Page 133 of Heart of Thieves

I grit my teeth, shoving splintered wood off me, squinting through tears and sweat and blood to see Lola’s back arching as threads of my magic spear through her like solid blades of electricity.

A human body is not meant to channel so much magic at once.

I search out Estelle and find her twitching in pain on the ground, too.

I have to stop this.

I dig my fingernails into my palms, clenching my fists so hard my knuckles pop as I mentally try to halt the magic flooding out of me.

But it’s like trying to block a tsunami.

Lola’s legs wobble, and she drops to her knees as her shrieks peal higher.

“No!” I grit out, wobbling through the torture to snatch up a nearby shard of the voratium Estelle just removed from Laurel’s arm. I hold it ahead of me like a dagger, its point gleaming in the dawn light peeking through the window.

The ice in my body grows colder. The familiar electric surge of my magic pulses through my blood, punctuated by the screams I’ve heard in my mind since the moment the moonshard broke.

Enzo. Laurel.

And now Lola, too.

Her cries fill me with a rage and a fury, a terror and a dread I have never known. I face Laurel, who stands like an undead goddess, glowing with white magic under her skin.

And still, that thread of the Unbreakable Lie twists through her. My magic. My fault.

I do not pause, do not even breathe. I hurtle at her, slamming into her with the force of everything I am and everything I wish I could be. She hits the ground beneath me as I swing my makeshift voratium dagger.

But before I can pierce her throat, she grins, and then a thousand glamours ram me backward, clouding my vision until I cannot see anything, hear anything, feel anything. I am alone in the dark. Lola is gone, the casino has dissolved, and I can’t see Laurel anywhere.

Ice unspools from my chest. Secrets unwind out of me, drawn like entrails from my throat into scintillating illusions on Laurel’s terrible stage of nothingness.

“Wait—” I gasp into the emptiness.

But instead of a response from the current Laurel, sixteen-year-old Laurel’s scream splits the air. An illusion of her ripples to life in the darkness. She rushes forward as the temple’s vault sprouts around me. Past-Nic drops a moonshard, and Laurel dives for it as it breaks. Her shrieks fill the temple with agony as her skin boils. My vocal cords scrape as I shout at her to run.

“No!” I growl, trying to squeeze my eyes shut so I cannot see these secrets spilling to life. But they’re still there, dancing on the inside of my eyelids.

Teen-Laurel transforms into my father. This is the night I found him in my office a few weeks after the moonshard cursed me. He stands behind my desk, and when past-Nic enters, he looks up, holds out my copy of the Odelion, and points at the notes in the margins. The questions, the doubts, the anger, the hurt I scrawled out as I tried to make sense of what I once believed and what I no longer could. Tears well in his eyes. Lines draw his mouth tight. “Who are you?” he croaks at the past version of me, and the words cleave me here deeper and harder than they did the first time. “What have you become?”

“Father—” I gasp as my throat closes over.

He walks out, never to return.

And then Enzo swirls into view. I sob, pressing the heels of my hands to my eyes. “No. Stop. Laurel.”

But she doesn’t. The illusions hit me like a bludgeon to the skull. The countless times Enzo came to the casino in those early days, trying to kill me. All over again, I live the agony of wishing I could tell him the truth but believing it would lead to ruin. Becoming outwardly the very thing I once despised because I thought that’s what I needed to do to keep Enzo and Laurel safe from one another.

Hot tears stream down my face as Enzo dissolves. Acid burns my throat. My whole body shakes.

But Laurel still isn’t finished.

Lola appears. Beautiful and fierce. Her lazy eye, her gorgeous curls, her cunning tongue dismantling every lie I tried to tell myself about what was honest and what was good and what my own deception did to the people I loved. I watch myself manipulate her. Deceive her. Break her. Cast her out. Then shame her for returning to my brother.

I failed her. I failed Enzo. I failed my father. I failed Laurel.

I failed them all when Laurel showed up in that mayor’s house up in Opalton and turned me into a weapon using the guilt I could not face. The pain I did not want to bear.

Enzo may have made the mistake that led us to the moonshard, but I’m the one who’s at fault for where we have all ended up.