Page 249 of The Nightmare Bride
Gods among us. I’d been right about one thing. I didn’t deserve him. I never had.
The knowledge cast a shadow across my mind, but I pushed past it and went to pull on my discarded dress.
Amryssa. She was waiting, and a heart-to-heart with Ky wasn’t the only one I had on my schedule today.
Right now, I needed to scrounge up the courage to tell my best friend where she’d come from.
And pray like hell that it didn’t end with her leaving me.
Despite my trepidation, once I started talking, I couldn’t stop. Mostly because Amryssa didn’t seem to believe me. Somewhere in the middle of my third attempt to explain her godly origins, I gave up and went to my room for the diary. Let the Lady lay it all out.
When I returned, Amryssa sat cross-legged on her bed. She reached for the book, a few moonlit strands catching on the knob of her elbow. My eyes snagged there, too. She was so skinny,barely there at all. How had that happened?Whyhad that happened, after I’d persuaded the dagger to help her last night?
Goddess, I needed to get her out of Oceansgate. The moment she married Ky, I would take her away.
Amryssa read in silence, turning pages, occasionally backing up again. When she reached the portrait of Zephyrine, she studied it for so long my chest tightened. I feared whatever she would say next.
So I went to the window and studied the lawn, which had been hacked to bits. Tainted sod had been piled up, and bonfires raged in the heat, sending rippled plumes into the sky. Ky had joined the efforts in the trenches. Sweat poured down his spine as he jabbed his shovel into the earth. Bits of grass stuck to his glistening shoulder blades.
As I watched, Merron’s words swelled in my ears.Maybe you should do something just because you want to.
For a moment—one selfish, stolen second—I pretended I could. That I wasn’t Amryssa’s protector. Just Ky’s wife, and not in this half-cocked, purgatorial capacity, but for real.
Images filled my head—of me standing by the door in the afternoon, welcoming him in from chopping wood. I would kiss his sweaty skin. Tell him about my day. I’d mock his fancy accent, and then, when he tried to win me over with a laugh and an arm clamped around my waist, I’d take him upstairs for a bath. Once there, I’d watch with eager eyes as?—
“What’s this?” Amryssa said behind me.
I whirled. She stared down at the diary, which lay open to the last page.
I shut my useless daydreams into a locked steel box. Mere days from now, Ky would marry Amryssa. Then he’d leave.
The end.
“What’s what?” I said, a shade too brightly.
Thankfully, Amryssa didn’t notice. She frowned down at the pages. “It looks like a letter. Addressed to me.”
I frowned and approached the bed. Sure enough, the Lady had inked an entry into the back, where Ky and I hadn’t thought to check. We’d stopped when the pages had gone blank.
I leaned in.My dearest Amryssa, it began.
“I didn’t see this,” I said, my heart thumping. “Can I read it with you?”
“Of course.”
I crawled onto the mattress, then propped my chin on her bony shoulder.
My dearest Amryssa,
Blood of my blood, flesh of my flesh—I love you so very much. Enough that the word ‘love’ is only a pale descriptor for how I feel.
If you’ve read the preceding entries, you’ll know we’re not kin, at least not in the strictest sense. But in my heart, in some place in me that runs deeper than a soul, I am your mother, and you are my daughter. This will never not be true. Time could fill an ocean, then another and another, and still not diminish my belief.
Which may explain why I stopped writing in this journal years ago—you became mine. We became family. I only came across this diary again this morning, and I was surprised to see I hadn’t written in over a decade.
You’re eighteen, now. We celebrated your birthday just last week. I’ll never forget the way you blew out the candles, because I loved you for granting me that indulgence, for not proclaiming yourself too old to partake in such silly traditions. In our all-too-brief time together, I’ve cherished our sillymoments most of all. This was no different, even if the occasion was one I’ve dreaded all your life.
As you’ve no doubt guessed, when the sun set on our celebration, I didn’t return you to the swamp. Zephyrine help me, but I couldn’t.
