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Around and around we went.
This curse was of my making.
Valentine would never forgive me.
I shoved from the table and fled the room.
“You cannot run from yourself, Devere!” Adair called.
I didn’t know how to stop running, how to undo all of this, how to break my own curse. I ran through the hall and out the front door, down the steps into the cold snow, and slowed to a breathless stop.
Snow fell in lazy flurries. The world was quiet outside. Calm. Peaceful.
I had to change things. I had to make it right.
There could be no more toymaker’s son, no more magic. If I was gone, my magic would be too. The curse would stop when I stopped.
It would not repair the torture I’d put Val through, but it would end the madness and set Val free.
I dropped to my knees in the cushioning snow. I might not look like the monster Adair had wished me to be when he’d bargained with Jacapo, but inside, I was exactly as Adair had hoped. A hideous, twistedthing.
I should never have been made.
Tears hardened to ice on my cheeks.
I’d wanted to be loved. How had something so terrible come fromme?
“He will not forgive you,” Adair said from the house steps behind me.
Tinkling laughter rang like musical bells from inside the mansion. It all sounded so perfect, like the tiny world inside a snow globe, forever trapped in a single flawless moment.
“How many times?” I whispered.
The crunch of snow underfoot signaled Adair’s approach. I could not look. I owed this fae everything, even my life, but bitter hatred oiled every cog and gear keeping me in motion. He’d known what I’d done and had kept it from me.
“Sometimes even I forget how often we’ve been here,” he said. “It is easier that way.”
“How many times, Adair!” My cry shattered the peaceful night, but the thick forest gobbled it up. I turned on my knees and stared up at the creature who had breathed life into me, made me twisted and vicious.
His smile unfurled. “Fifteen years in their time. Countless lifetimes in ours.”
Valentine had never escaped Minerva or me. His entire life was an illusion. Every version of it. I knew because I’d crafted each one. In one, he’d come back to Minerva married with children. In another, he’d returned a pauper, lost and alone. He’d been a criminal investigator, returned to solve Jacapo’s murder, and in the last, he’d been confined to an asylum, only to return at Lord Rochefort’s bequest. He’d been a hundred different versions of himself, and every time, I’d sought to torture him, to punish him.
All because of a kiss.
Gods, I was a foul creature no better than Adair.
I clutched at my chest as though to rip out my clockwork heart. I did not deserve Valentine, and he did not deserve me. “But I love him,” I sobbed. “Why would I do this?”
“It is time to let him go, to set him free.”
Let him go.I didn’t remember how. I must have known how to end it in the beginning, but each time Valentine’s torture had begun again, so had mine, and somewhere in all the madness, I’d lost myself, lost who I was supposed to be.
Adair’s hand settled on my shoulder. “Come to me and save him.” The words poured into my ear like poison. “It’s that simple.”
Save Valentine. From myself.
It was the right thing to do, to let him go free, but it hurt. It hurt like nothing in this world, or the thousands I’d created, had ever pained me before. Icouldn’tlet him go. Without him and the countless worlds I’d made, what was I?
