But Valentine didn’t let me go.
Calm down first,he said, and he wasn’t afraid of my magic, though he’d felt it firsthand. He wasn’t afraid at all that I’d attack him—and I was going to, I really was.
But it was such chaos inside me right now that all my magic knew how to do was burn me. My thoughts made no sense, and my body was already numb, limbs weighed down so that what could have been only seconds later, I stopped thrashing and trying to push Valentine away.
I stopped screaming and crying and thinking.
I just…stopped.
“We’ll get him back, but not like this,” Valentine whispered in my ear. “You’re in no way prepared for Syra. I won’t let you go like this unless you kill me first.”
And I wanted to. My God, I wanted to kill him so badly, but my resolve was gone. My energy depleted. My will to live perished.
“Let me go,” I thought I whispered. “Please, just let me go.” I didn’t want his arms around me, his body close to me in any way. I didn’t want to be on the same fucking planet as him—Valentine Evernight, the first man I’d ever truly loved. Not romantically, but I’d loved him.
And he’d hurt me worse than anyone, even my own grandmother.
By some miracle, he let me go. His arms around me loosened slowly, his body stiff, as if he’d beensurprisedat my begging him, but I would do it again if it got him off me. I’d do it all fucking day.
When he stepped back and I was free, I found my legs barely held me. I looked up at the blue sky, blinking the tears away as fast as I could.
It sucked to admit to myself that Valentine was absolutely right. I was in no way ready to even make it to the Eighth Isle in one piece, let alone face Syra or save Grey. I was weak. I was alone. I was hurting—a very bad combination.
And I would only getoneshot at finding Grey, bringing him back home. One shot, and if I lost my head, I was going to die before I even saw him.
No, I couldn’t afford to be stupid, not now. As much as it killed me, I had to sit tight and calm down andthink. Make a plan. Prepare.
So, I slowly turned to the castle again, to Valentine still standing behind me among the trees, and I could hear Shadow’s wings beating over us somewhere, but I didn’t even look up to acknowledge him.
“You did this,” I whispered because it was impossible to stop those words from coming out of me. They were too powerful. “You…you filthy fuckingserpent. You’re evil.”
Valentine’s jaws clenched and his fists had turned completely white, but he said nothing, just held my eyes. He still had the balls to fucking look me in the face.
“How could you? What…what the hell iswrong with you?!” My voice rose with each word. Not like I was trying to control myself at this point. “What the hell is wrong with you, you sick bastard? You think you can justchooseto ruin the whole fucking world because you aren’t happy with how things are going?!”
And wasn’t it funny thathe did?
“I had a plan,” he had the audacity to say, his voice strained. “I had no idea what Sedelis wanted to do, and I thought Syra wouldn’t…” His eyes closed and he lowered his head. “I had a plan.”
I laughed again.
Really, from the bottom of my heart, I laughed like a fucking maniac, throwing my head back, looking at the open sky. Never in a billion years could I have thought that I’dwantit to be as dark as it had been before in the Woods. Never would I have believed that I’d yearn for that black cloud to be around this Isle,blocking out the sun from me forever, for things to go back to the way they were. To when Grey was here. When I was in his arms.
“You had a plan.” He’d rested the fate of an entire world on the idea thathe had a plan.Really—typical Valentine. I would have been surprised if he were any…less. “You’re not just evil, you’re rotten.”
It was useless to stay out here and talk to him. So, I walked around him, not able to even look him in the face anymore. I was calm. I was still standing. I didn’t need to be near him for a second longer.
“You’re right, Sunshine,” Valentine said just as I passed by him. “Iamrotten. And I might be the most evil man in the world, but don’t think for a second that I wouldn’t give up my life for yours.”
I cried and cried and cried all the way inside the castle, and up to my bedroom in the third tower. I cried because half of me believed him and hated him for it, and half of me thought he was full of shit and hated him for it more. Such an incredible combination that I was surprised I could still go about the things that I needed to do—like shower in the same bathroom where I’d showered with Grey. Go back to the closet that had become my safe place in the weeks after Grey’s banishment, where his portrait was still against the wall, as if he’d been waiting for me to come back for days. I could still pick out clean clothes to wear and sit in front of the painting, touch the colors with my fingertips, and tell them that they did not do the real Grey justice—not even close. There was a spark in his eyes that these colors could never replicate. There was the way he looked at me that these colors could never imitate properly.
But I sat there and told them all about how happy I’d been living in a cave on a ruined Isle with Grey.
That’s how I waited for the sirens to arrive, knowing full well that they weren’t going to make any difference at all.
Nighttime wasdifferent in the Whispering Woods. I thought it would be like before, when the dark cloud still wrapped around this entire Isle, but back then the darkness had been so deep. Never-ending.
Now, as I looked out the windows of the room Romin had taken us to, to meet with the sirens, I realized just how big a difference a half moon and stars in the sky made. I realized how much light they gave off and how much the magic of the curse had taken from the Woods.