and gently as you did just now.”
Sadness crosses over his eyes. “You don’t know what I am and what I’ve seen. Gentle isn’t the word for what lives in my skull.”
“You might say that, but all I’ve seen is a man who trembles when he touches me because he’s afraid of hurting me.” I reach for his hand, and his fingers tighten around mine, as if I’m a light in his darkness. “That’s not dangerous, Tobias. That’s broken. And I understand broken.”
His breath catches, his eyes searching my face like he’s waiting for me to realize I’ve made a mistake. But this isn’t a mistake. Coming here with him, letting him into my mind, feeling seen for the first time in my entire life… this was far, far from a mistake.
My heart’s pounding. His gaze flickers to my mouth again, then away, then back again, like he’s fighting a losing battle with himself.
So, before he can talk himself out of it, I lean in and press my lips to his.