Chapter 25
Chapter Twenty-Five
I opened the cover of the journal tentatively, testing the binding as if I were afraid it had changed since the moment I last held it.
The early pages were still there.
My handwritten entries, crooked, hurried, and half-mad.
Stories from a life I could no longer remember.
It was yet another thing the curse had stolen from me, left behind on some long-forgotten shore.
And Corynne had found it. She’d filled the rest of its pages with her own sharp, relentless mind, and made it hers without ever knowing it had once been mine.
More than that, though, was the clue I couldn’t yet bring myself to give her. That the leather was not leather, but human hide. It was the missing piece from my back.
The large, jagged absence between my shoulder blades never reappeared after I’d cut it out one night in a frenzy of rage and terror.
I’d done it in one of the early cycles, desperate to preserve the map before the curse could steal it from me again.
I’d bound the skin into a book so the stars scarred there could not be forgotten.
Then I woke up on that damned beach with no memory of it at all.
Ever since Corynne came into my life, though, that had changed.
Her presence brought back some of the small things that I’d lost over time, little by little.
Touch no longer felt like needles in my skin, and food stopped falling to ash on my tongue.
More than that, were fragments of memories I was regaining. Memories, such as the journal.
I was likely holding the final piece to her puzzle.
The question was whether or not I wanted to give it to her.
She was the smartest person I’d ever met, man or woman. If I handed the journal over now, it wouldn’t take her long to put the last pieces together. We would have a completed map, a destination to sail to, and I would finally be able to break this damned curse.
Even as I thought it, I knew I wasn’t ready for our time to end.
“A sacrifice,” Amalya’s voice whispered through my mind. “Something freely given, that costs the giver more than they have ever been willing to pay.”
Before, I thought Corynne to be the cost because she was the most valuable astronomer I could find. But an unfamiliar weight of sorrow hit me hard, nausea roiling at the thought of taking her life just so I could reclaim my own.
I couldn’t do it.
The realization didn’t arrive with any sort of shock or anger. Rather, it settled into place with a quiet, unshakable finality.
I wouldn’t use her. I would not make her my sacrifice, because my life was not worth even a grain of sand compared to hers.
I picked up the journal and turned it over in my hands, taking it in with grim consideration. I could throw it overboard. Wait until she was asleep and toss it to the depths along with all of its mysteries and revelations.
That felt wrong, though. She regarded the journal with such care and it held everything dear to her. I would be a bastard to take it away.
The inner workings of her mind was something I’d found fascinating since the beginning.
I liked the way she argued with me, even when it was futile, and even more so the way she came undone when I pushed her a little too far.
The memory of her soft moans in my ear and the brush of her skin against mine sent chills skating down my spine.
If I handed her the journal now, the map would be complete, and our end would come too soon.
All I wanted was just one more day filled with her sharp tongue and wit, and the quiet moments when her fingers lingered just a little too long.
Then, I could let her believe that the only thing I wanted from her was the map.
That I was just using her, and there was nothing more for me there than a symbiotic relationship that had come to an end.
It would be for the best. A clean break.
I decided that when we reached whatever waited at the end of this map, I would put the power into her hands and let her walk away, even if it meant I rode this dreadful cycle into eternity and forgot every kindness she had ever shown me.
I would be swept away into the tide so that Corynne Godwin could live.