17. The Ritual 2.0
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I’d nearly fallen out of the sky three times trying to fly home.
Hawk had caught me, just like he’d promised.
But as we’d climbed the stairs, I’d placed a hesitant kiss on his cheek and then stepped into my room, closing the door behind me.
It hadn’t stopped the pain and loneliness that had surged down our bond after, but I was used to that.
It was what I’d been dealing with for years.
He’d be happy again when he was free of me.
When he could go home and get on with his life.
No crying, Lucia. He deserves better than that.
But they came anyway. My mind swirled around thoughts of tomorrow, of the ritual, and how breaking a bond that I never wanted felt like an insurmountable task.
Not because I wasn’t ready, but because I knew what lay on the other side.
Quiet. That unending quiet that had defined my life for five years.
No shuffling around the kitchen as he made us tea, no creaking of rusty pipes as he fixed the sink that had been leaking in the bathroom for months, no soft fluttering of wings as he slept beside me.
There would be nothing.
I couldn’t think about that. I wasn’t strong enough.
I found an old bottle of valerian tincture in my bedside table and downed it. I let the darkness that had been my only loyal companion consume me, barely crawling into bed before falling unconscious.
“No—no! You’re still not pronouncing it right!”
Hawk squeaked as I reprimanded him, and my heart nearly burst.
“I’m sorry—I…I need space.” But I couldn’t get that. I fled the parlor but only got as far as the front porch before the bond tugged under my ribs. I pressed my forehead to the cool railing, my chest heaving as I tried to hold it all back.
Get your shit together. For him. You can do it.
Soft footsteps echoed on the porch behind me.
“Hey, I’m sorry. I’ll do better. The pronunciation’s just hard with my tongue and—”
I spun around, grabbing his face. “Don’t apologize. Please. It’s not your fault. I’m the one who—”
I’m the one who’s so scared of losing you I’m ruining everything.
If I couldn’t get my damned emotions under control, I was going to ruin this ritual. And if I couldn’t break this spell, he would be trapped here with me, and no matter how he felt now, he would hate me. Of course he would. Love couldn’t bloom buried in obligation.
The word pulsed between us, and his wings twitched.
He put his hand on my chest. “Lucia, talk to me. Please.”
Talk to him. As if talking had ever helped me.
I’d spoken out and been permanently silenced.
Every word since, twisted. Every kindness soured in the air between my lips and someone’s ears.
After all these years, I had finally learned my lesson.
The truth only caused pain. Pain I could manage, but I wouldn’t let it hurt him.
The cruelest part was that he was the only one the curse couldn’t touch. He heard me, the person I’d been before. And I’d been pretending that could last, digging my heart’s own grave.
Tonight, I would cut that out of both of us.
The full moon would crest the treeline in a few hours. All my ingredients were drying in the kitchen, he would learn the chant, and the circle was chalked on the greenhouse floor. Everything was ready except me.
I made myself step back, out of his touch, before the bond could betray how much I didn’t want to.
“There’s nothing to talk about,” I said, and for the first time since that first night, he flinched away from me. “The moon rises at nine. We should finish the preparations.”
My night-bloomers were all awake—the datura turned wide and white toward the glass roof, the evening primrose spilling perfume into the humid dark.
Through the panes Hawk had set with his own hands, the full moon shone behind a veil of clouds, dragging its light across the flagstones inch by inch toward the gypsum circle at the center.
We knelt facing each other inside it, the way the spell demanded. Between us, the last of the horehound smoldered in a copper dish, its bitter smoke curling upward. The sword, waiting to be drawn.
One by one, I lit the candles at the circle’s five points, and it felt like a ticking clock. The dark pressed in around us, its icy fingers insatiable.
“Ready, boss?” Hawk’s voice was steady. The bond wasn’t. It quivered like a moth in a spider’s web that knew its time was limited.
I took his hands. His palms were warm, and his fingers curled around mine like they were memorizing their shape—one last time. I didn’t let myself think about that.
I began the chant.
The vines of Hawk’s bond came up first, rising from the ring of gypsum beneath his knees.
They were pale, almost translucent, threaded through with the faint silver of the Moon Queen’s magic.
They climbed him slowly, winding around his ankles and up his thighs, curling twice around his ribs before pausing at his chest. Their light beat in sync with his heart, and they grew down his arms to our joined hands, reaching for me.
Their leaves turned to me like I was the sun.
I wanted to be that for him, but I couldn’t.
Not until I’d broken my curse—which I had no fucking clue how to do now—and could give him a real life. It was time to let go.
I took a deep breath and whispered the next part of the spell, and the ghostly vines rose like spirits out of the floor around me.
My vines were different. First came vines that mirrored his, pale and luminous as they threaded up my body.
But behind them, from somewhere deeper than the cold flagstones, a second vine reared its ugly head.
This one was dark, gnarled at the joints, thick as my wrist, and old.
Older than my brother’s voice speaking Latin in the drawing room.
It had grown from roots nested in every whisper of She’s too aggressive and You should try to be more agreeable.
Smile more, sweetheart, then people might like you.
Its thorns were long and cruel, and where it wrapped around my chest, it squeezed the breath out of me.
Where it wrapped around my throat, it cut deep until blood ran down my skin.
Hawk’s eyes went wide, his grip tightening around my hands. “Lucia, stop!”
“No…no, we’re so close. I’m all right.” I kept chanting, and the thorns of my curse cut through the tender, pale vines. They snapped, and with each one that broke, thorns cut into my throat until my voice came out raw. But I couldn’t stop now. Hawk was almost free.
I’d suspected this might happen ever since I’d finished the translation.
Sever each with the tongue laid bare. But my tongue had been twisted for years.
My curse had just been waiting to kill this soft magic within me.
I could practically feel its glee as it cut those ties.
I’d never needed the ritual; the sword had been within me all along.
It reached for Hawk, its invasive nature grasping for anything that was good. It had been designed to keep me alone.
The curse could have me, but I would never let it have him.
I channeled all the magic I had into rage and poison.
All my plants came alive, their toxic sap and pollen twisting around the fresh, green tips of the curse.
They couldn’t destroy it, but they could stop its spread.
It screamed as it coiled back toward me—and away from him.
The vine doubled around my throat, squeezing until I choked.
Hawk thrashed against the soft vines that held him, squeaking so much I could barely understand him.
“Lucia, stop! I don’t care about the bond! It’s too dangerous!”
He was so good. He’d always been far too good for me. I forced the words out. “Finish the spell, Hawk.”
“No!” He beat his wings until the greenhouse was a whirlwind and the candles winked out one by one, tumbling out of the circle. His vines grew brighter—stronger. They lashed back toward me, undoing the ritual’s work.
“Hawk, no—” I forced out.
“I’ll stay, Lucia. I want to stay! Don’t do this.”
“You can’t. I can’t trap you.” The silver vines coiled tighter, and I was failing again. The ritual was failing, and it was all my fault.
You’ve always been too much, wanted too much. Now he is going to pay the price.
I tried to choke out the song, but the vines were too tight.
Then the moon came out from behind the clouds, and soft silver light filled the greenhouse.
From every crack in the flagstone, silver dust—no, not dust—pollen rose in a cloud between us.
Hawk’s wings froze, and wind from an invisible hand shaped the cloud first into a flower with dozens of petals that unfurled slowly, revealing a wide, youthful face with high cheekbones and almond-shaped eyes.
Then she disappeared, and the pollen swirled around us booth, the breeze warm like the touch of a gentle hand. In my ear, I heard the song spoken by a native tongue for the first time.
And I finally understood it.
The whole, not the parts.
And then, one last prayer.
Be brave, Lucia.
The dark vines around my throat flailed, trying and failing to disperse the pollen around me. I inhaled deeply and spoke the truth of my heart for the first time.
“Hawk, I—I don’t want you to go. At least, not forever.
I want you to be able to run your business and go where you want and be free, like you need to be.
But…I want you to come back. I want you to eat all my honey, and I want you to help me in the garden, and I want you to sleep in my bed so in the morning I can wake up and see you sleeping peacefully, see you happy and not weighed down. ”
Tears rose in my eyes and bubbled out, and I didn’t try to stop them.
Not this time. Because they were honest too.
Then something cracked—not in me, but in the air, like lightning.
My truth left my lips, the eyebright at the circle’s edge flared white, and the black vine at my throat split, withering to ash.
It shrieked, tightening elsewhere, but nothing could stop me now.
“And…I’m scared, Hawk. I’m so fucking scared that I’ll break this spell and you’ll leave and I’ll never see you again.
I’m so scared that I can’t break this spell, that I’ll fail again, and then you’ll be stuck with me and you’ll hate me, and the thought of that is worse than any curse.
I—I need to break my curse so you aren’t stuck in this half-life. So stop fighting me!”
Understanding dawned across his face, and then that perfect, shy smile broke through.
“Lucia, you can see straight into my heart, and you still think I’m going to leave?”
I wasn’t just crying. It was full-on sobbing, and the silver vines wrapped tighter around us both until I heard snapping.
“Nobody stays. I was always too much. Too loud, too bossy, too arrogant. I was never very good with people…always saying the wrong thing, even before the curse. You shouldn’t want to.”
He chuckled softly.
“You’re not arrogant, you’re brilliant. You’ve pulled off in a few days what most people would take years to decipher. And you are good. You’ve already done so much good. Some people are good at talking, but if we want to be better, someone needs to be able to do the thing, not just talk about it.”
The silver vines snapped again, and suddenly we were chest to chest. “And I think you’ve noticed, I like when you’re bossy. Like, really like it.”
I laughed, half choking around my tears. He was so good. So good, he’d lit a spark inside me and fanned it into a flame, and it made me want to be brave. It made me want to hope there could be a future outside of this house and these walls. A future—with him.
I looked deep into his crimson eyes, and the words still stuck in my throat like they’d been caught in a spider’s web. But he knew just what to do.
“Don’t you see? It was never about those damn candles. It was always you. You’ve got a light inside you so bright I haven’t been able to look away. I’ve haven’t been able to resist you since the moment I first laid eyes on you.”
“Hawk…”
“Like a moth to a flame, Lucia.”
There it was. The dam in my chest broke, and I laughed and laughed like a maniac.
“That is so fucking cheesy,” I said as hope burned away all the darkness that had been holding me down for years.
“But you love it.” He gave me that beautiful, soft smile.
I leaned in and gently placed my forehead against his. “Yes, I love you, Hawk Mothgomery Acheron. I love you, and I need to break this bond so that maybe one day you can love me too.”
“Already do. For such a smart witch, you sure are oblivious.”
Before I could retort, an explosion like a sonic boom shattered every window in my greenhouse.
The Moon Queen’s silver vines grew longer and longer, wrapping around the gnarled vines of my curse.
It fought, thrashing and screaming, but as the silver beat with our shared heartbeats, nothing could stop it.
It crushed the curse, snapping it into twigs that rotted and dried into ash on the floor.
They attacked the final, thickest, oldest vine around my chest, and as they struggled, Hawk freed his arms and pulled me into a kiss.
I kissed him back like he was my everything, because he was.
He had been my hope in the dark, soft but unbreakable.
Because strength wasn’t found in dominance but in mutual surrender and care.
The final vine snapped, and I leaned back to take my first free breath in five years. He was beaming.
“Sever each vine with tongue laid bare, what becomes unbound was always there.” His pronunciation was perfect. “I was always yours, bond or no bond, Lucia.”
“Stay with me, Hawk?”
“Until the moon no longer shines, and even after.” The silver vines around us began to dissolve. It wasn’t the violent undoing of my curse but a gentle exhale as their silver ash drifted up and out of the shattered greenhouse toward the moon.
As the air cleared, I heard a laugh that sounded suspiciously like that of an old lady I knew who lived thirty minutes down the road.
Magic has a will of its own indeed.
But none of that mattered. The bond was broken, and so was my curse.
I was sobbing like a baby, and I was the happiest I had ever been.
He was still here, smiling at me, and I knew everything else would follow.
No plan this time. I didn’t need one. I had everything I’d ever needed right here with me.