Page 41 of The Legacy of Ophelia
But as much as my heart ached with every inch of space between us, I hoped he was staying away from Damenal. I hoped Santorina and Cypherion were able to keep him away as Rinapromised they would, especially after what Echnid made me do to Malakai. The Vincienzo bloodline may not be Blastwood and Deneski, but it was strong. And I didn’t think I could bear using the mythos magic on anyone else.
Heart pounding behind my ribs and eyes stinging, I crossed to the bed. The sheets were cold—unnaturally so. The clearest sign that no one had been here for months. I dragged my fingertips across them, fluttered over the pillows and curtains framing the four posts—they were perfectly tied back like he’d left them the day we departed for Brontain.
Beside the bed, a dark wood nightstand held both a half-burned candlestick and a mystlight lantern. I almost laughed at him having both when mystlight was the easier choice, but something about Tolek writing by candlelight made my heart expand in my chest. An empty whiskey glass waited beside it and a journal. All untouched.
I shouldn’t have pried, but the tether that connected me to Tolek pulled taut. So, with a shaking hand, I opened the drawer.
“What?” I breathed, brows scrunching at the sight within.
Pieces of parchment, all folded in three, and all with my name scrawled across the front.
Letters.
They were letters, ripped from Tolek’s journals if the frayed edges of the pages were any indication.
My heart pounded as I picked one up, and when I opened it—when I saw the first line in Tolek’s handwriting and heard his voice reading it to me in my mind—I lost the battle against the stinging in my eyes.
They weren’t just letters, they were poems. Poems he’d written for me—about me. Things he’d always wanted to say but either couldn’t or didn’t know how. The deepest, most beautiful thoughts of his heart and soul, captured in black ink on the pages of his many journals.
I fell to my knees, my wings slumping to the ground behind me, and read one after the other. My tears stained the pages, my fingers trembling around them, but I couldn’t stop.
He’d marked the date on every single one. Some days he’d written multiple, some went as far back as when we were children. Those were more rudimentary, focusing on rhyming words, and I couldn’t help but laugh through my sobs when he talked about how he was neverboredwatching me with mysword.
I hurried through them, desperation clawing within me to consume every bit of Tolek’s mind that I could, to wear these words like my favorite armor.
Finally, there was only one left. And when I opened it, when I saw that this one began with my name at the top, my heart cracked.
The date—it was my twentieth birthday.
Exactly one year ago today.
The day that Damien had first appeared in my bedroom; the day my life was officially handed to the Angels and gods.
I have a gift for you, he’d said at the party at my parent’s manor.I’ll give it to you later.
This. This was the present he’d always intended. It was a personal note and a poem he’d written. Something small, that could be folded up in my pocket and read repeatedly, always with me for protection—it likely was in his pocket that night. The creases were worn, like it had been opened and studied time and again. But it was the most intimate gift ever intended for me.
Because this wasn’t just a poem.
It was a love letter.
He didn’t come out and confess his feelings. No, Tolek never would have done that when I was still grieving Malakai. But it was written in every line now that I knew where to look. These words were his way of trying to bring me back to life when I wasso ruined. His plea to be strong, to fight through the pain. It was his confession that he cared for me more than he ever would have dared say aloud, and his desperate, hopeless thought that maybe one day I would care for him, too, but if I didn’t, he would accept what I could give.
This letter was evidence of the love Tolek showed me every day and a vow to do so for eternity.
I read it again and again—read them all repeatedly until the sun was setting, spending my birthday with Tolek in the only way I could.
No one came to look for me. No one asked me to train or attempt to awake a seraph. No one needed me. So, I sat in solitude with love letters from the man who cradled my broken heart so delicately in the palm of his hands. I wept over the words he’d written for me, and I plotted the day I’d return to him.
Chapter Fourteen
Ophelia
Echnid cameto me on the night of my birthday, less than an hour before midnight. He gave me another gold feathered armored gown—this one with lace sleeves that hugged my arms tightly to my wrists and vambraces—and escorted me to the Rapture Chamber, where a decadent feast of fresh fruits and pastries was laid out, wine and liquor in abundance for my choosing.
When I asked why—why the theatrics, why allow me to cry in Tolek’s bed all day, why not summon me until the very last minute—he said, “Because you spent the day mourning the life you will no longer know, and now we shall end it looking forward to the future we will live together.”
Bile crept up my throat, my jaw trembling with the force of all the words I wanted to spew at the god before me. At the thought of Malakai, still unconscious and recovering in my bed. At the thought of Tolek’s letters.
