Page 140 of The Rogue's Curse

Her eyes lifted to him, and lightning struck the ground between them. Smoke billowed around her, but she was unfazed as she said, “If you cannot be honest anywhere else, you will be honest here in the shadows of your own mind, Phillippe. Why are you here?”

“I want my curse broken. I want to be free, and I want Misha to be free,” he said. “I know that you didn’t place it on me, and that you don’t want to hurt me.”

Her lips curved in a wicked smile. “You know this, do you?” She rose, and her body shifted, the spinning wheel disintegrating to reveal a spider-like body with a woman’s torso. Red threads spiraled around him, slicing into his flesh. Hallucination or not, the pain was real, and he let out a sharp cry.

“The witch bound you,” he gasped, trying to pull away and cringing when he saw the razor-sharp threads slicing into his flesh.

“A contract was forged, cursed one, and when a contract is forged, a contract is honored. Perhaps there is truth in what you say, but it is not the complete truth,” she said. “Your fate was to suffer, and my fate is to see that you do.”

“But what if you could do something else?” he asked. “Instead of thinking of ways to torment me? I must be very boring after all this time.”

She let out a laugh that rolled across the world like thunder. “Silly boy. I think of nothing. You create your own nightmares. I merely weave them into being, as I am bound to do. What are you thinking of now, I wonder?”

Without hesitation, she plunged a talon through his eye, and images flashed through his mind. When her hand snapped back with a squelching sound, she flung a spray of blood from her fingers. Red droplets shimmered, then coalesced into a dark facsimile of Misha.

“No, please,” Paris murmured.

The not-Misha let out a terrible cry and said, “Why did you do this to me?” as he tore at his face, leaving deep bloody furrows.

Paris closed his eyes, pleading, “Make it stop. Please.”

The red threads binding him snapped, and he fell to the ground, where a glowing blade lay in the dust.

“You make it stop,” the spirit said, gesturing to Misha. Glowing cracks radiated across the soil from beneath his feet. “End it. Kill him.”

Was this the test? Was this the decision that would determine both their fates?

He looked back to where Anais had been, where a little husk of a doll still lay in the path.Then he shoved his hand into his pocket, and instead of his journal, found a handful of dried rose petals that crumbled to dust.

Turning back to the spider, he shook his head and said, “No.”

“No?” the spirit said.

“No,” he echoed. “If you’re in my mind, you can see everything. You’ve been with me for two hundred years, haven’t you? My apologies for the debauchery you’ve witnessed, but you must know everything about me.”

“I know more about you than you know about yourself,” she said proudly.

Arrogant, too. That seemed appropriate.

“Then read me like a book with a very sad middle,” he said. “If you know as much as you say you do, then you know I have loved many people in my life. My love has turned poisonous to some, and even for those who no longer wanted it, I still love them. Is this true?”

“Tell me who you loved,” she said.

“I once loved Alistair Thorne more than life itself,” he said.

“Then why did you leave?”

“Because he rejected me, and I took it personally instead of understanding how wounded he was,” Paris said.“I couldn’t get over my own ego to see what he needed.”

“He was not truly yours,” she said.

“Perhaps. But I could have at least sheltered him until Shoshanna came along to take care of him, sparing him some loneliness,” Paris said. “Yet I walked away from him. I hated him before I was able to love him again.”

“I know this, too,” she huffed.

“And you know that even when Alistair refused to speak to me for more than twenty years, I killed Franziska Bauer so that she would never utter another cruel word to him,” he said.

“You did this because you blamed her for driving you apart. This was a selfish act,” the spirit said.

---