Page 18 of The Curse of Ophelia

The crack in my heart widened. I took a breath, holding Tol’s eyes as I said, “I feel as if a piece of me will always be missing while he’s gone. It’s that lost piece that keeps me from believing what you all believe.” I’d not dared divulge those words to anyone.

“You don’t need to believe what we do, but I know that Malakai wouldn’t want you traveling through life with this darkness in your heart.” Tol’s words were gentle, and as he spoke, his voice worked its way into that cracked space in my heart, forging it back together.

“How do you know that?” I faced him, leaning one shoulder against the window. With my pinkie, I drew a star in the dust coating the glass, watching how it caught the light.

Tolek faced me, eyes on the dirt now covering my finger. “You are brighter than this, Ophelia. Meant to be a shining star among us. But since he left, your light has dimmed.”

My eyes stung, and the back of my throat tightened. I bit my lips to fight what was inevitable.

Tol stepped closer, lifting my chin so I was forced to look into his eyes. Swirls of sorrowful deep brown and hints of amber longing stared back at me from behind the hair drooping forward across his brow. It had been rumpled, likely from his own hand, and the highlights caught the moonlight.

“My heart broke the day Malakai left,” he whispered. “But it has continued to break every day since, seeing what his absence has done to you.”

Tears rolled down my cheeks. Tears I had fought for over two years, not allowing myself the weakness of crying for the man I loved or the life that had been taken from me.

Tolek tugged me to his chest, one hand coming up to cradle the back of my head as a sob worked its way up my throat. His citrus and spice scent enveloped me, and I breathed it in greedily, needing to calm the roaring in my ears. I fisted my hands against the thin black linen of his shirt, my tears staining him as he breathed a soothing whisper against my hair.

Under the cover of night, with Tol siphoning off my pain and shielding me from the world, I leaned into his embrace and surrendered.

Chapter Eight

My head felt like it was packed with damp leaves. The dull, lingering cloudiness was most definitely a residual effect of the time I spent crying into Tol’s chest.

I rolled onto my back, squeezing my swollen eyes shut and stretching my hands above my head. Spirits, everything was stiff—likely a result of training my rusty spearwork. That pulse beneath my skin had not calmed overnight either. It centralized in a burning sensation in my right wrist, spreading throughout my forearm. Maybe I had not been quite as flawless with that weapon as I thought. Training this morning would be a challenge if I’d injured myself, but I didn’t care.

Still, the pain did not feel like bone or muscle. It went deeper—starting at the surface and sinking into me.

Reluctantly, I sat up in my four-poster bed, rubbing circles against my temples. Once the pressure eased, I sighed and opened my eyes. Dull purple light peeked through my cream curtains, illuminating the dresses, books, and scrolls I had left on the floor in the past week.

There was no fire in the grate this morning, the air streaming through the open window pleasant enough on its own.

I scooted out of bed and reached to pull up the covers, but when I extended my arm, I saw it.

It was not a training sprain.

It was not a stiff muscle.

It was a delicate patch of green-and-gray webbing, starting in the veins of my wrist and working outward. The visible progress was subtle, isolating itself to the wrist for now, but it was digging deeper. It seeped into my body, my blood. Contaminating it. A slow crawl through my veins as it ripped apart what was most precious.

The Curse.

I stumbled against the bed, my legs no longer able to support my weight. Everything around me disappeared. The only sound was panicked blood rushing through my ears. A clammy sweat broke out on my forehead. My body seized and trembled in waves as it fought to understand the foreign agent that had somehow found its way into my skin.

“How?” I exhaled, the word barely distinguishable between my panting breaths.

The plague of our people was gone. It had disappeared two years ago when the end of the war was negotiated. The Engrossians had the sorcia who had cast the Curse remove it.

Maybe they fed us false information, I said to myself, horrified at the possibility of this disease lurking through our territory unexpectedly for the past two years.

But no. I quickly realized that couldn’t be. Even if they had lied, not one case of the Curse had been reported in two years. Someone would have known if this disease was still infecting our people.

How is it now embedded on my skin?

My stomach clenched, but not from pain. It was uncertainty. Fear.

I struggled to breathe deeply. How would an ascended Mystique Warrior approach this threat? I asked myself.

The obvious answer was to fight. And the first step of any battle: strategize. My heart beat faster as I fought through the fog still clouding my head, attempting to organize the information I knew to be true.I stood from the bed and paced my messy bedroom, the cool floorboards a steady constant beneath my feet.

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