Chapter 113: Fighting ghosts
CÉLINE
The flashback let me go the way nightmares spit you out, sudden and sharp, leaving me stranded in a present I had briefly abandoned, dizzy with the shock of return.
I was still in my bed.
Theodore still hung above me.
His neck twisted at that impossible angle. That smile, fixed and wrong. The rope vanished into the darkness overhead, as if the shadows themselves had tied the knot.
Something ripped free inside my chest. I had kept myself stitched together through the shock, through the bitter recognition, through the dreadful patience in his eyes, but now the seams burst, and what spilled out was not grief.
It was pure fury.
"You did that yourself." The words came out rough and immediate. "You were weak. You were pathetic, and you were weak, and you made a choice that a stronger person would never have made."
The smile on his ruined face did not waver.
"You are the reason a fraud is sitting in the seat that should have been mine." My voice had climbed without my permission, and I did not pull it back. "You are the reason Father handed what belonged to our bloodline to a rogue with a grudge and a fucking dead family. You could have stayed. You could have fought. You could have done anything except what you did, and instead you chose the one exit that left the rest of us to clean up the ruin of it."
The body swayed.
Then it dropped.
He did not fall or collapse. He descended with a dreadful, slow purpose, as if gravity had nothing to do with it, until Theodore’s shattered face hovered at my level and his smile stretched into something monstrous, nothing like the face I once knew.
"You will never touch that seat." His voice came out wrong, wrong in its register and its quality, carrying the particular resonance of something that spoke from a place that had no acoustics. "Even if you do, you will spend every second of it working yourself to the bone and watching every shadow for the knife that is already coming. You will spend every hour proving yourself to a man who will never be satisfied and to a pack that will never fully accept you." The smile stayed. "And in the end, you will be worse than me. I chose when to leave. You will not get that choice."
I shut my eyes.
"You are not real." My voice came out flat, directed inward rather than at him. "You are not real."
The darkness behind my eyelids pressed close.
"You are not real."
I repeated it. Again and again. Each word hammered down with intent, a nail sealing shut something I refused to let rise.
"You are not real."
I opened my eyes.
He was gone.
The room was empty above me, the darkness ordinary, the ceiling just a ceiling. The rope was gone. The body was gone. The smile was gone.
I lay in the silence for exactly three seconds.
Then something broke open in me, and I slid off the bed and hit the floor on my knees, and the crying that came out was not the kind I had performed at appropriate moments for appropriate audiences. It was the other kind. The kind that had no audience and no shape and no purpose except its own existence, tearing out of me in waves that I had no framework for because I had spent my entire life ensuring I never needed one.
I did not know how long I stayed there.
Long enough that the initial force of it exhausted itself into something quieter and more manageable. Long enough that the floor had gone cold against my knees, and my face felt raw, and my throat ached.
I got up.
I strode to the door and yanked it open harder than I meant to. The corridor was dim, silent, empty—a violation in itself, since someone should always be close enough to respond.
"I need a servant." I kept my voice level. "Now!"
But instead of swift action, what I got was silence.
Those words... a pack that will never fully accept you... burned into my head.
I waited four seconds, which was three more than was acceptable.
The girl rounded the corridor, moving fast, her hair crooked, her face marked by the sharp alertness of someone roused from sleep and desperate to hide it.
My hand connected with her cheek before I had consciously decided to strike her.
She made a small sound, her head turning with it, and pressed her lips together, dropping her gaze to the floor.
"You should always be within reach." I kept my voice even. The steadiness of it was its own kind of effort. "When I call, you appear. Not when you have finished whatever you were doing. Immediately. Do you understand that?"
"Yes, Luna Céline."
"Water." I turned back into my room. "Bring it and leave it."
She went.
I moved to the window and stared out at the estate, silent and shadowed beneath the night sky. I breathed slow and steady, waiting for the jagged aftermath to begin smoothing over.
He was wrong.
That was what I kept returning to as I stood at the window with my hands flat against the sill and the cold of the glass reaching through my palms.
Theodore had always been like that. Even in life, he had been like that, seeing the darkness in everything, finding the worst version of every possible future, and presenting it as inevitability. It was what had made him unable to stay. He had looked at what was coming, decided the worst outcome was the only outcome, and acted accordingly.
I was not Theodore.
I did not act on the worst outcomes. I built toward the best ones, deliberately and without sentiment, and I had been doing it since before he left, and I would keep doing it long after whatever this had been tonight finished haunting me.
One week was not nothing.
One week, handled well and decisively, was a foundation. It was proof. It was the start of something my father could not ignore, no matter how much he wished to.
The Omega returned with the water. I heard the tray set down behind me and the quiet retreat of her footsteps.
I did not turn around.
Because those stupid words of his refused to leave me. You will be worse than me.
I let the words settle, examined them, and then discarded them, just as you discard anything that serves no purpose.
He was wrong.
I would show him, with absolute clarity, just how wrong he was.