Chapter 38
Chapter Thirty-Eight
All I could see was Silas. Every version of him in my memories collided at once.
There was the young merchant who had promised me forever across the kitchen table, made love to me on stormy nights, and handed me the world.
I saw the man who threw things when he was angry and then groveled at my feet until I decided he was forgivable.
Then there was the cursed captain who had forgotten my name, his name, who had taken me to see the stars in the night sea and showed me the beast had not finished erasing him yet.
He came back.
Silas wanted to save me. August wanted immortality. But neither of them got to decide how this ended. This time, I would choose.
I was the Stella Mortis, and I had spoken a curse with so much venom that the world itself had been forced to answer.
I’d set this curse into motion. It was born of pain and every ounce of hurt he’d ever made me feel, and that was enough to keep it going for centuries. That same feeling that lived in my memories bled into the present, forcing me to feel it all over again.
“How could you?” I asked, tears falling down my cheeks.
Silas took a step toward me, his expression severe in the flashes of lightning. Gods, how deeply I’d fallen in love with him. No matter how far we’d gone or in how many lives our paths crossed, I always fell desperately in love with him.
“I don’t remember all of it,” he said, his hands up in a placating gesture as if I might jump before I was done screaming at him. “But I know I’ve left you. I know I’ve hurt you.”
“Do you?” I straightened, my hands shaking from the anger rising inside.
“Because I remember everything. I remember every laugh and every time we made love. I remember all of your promises and all the ways you let me down, but most of all I will never forget the sound of the door when you shut it behind you and my screams echoing through the night while I called out your name, begging you not to go. The memory of your ship sailing over the horizon while I was dying inside will never go away.”
Sobs wracked my body, tears mixing with the rain as I clenched my fists and tried to keep my knees from buckling.
He watched me, his gaze unwavering, and I knew he was seeing the spectral image of my past self, broken and left behind. The storm raged, mirroring the tempest in my soul, each thunderclap a painful echo of betrayal.
“This is the price,” I whispered, my voice raw. “The price for your leaving, for your broken vows.”
August scoffed to the side, but I paid him no heed.
“I loved you,” I said to Silas, jaw clenched. “Across every lifetime, Silas, I loved you!”
He took one step forward, but I stepped back. I couldn’t be near him. If he wrapped his arms around me, I would fold. I needed him to hear this.
“Even the ones where I hated you for leaving, where I stepped off this cliff with a curse on my lips to damn us both, I chose you. Every single time, I chose you, and you chose the sea.”
Silas’s hands flexed at his side as he took another step forward, blood dripping from a cut on his arm and mixing with the rain to drip off his fingers. “I came back.”
“This time,” I spat. “Once. After you’d already put me on the shore and broken the only promise I asked you to keep. You decided my freedom was worth more than the chance of your own and left me here. You made that choice for me, one I never asked you to make.”
Silas took another timid step forward, jaw clenching and a muscle twitching in his temple. A shudder ran through his frame, though it was impossible to tell if it was from the cold, the rain, or the raw regret burning in his eyes.
“Corynne,” he warned. “I have failed you, gods know I have, but I—please, I need you,” he confessed, and the words cracked something vital inside of me. “I have never been the man you deserved, but I want to spend eternity trying. Please.”
My breath hitched in my throat, a knot of anxiety coiling in my stomach making it hard to draw a full breath.
As angry as I was, as much as I wanted to hate him…
I couldn’t. Through all the bad, there had been good.
The way he held me through the stormy nights, how I felt wrapped up in his arms, always shadowed the fight that had inevitably landed us there.
The sea glass belt wrapped around my waist told me that he’d thought about me even as he was preparing to let me go, to make sure that I lived even if he became a figment of the past.
Yes, he left me, but we both changed. This version of me was learning how to forgive through the anger, and Silas had learned how to give when there was opportunity to take. When we fought, there was a gleam of emotion present that didn’t match the malice that was once there.
It was love. Undeniable, unbidden love.
I knew how our story had to end.
For a heartbeat, time stopped as I looked at him. At the fear and love gazing back at me. I smiled softly as I spoke, “Through every lifetime, I will always belong to you.”
Then, with a steadying breath, I grabbed August by the front of his coat with both hands and threw my full weight backward into the open air.