Page 83 of A Fate Everlasting

It was clear the debt had forged me into something else, too. Something the High King of Elsewhere wanted to use. They needed me to Fall to tip the scales of light and dark in their favor. If I understood all of this confusion correctly, that was theonething they could not force or take. In order to make the Fall, you had to fight for it.Chooseit.

The flames in the hearth flickered, twisting violently. The air vibrated, thick with something I could feel now, deep in my bones. They were afraid. The High King’s lowered, his words curling with inevitability.“She will be our making, or our undoing.”

The world shattered. The vision imploded, ripping away from me like a tidal wave, and I stumbled back, gasping. The chamber tilted, and the bookshelves blurred into streaks of gold and black.

I clutched my chest. They had called me animpossibility, like I was a wound in the very spine of fate itself. I sunk onto themarble floor, my back scraping against the shelves. My chest heaved once, twice, and then came the tears.

As if to comfort me, or maybe silence me, something dropped onto my lap.Hard.I jumped, wiping at my eyes. It was a black, leatherbound book with a silver lock.I knew this book. The Sanctum shouldn’t have it. Which meant one thing: Dante wanted me to.

I pulled the silver key from my skirt pocket. Dante’s journal. I had already read its pages in the quiet of Dante’s dormitory, rifling through his things with shaking hands, trying to make sense of the truth tangled between the lies.

Did he want me to read this? Or the library? I tried to find the page I had left off on, but they seemed compelled to move on their own.

“Father sought the Dowager of Knots. He traded my fate by severing my soul in three. The Dowager knew that the Prince of Darkness would possess a power unknown, and soul-severance was the only way to contain it. A piece went to the light. A piece to the dark. And the last…”The ink was smudged and nearly blotted out, but I saw the word beneath it. I spoke it aloud. “A piece was lost to something… between.”

I skipped a few lines, my heart nearly beating out of my chest. I felt pity stirring, then. His own father had done this to him. His own father had, if I was reading this right, severed Dante’s soul.

“Help me. I see her every time I close my eyes. There is no silence in the darkness, only her.”

No. No more of this.My vision blurred. This was the unravelling of his lies, the one place where he would speak truth. There was no clear reason why his journal would be shelved in a library. He wanted me to find it this time. He was ready to tell me everything he could not say.

I hurled the journal with as much force as I could muster,and the library recoiled. The shadows screamed, writhing like wounded creatures, walls groaning as if they, too, were pained by the secrets they kept locked away. I paced the length of the library. The shadows bent with my every step, retreating from the storm unraveling inside me.

The doors slammed open behind me. I turned slowly. Dante was there, studying me like he’d been watching all along.

39

Dante was framed in darkness, shaped by it like the library itself had conjured him from the ink of its most vile stories. The journal was still in my hands. The confession burned into every word, into every line, into the ink smudged by the force of his hand pressing too hard to the page. “I trust you found understanding,” he said simply.

He watched me carefully, like one word might cause total collapse.I thrust the book at his feet. “I am done with your ridiculous games.” My voice cracked, but I didn’t care. It mirrored the break I felt inside, and outside, too. Everything I’d known and trusted about my world had come undone at the seams.

If what I saw was true, then all of this was just an elaborate trap. And my parents’ death. I didn’t even have a minute to process the convenient timing of it, and what it might mean.

Dante stilled, jaw locking. “Games?” He didn’t look at the book on the floor. “You’ll have to be more specific.”

I stepped forward, scooping the journal back up and shoving it between us. “Why?” My voice cut through the room,wavering. “Why did you want me to find this? To be pulled into those stories, visions, whatever they were?”

Dante didn’t answer, but his shoulders tensed.

“I deserved the truth from the beginning. These pages are dated before we met. You kept me in the dark to manipulate me,” I seethed. “So why now?”

Dante’s throat bobbed. “Arabella.”

I flinched. Even my name sounded like a curse when it was spoken by him.

“No.” My nails bit into the journal’s vellum. “You don’t get to say my name like that. You don’t get to look at me like that.”

Something fractured across his face. It was hesitation, a glint of something that looked too much like regret. It made me hate him more. I turned to leave, but Dante moved fast. His hand slid around my waist.

I turned, fire licking through my veins. Then, in a voice barely more than a whisper, he said, “I need you to know that those were not lies. Not games. Everything you read was the truth.” I inhaled. Dante’s fingers loosened, just slightly, his hold on me trembling, like he knew—he knew—that what he was about to say would unravel everything. “Because that’s what you deserve.”

“Didn’t I deserve itthen?” My heartbeat slammed against my ribs, the weight of his words pressing in. “When you first met me. The moment you knew who I was.”

Another question clawed its way up my throat, one I didn’t dare breathe aloud.What’s wrong with me?

A war raged behind his eyes. I couldn’t tell if he’d heard it. He looked like he wanted to explain, to tell me the truth all at once. But all that came was a whisper, softer than a dying breath?—

“I’m sorry,little thief.” Dante wavered, his fingers jerking free as if it had taken great force to make himself let go. For one,fragile moment, we were suspended in the gravity of something neither of us could name.

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