Chapter 105: Come back to me
SÉVERINE
The water in the sink stilled, turning dark as ink.
I had clogged the drain with a wad of cloth and filled it slowly, whispering the words that turned ordinary water into a surface that showed me what I needed to see. It was not a sophisticated work. It was the kind of magic you learned early, when you were still figuring out the shape of what you could do, and it had served me well enough tonight.
I had watched the dinner through it.
I watched Margaux kneel on the dining room floor, a vicious satisfaction twisting inside me. I watched Dorian dismiss her, use her, banish her to a kitchen she did not belong in. I watched the entire elegant humiliation unfold, my hands gripping the sink, my face hovering just above the water’s surface.
And then Étienne stood up.
I watched him follow her out of the dining room, and my satisfaction soured in an instant.
I told myself it was nothing. Pragmatism. He was protecting his investment in the revenge. He needed her to be functional and cooperative, and this was the rational explanation for why he crossed that room and walked through that door after her.
I kept watching.
They worked together in the kitchen, and I watched that too. I watched him step behind her, guiding her hands, his body moving in ways I had begged for years to see. He was easy, unguarded, the walls he wore everywhere else gone. In that kitchen, he was real, and she was the reason. I pressed my fingers flat against the porcelain and forced myself to breathe.
Then he took the mask off.
He took it off and set it on the counter and kissed her, and the kiss was nothing like the ones he gave me, which were always careful, always measured, always carrying the weight of something he was managing rather than feeling.
This was not managed.
I broke the surface of the water with my palm.
The image shattered. The spell collapsed. Water sloshed over the sink’s edge, running cold across my hand as I stood in the bathroom, chest heaving, caught in the silence of someone who had just witnessed the unthinkable.
My familiar materialized at the edge of my vision, in his human form, which meant he had already sensed where this was going and had decided to be present for it.
"It should not bother you, Mistress," he said. "That mess ends tonight."
"You do not get it."
My voice sounded strange, too high, squeezed through something raw and unfinished inside me.
"He does not have that with me." I turned away from the sink. "He has never been like that with me. Not once."
My familiar was quiet.
I thought about every time Étienne had kissed me with the particular restraint of a man who was choosing to rather than being pulled toward it. Every time I had felt the invisible distance between us, even when he was close enough that there should not have been any. Every time I had told myself it was the trauma, it was the history, it was something that would resolve itself with time, patience, and the right circumstances.
And then I thought about his face in that kitchen.
A laugh burst out of me, short and sharp, slipping past my control.
"Is there a chance?" I said, then stopped, then started again because the thought had to be spoken out loud, or it would eat me from the inside. "Is there a chance that they could actually sleep together?"
The laugh came again, louder now. I pressed my hand to my mouth and felt it tremble against my palm.
"That is not—" my familiar began.
"Do not." I dropped my hand. "Do not tell me it is not possible. Do not stand there and manage me right now."
"I am not managing you."
"They have already kissed." I turned to look at him directly. "You saw it. I saw it. The next step is obvious, and when it happens, when he realizes that his trauma is not the wall he thought it was, when he realizes that it does not stop him the way he believed it did, he will not need me anymore." My voice cracked on the last word, and I hated it. "He will have no reason to come back to me."
"That is not how trauma... especially his own works," my familiar said carefully.
"But is it possible?" I stepped toward him. "Tell me honestly. Is it possible?"
He held my gaze for a moment. "They are connected by the red string of fate. The gods and the universe want them together. That has always been true."
The words struck my chest like stones falling from a great height.
"I refuse," I said.
My words emerged quiet and absolute.
"I will not let that happen." I turned back to the ruined water in the sink, the spell broken, Étienne and Margaux somewhere in that kitchen doing whatever they were doing now. "No god and no fate will stand in my way. I have fought harder than either of them understands for what I have, and I will not watch it be handed to someone else because the universe decided to be sentimental."
"Séverine—"
"We cannot wait." I turned back to him. "We cannot wait for everyone to sleep. We cannot wait for the right moment or the right setup. Every second that passes is a second they get closer, a second he realizes something, a second I lose ground I will never get back."
I looked at him and felt the mania surge through me like an electric current in water, unstoppable and barely mine to command.
"Bring the Omega here," I said. "We find a camera. We stage what needs to happen tonight. Now."
"That is extraordinarily risky."
"What is more risky," I said, and my voice had gone very calm in the particular way it got when I had moved past the point where fear could reach me, "is standing here while the seconds pass. While he gets closer to her and further from me. While whatever I built with him gets quietly dismantled by a girl who does not even deserve to be here or reside in his heart." I looked at him steadily. "You are my familiar. You are supposed to be on my side."
"I am on your side." His voice was gentle in a way I hated. "That is why I am telling you that you need to stop."
"You are my slave—"
"I am not your slave." The gentleness did not leave his voice, but something underneath it hardened. "I am your guardian. I have always been your guardian. And what I know right now is that you are not thinking clearly, and if you make a move from this place, you will make a mistake you cannot recover from." He took a step toward me. "You will see reason when you wake. Then we can get to work."
I opened my mouth to counter him, but it was at that moment that his fingers snapped.
The sound was very small for something that swallowed the whole world.
White came in from every direction at once, total and immediate, and the last thing I felt before it took me completely was his hands catching me before the floor could.