Chapter 53
HALLUCINATION
Bronte
ONE MONTH LATER
Poppy won’t stop shivering.
We’re sharing a loveseat in the library at Morgenstern Manor. She’s wrapped in a blanket, a steaming mug in her grip and her head resting on my shoulder as her pet panther snores in her lap.
We’re lucky Jezebel survived the shots she took. If she hadn’t, I doubt Poppy would still be herself.
There’s a blank space in my memory between shooting Margot while she’d been fifty feet away on a burning pyre and that pyre being empty of flames while Margot ran up the stairs behind me. During that same glitch in reality, Quinn’s corpse disappeared.
Neither Nikolai nor Dante remember those moments, either.
Worse yet, the bodies of every Leviathan member we'd laid waste to had vanished. Rain washed their blood away and doused the fire from the dynamite we'd detonated. As if none of it had even happened.
Poppy has yet to talk about what she saw.
Virgil says she could at any point, but it's already been a month. She’s been having nightmares, waking up screaming.
When I’m able to calm her, she says she keeps reliving that night over and over.
My lullabies help her sleep, but she’s still waking with restless bruises beneath her eyes.
My gaze finds Rin’s, then Alexander’s. Shame weighs their shoulders down. They weren’t able to protect their daughter when she needed them most. Worse, the predator preying upon their family escaped without leaving a single lead for us to follow.
Margot has vanished. Though it’s unclear how many cult members are on what sides of Leviathan’s internal war, we’ve all been watching our backs for another attack.
Emi has contacted the number belonging to the man Poppy saw at Leviathan’s masquerade—the same man who called to help us find her and her parents that night, leaving us constantly asking ourselves why.
No one has answered.
Leaving too many questions in the void.
“Filia,” Poppy murmurs into her mug, baby blues swimming with the same uncertainty she’s been carrying for weeks. “Does anyone know that word?”
Alexander blinks through a wine-induced haze. “It’s Latin for ‘daughter.’”
“And occidere?”
“Why are you asking, Petit Diable?” I interject before her father can reply.
“Just curious.”
My eyes taper at the blatant lie, but I don’t push her. Not while she’s still recovering from that night.
“‘Kill,’” Alexander says with the same narrowed gaze as me. “Occidere is a command to kill.”
Poppy shivers again, curling into a tighter ball beneath my arm. Her parents exchange a loaded glance that sets my teeth grinding before Rin places a hand on Poppy’s knee.
“What did you see, darling?”
Poppy hesitates, and then her shoulder hikes in a tentative shrug. When she looks at me with the memory of impossible wind and a glowing pentagram haunting her eyes, she answers, “It doesn’t matter. It wasn't real; it was just another hallucination.”
A quiet week later, I’m breathing gray smoke out a window cracked to the May dawn as Poppy sits at her father’s desk in his study, reading through her childhood fairytales with tears in her eyes.
“I want her back,” she rasps, flipping through the leather-bound notebooks. “I want this little girl back.”
I don’t have any encouraging words to offer. She’ll never get that piece of herself back, and she knows it. Her innocence died the day her father handed her a knife and ordered her to take a life. At her core, Poppy Morgenstern is a killer.
Leviathan spent enough time beating that fact into her bones.
“You still have a choice,” I remind her. “Assume your birthright and rule. Or let the legacy of your forefathers die.”
“Let’s tackle that another day.” Poppy sighs, closing her notebooks in a desk drawer and joining my side as she nurses her vape. “How is Dante?”
Since that bloody night last month nearly killed him, my twin has been healing at a decent rate and walking with only a slight limp. He’s still beyond exhausted, using his recovery time to pour himself into gaming to distract himself from the less-than-slim chances of ever seeing Mama’s ring again.
“Physically, he’s fine.”
“You know that’s not what I'm asking.”
“Not to sound like a copycat, but let’s tackle that another day.”
“Fair enough.” She chews her bottom lip. “How has work been without…”
Without Quinn. We don't speak her name. I refuse to acknowledge she even existed. It was easy for us to plant the evidence needed for a convincing runaway story. Everyone at work had seen how devastated she'd been after Scull “left the city” and believed she'd gone to find him.
But that's not what Poppy is asking.
She's asking how I am without voicing the question directly.
Because I never have a simple answer for how I feel about the woman I'd thought was my friend.
The friend I'd given a second chance even when I shouldn't have.
A second chance I'll regret for the rest of my life, as it had nearly ended in me losing the most precious person in my life.
Something wet and warm slips from my lashes.
“I'm sorry,” Poppy murmurs, stepping into my side and wrapping an arm around my waist. “I shouldn't have asked.”
“Don't be sorry,” I say, pawing at the unbidden tear and kissing the crown of her head. “Merci for caring enough to ask. For being here even after my mistakes led to you and your parents in that crypt.”
“That's not your burden to bear, mon ange.” She presses a kiss to the angel guarding my heart.
“You saw the good in her. Something tells me it wasn't all an act on her part, that she really did think of you as a friend, in her own twisted way.
Maybe that's why Scull hadn't gone after you sooner. Maybe she was protecting you.”
I don't know how much I believe that, but we'll never know now. It's the closest thing to closure I'll have, and I'm more than ready to end that chapter of my life forever.
Silence descends over us like a calm mist. It’s as comforting as sitting at a campfire in the dead of winter. Poppy is my flame, and I’m hers. I toy with her hair, my knuckles brushing her spine. Goosebumps prickle her flesh as if my hands haven’t been a constant presence on her skin.
I’ve lost count of how many times we've claimed each other. Lately, though, it’s been different.
We’ve been different.
Everything we thought to be true was a lie. Margot wasn’t murdered; she’s a member of the same cult that nearly destroyed my own life twice over. Quinn wasn’t my friend; she was using me to get to Poppy for her own gain.
We both saw inexplicable things that defied logic.
But we have yet to talk about any of it.
And it's driving me up a fucking wall.
“What’s wrong, mon roi?”
“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to, ma reine.”
Poppy palms my cheek, thumbing the scar she gifted me. “Aren’t some unknowns better left in the dark?”
“Says the woman who held a knife to my throat when demanding to know my past I also thought was better left in the dark.”
“You liked it. The knife part, I mean.”
“Poppy.” My irritated tone causes her to flinch, and I dust apologetic kisses across her scarred fingers. “Respectfully, you’re being a little prick.”
“I know.” She huffs a breath, ruffling her fringe. “I don’t know how to describe any of it without sounding fucking insane.”
“Trust me, Petit Diable. You can’t sound any worse than I feel.”
Poppy casts her gaze to the city and the rising sun beyond.
“When I woke up in the crypt on the pyre with my unconscious parents, Margot and Quinn revealed themselves.
And then they told me a psychotic story I have yet to wrap my head around.
" She briefly speaks about a supposed curse her ancestor, Octavia, triggered in cheating death thanks to the Devil himself saving her life the night she'd been destined to die.
And the repercussions of that curse the longer it's left unresolved.
"Margot also mentioned something about your family ring that I don't understand beyond it being a targeted object that she planned to steal from your brother all along. "
"Putain," I breathe, raking an agitated hand through my hair. "What a fucking mess."
"There's more, Bronte. So much more."
I nod, bracing myself. "Let's hear it."
"Margot called herself a witch. I wouldn't be questioning the validity of that claim if I hadn't seen her literally conjure a ball of fire from thin air to light the pyre and subsequently cast what I can only assume was meant to be a ritual.
As if that wasn't a hard enough pill to swallow, something else happened after you shot her.
Something…" She shakes her head, her expression wan. "You're not going to believe me."
"Try me," I insist. Everything is making so much more sense now, even if the facts are too fantastical to contemplate being actually true.
Poppy lets her eyes drift shut, shivering even as I drape an arm over her shoulders.
"Time didn’t exist. Or maybe it did, and it was paused?
I don’t know. I felt something cold. It touched me.
Not possessively, but tenderly. Adoringly.
I felt its breath on my skin. First, it said, ‘Filia.’ Then it opened its eyes.
They were beautiful and monstrous and…" Her lips wrap the vape, and she inhales deeply, exhaling lavender smoke as her eyelids crack open.
"They were that color—purple. But they were glowing, like they were made of fire. It saw my fear, and I swear on every star, it looked like it didn't want me to be afraid of it. Then it closed its eyes, kissed my forehead, and said, ‘Occidere.’ That’s when the restraints came loose and time resumed.”
I drag on my cigar, breathing cherry smoke as I mentally digest the tale that feels more and more like fact than fiction.
“Walk the path of insanity with me for a moment.
Leviathan was remembered by your family as a cult, but the history of their founding father, Felix Aurelius, claims they were a coven of satanic witches.
What if Margot is, indeed, a witch? That tracks with what we've learned about Leviathan thus far. "
"Hai. But what about the creature that appeared?"
"Margot was on the side of Leviathan that believes Lucifer assisted Octavia in cheating death, which now has this insatiable hunger that must be satisfied in the form of Morgenstern blood—Lucifer’s blood.
What you just described sounds like it wasn't a creature at all.
To me, it sounds like it'd been Lucifer himself, and he rose from the deepest pits of Hell to save the last of his descendants, along with commanding you to kill Margot.”
Part of me wants to laugh at the outrageousness.
A larger part of me wishes my mother—an expert on all things otherworldly—was here to make sense of it all.
“If any of it was real,” Poppy says slowly, puffing purple smoke, “what does it change?”
“Either nothing…or everything.”
“Depending on what?”
“What you decide, I suppose.” At her quizzical look, I add, "Margot may have escaped, but that doesn't mean she or anyone on her side won't be back to finish what she started.
You're still a Morgenstern. You're still her target, as are your parents.
You can either tuck tail and run—or stand and fight.
Either way, I'm with you. Whatever you choose. "
Her expression falls, and I can almost see her tucking those thoughts in a dark corner of her mind before she says, "I don’t want to talk anymore.”
"Poppy, you need to—"
Faster than I can register, she fists my shirt and pulls me down to her sweet lips.
Her open-mouthed kiss steals whatever argument I'd been about to voice, her tongue flicking mine in silent demand.
A groan climbs up my throat only to be echoed by her.
Blindly tossing my cigar out the window, I palm her waist and plant her ass against the glass, shoving her red silk yukata up past her hips as the need to be inside her overrides my brain and consumes every instinct.
“Bronte,” she warns, tugging the skirt back down. “Not here.”
“If not here, then where?”
Poppy grabs my wrist and tows me back to the empty library. She leads me through the stacks until finding a rolling ladder. “How is this?”
“Parfait.”
I lift her onto a rung and unbuckle my belt, ripping her skirt up to her navel and fitting my aching cock to her weeping entrance. She whimpers, rolling her hips and impaling herself on my dick. Her inner walls constrict around me, and I nearly come undone as her greedy cunt sucks me in.
I fight against the urge to let my eyes find new homes in the back of my skull and just rut into her. I want to savor this—her.
Gently, I rock my hips and work myself deeper into her tight, wet heat until I’m fully seated. Arms circling my neck to hold me close, she breathes little Japanese curses against my throat like love notes.
A thousand lifetimes spent right here, in this moment, and it still wouldn’t be enough. Especially not when I remember that I almost lost her again.
I don’t let the intrusive thought in often, but it’s a very real possibility. A hundred scenarios from that single harrowing night could've ended with the woman I love dead. With the color in my life fading back to the dullest shade of gray.
“What are you waiting for?” Poppy plunges her hands into my hair, her lips finding their home on mine. “Be a good king, and fuck your queen.”
I do, tasting my name on her tongue and listening to her body sing for me. This, being inside her, reminds me that she’s still here.
Alive and beautiful and certainly not a hallucination.