Chapter 85: Sight
MARGAUX
I was barely awake when Séverine and Étienne began their tangled dance, a mess of limbs and whispers that quickly gave way to a raw conversation about everything broken between them.
I drifted at the edge of sleep, that soft threshold where sounds linger and your body is already lost. The rustle of fabric, the click of buttons, the hush of a belt, the wet hush of lips meeting, her voice—then, suddenly, Étienne faltering.
His shields were not up.
That was the trouble with the bond, the flaw I had spent the last day refusing to acknowledge. When his defenses crumbled—worn down by exhaustion, pain, or something unnamed—I could feel what he hid. Beneath the steady cadence of his voice, doubt churned. Heavy, knotted, and unresolved. It swept through the bond like a gathering storm.
He did not know what he wanted. I felt that clearly enough.
I kept still.
I had become very skilled at keeping still when it mattered.
But as I lay there, eyes shut, Séverine’s voice grew small—frightened, stripped bare by honesty. Something inside me recoiled. She was afraid, not with a sudden jolt, but with the slow, deep fear that burrows for years and finally runs out of places to hide. I recognized it. She was afraid of losing him. She said as much.
I had felt that fear too. When I had to toss him away, and even when he returned to me.
When I opened my eyes enough to see, in the unguarded quiet of that room, I saw it between my hands and Séverine’s.
A thin thread of black.
It was dense, unmoving, and the sight of it turned my stomach. I had learned enough about these visions to know that black never meant anything good. It was not the color of love that thrived.
There was a thread between her and Étienne as well. Purple. The same shade that linked Chris and me. I wondered if that color meant one-sided love.
But she did not know that. Nor would she have been able to see it.
She only knew she was scared, and she was asking him not to leave, and she had been waiting for him in a way that had cost her.
I made myself breathe.
The goddess had given us this bond, and I had been turning that fact over in my hands for hours now like a stone I could not figure out the weight of. Why? That was the question that had no clean answer. Why bind us together, why pull something toward each other that had every possible reason to stay apart? My family had destroyed his. Whatever Étienne felt, whatever confused, unresolved thing lived in him and reached through the bond sometimes in the dark, the foundation of it was built on a grave. His family’s grave. My mother had—
I stopped the thought there.
I rose quietly and left.
Three words to him at the door, and I was in the corridor with the cool air and the low afternoon light stretched long and gold across the stone floor. I smoothed my dress because my hands needed something to do, and I walked, and I told myself to think about something else.
My mother.
That was one option to consider. Calling her. Hearing her voice and finally asking her, plainly and without softening it, what she had done and why. I had been putting that conversation off since the truth had started coming into focus, each new detail worse than the last. She had not simply made a choice. She had made choices, plural, layered, and deliberate, and every one of them had left marks on people I had cared deeply about.
Maybe even hearing more about this new condition of mine. If I were going mad, or if there was truly something supernatural happening.
But we wouldn’t even cross that river before she would fixate on Étienne.
That was the problem with calling her. Any conversation I tried to steer toward her reasoning, her justification, or her face when she made those decisions would eventually curve back to him. She had always had opinions about Étienne. About what he meant. About what I should do, or not do. And I was not ready to hear her voice on that particular subject right now, when the bond was sitting so raw and recently decided in my chest.
Or how should Étienne be right, my mother would most likely wnat him dead.
Then and there, I decided to focus on the bond.
Letting it go was the right thing to do, I thought.
I kept walking, repeating it until it stopped feeling like a choice and started to settle into fact.
The only reason I clung to it, I told myself, was because it was what he wanted. To torment me. I let myself be his doormat out of guilt.
I wished I could believe that, but it was never that simple. I was sure it was the same for him, even if he buried it under all that hate.
I liked the bond. It let me slip into his mind, and for a moment, it almost felt like old times, even if everything had changed.
But I could not be selfish.
He would not do it; he would not reject me. It was a feeling I had.
But hearing Séverine’s pain because of this bond made me ache. And when I felt Étienne’s raw, exhausting doubt through the bond, it was its own kind of proof that things would only unravel further.
I could still picture Séverine trembling in my mind. Her voice had been stripped to something so raw and scared that even I, with every reason to hate her, felt the wrongness of standing in the way.
And then there were those stupid threads I had seen.
Black. Twisted tight between our hands, dense, unhealthy, and undeniably real. I did not fully grasp these threads, these colors, this new and unwelcome sight my eyes had chosen. But I knew enough: black was a warning, a wound, or both.
It did not matter. I had made my choice.
The second-chance bond was the goddess’s doing, not ours. Wanting something because the bond demanded it was not the same as choosing it. We both understood that. Whatever reached through the bond in those unguarded moments, we would always remember where we came from.
He knew what my family had cost his. He would want the bond gone, too. He would probably feel relief, though he would never admit it. But I would see it happen. I had to.
I had made up my mind, I told myself.
I was so busy arguing with myself that I almost walked straight into him.
I pulled up short.
He was standing in the middle of the corridor.
A man. Completely, utterly, bewilderingly naked. He stood with his arms loose at his sides, as if he had just materialized in the hallway and saw nothing strange about it. For a moment, I thought the light slipped through him, but when I looked again, he was solid. Real. Like someone who had left home and forgotten every crucial step.
I stood there.
He stood there.
I glanced down, then up again, the way you do when your eyes need a second chance to believe what they are seeing.
"You are aware," I said, "that this counts as a crime."
His eyes found my face. They were blue. Deeply, unsettlingly blue, the kind of blue that had too much going on behind it. He stared at me for a moment, and then he looked sharply behind himself, like he expected to find someone standing there to whom I had actually been speaking. When he found no one there, he looked back at me and something moved through his expression.
He raised his hand and waved it directly in front of my face.
"Fuck," he said. "Can you see me?"
"Should I not?"
"Yeah," he said. "You should not."
I stared at him.
He stared back.
The silence between us shifted, turning into something I could not name. I had seen Theodore’s ghost before. I knew what a ghost was.
I could not believe that kind of madness was coming from me.
This man was nothing like that. Theodore had blurred at the edges, moved like light underwater. This man stood in sharp shadow, every line clear, and with a very obvious lack of clothing.
I did not even know why, but I reached out and touched his arm.
He winced. A sharp, involuntary flinch, his whole body recoiling from the contact. Before I could pull my hand back, he jerked away, and my nails grazed his forearm in the process. He glanced down at the thin red lines left behind, already beginning to rise on his skin.
"What the fuck," He said, very quietly and with great feeling, "This is new."
Then he vanished.
I was not even sure how to explain it. He did not flicker or fade. He was there, and then he was gone, leaving only the corridor and light behind.
I stood with my hand still outstretched, one heartbeat, then it tore out of me before I could stop it, all the strangeness of the past days crashing into my throat and making its own decision. My sudden marriage, the black thread, the silver bond, the supposed witch, the bathroom, the dead sentinel, the naked vanishing man who should not have been real—every bit of it spilled out in one long, undignified wail.e long, undignified sound.
Then I heard footsteps behind me, so I spun towards them.
Séverine stood in the corridor. Her eyes were red. Not metaphorically; the skin around them was swollen and raw, and she was looking at me the way a person looked at someone they deeply did not want to deal with right now.
"What the hell are you screaming about?"
I pointed at the empty corridor in front of me.
"I saw him," I said. My voice came out uneven. "I think I saw the witch. It is a warlock."