Page 39 of The Witch is Back

“Leave!” she shouted, her voice a thunderclap in a storm. “You’re so good at it.”

“Em—”

“You didn’t even say goodbye.” The words burst out of her, seven years in the making. “You were just gone. I needed you and you were gone.”

He twitched, gone rigid. “I left a note.”

“For your parents. I didn’t make the cut?”

He rubbed the back of his neck, tension vibrating around him. “It’s not like that.”

“Yes, it is. You couldn’t have made it more obvious how little I meant.”

His eyebrows slammed together. “That’s bull.”

Her laugh was short and sharp enough to cut into skin.

He flinched. “It is,” he insisted. “You meant something—you mean something.”

Emma felt the lie like a blow. “And that’s why you fled the country with only I can’t marry Emmaline as a reason?”

“I didn’t ‘flee.’ I just...” He grimaced. “I can’t... It’s complicated.”

“I’m sure.” She swallowed past the lump in her throat. “Do you know...what it was like to get up the next day and be told you’d left me?”

“I didn’t leave you.” But he didn’t look at her.

“Yes, you did,” she confirmed. “That fact was rubbed in my face at every opportunity. Poor Emmaline. Bastian had to run to get away. And my mom...”

His attention was keen. “What? What did she do?”

“It doesn’t matter.” She dragged in an unsteady breath. Her knees were trembling, her weight unbalanced. “None of it matters now.” Disgusted with herself, she shook her head. “I don’t even know why I bothered. It’s not like you care.”

“Emma.” Bastian’s strained voice stole over her senses, trying to weave its own magic. “You don’t know—You have to understand.” Frustration simmered in his eyes.

She could sympathize. She could back off and play her role again. But she’d had enough of this falseness. Leah was right.

“What I understand is that the boy I needed abandoned me. Left me to the wolves. No explanation. No apology. Nothing. For seven years, I heard nothing. And now you’re back, and we have to get married, and you expect me to forget everything. Smile, laugh. Do my part, play my role like you. Why not, right? You don’t think you have anything to be sorry about. You’ve always done what’s easiest.” Her jaw firmed as she stared into his pale face. “And the worst thing is? I didn’t even expect you to do any different.”

Unable to keep looking at him, she whistled for Chester and headed for the door.

As she passed Bastian, he touched her arm. “Emmali—”

At the touch, a pulse wave of emotion burst from her. She couldn’t control it. It rippled over him, his eyes going pure black at the major use of magic as he opened to the memory she unintentionally released. His hand clamped around her arm and he shuddered.

The backlash was keen and Emma’s teeth gritted as a small amount of pain knifed through her system. It would be nothing like what Bastian was experiencing as he relived the memory of her being told he was gone, that he’d left her. Of the moment she realized she was alone and—

She ripped herself free, shaken at the memory read. Pure betrayal ripped through her. “How dare you?” she seethed. The idea of what he could have read had her heart pounding.

He stared at her, cheeks as white as death.

She didn’t say anything else—what was there to say? She stepped out of his reach and walked to the door. Opening it, she snapped her fingers for Chester and created a portal to her hiding place. She managed to close the portal on the other side before she dropped to her knees, burning up with old pain and humiliation. Sand rubbed against her palms as she flattened them, then dug them into the beach.

“So close to discovery,” she murmured to Chester, who belly-crawled up to her. “Thank the Goddess I managed to pull out in time.”

As she sat in the cool quiet of the beach next to Lake Michigan, no others around due to the freezing weather so late on a Saturday night, the full extent of how badly she’d veered off course sank in. So much for calm. So much for control.

She winced at the thought that he’d relived her pain. At least that was all he’d relived. At least now he’d stay away. What that meant for the Divining, she didn’t know, but it had been a week out of the month already and no new tattoos had etched into her skin.

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