Page 113 of The Toymaker's Son

He could make a thousand dreams, a hundred mannequins of me, but none of them were real. His magic was soulless;hewas soulless.

“I will never love you,” I seethed.

“Love? You are incapable of it.Thatis why Valentine left you.”

“He didn’t leave.” I rose to my full height and glared into Adair’s eyes. “You forced him out.”

“No, Devere.” He cupped my face, his touch cool against my bruised cheek. “You did that. But I love you, and one day you will see that for the precious gift it is.”

I knocked his hand aside. “Your love is a curse.”

He clamped his fingers around my neck and hauled me off my feet. “I worked tirelessly to give you everything you wanted. Without me, your silly little dream world would have been nothing but smoke and mirrors. I gave it substance. I made it real for that wretched man who did not deserve your heart. You should thank me. I took your flimsy fantasy, and I made it brilliant. Why do you think I stayed? It certainly was not to endure your pining for a mortal boy.”

I clawed at his grip, trying to pry his fingers off.

“If it were up to you, the whole dream would have collapsed after the first go-around. But I made it last. It was my magic that fueled your dreams, Devere. I took your lies and made them wonderful, the same as I did with Jacapo’s pitiful mannequin son. I made you. I made the dream in which you manipulated the mortal. I own your every heartbeat. Every breath you take is mine to give. You are my puppet.”

He dropped me, I gasped, the click of his fingers sounded, and I froze.

“Get up.”

I stood, a passenger in my own body.

Adair’s smirk spoke of satisfaction. He stepped closer, so close his immortal heart beat close against my metal one. “As a child, you begged me for help. You loved the boy, but if you let him go, you knew he’d fly away. So I made it so you’d never let him go. I made it so you lived the dream over and over. It was my power that fueled your brilliance. It was my power that made you forget. Mine!”

I remembered the day the boys had beaten me. I remembered stumbling into the woods and calling out. Jacapo had told me never to call on the fae, that they twisted and soured everything they touched, but in my shame and rage, I’d ignored Jacapo’s warnings. Teary-eyed and bloody all over, I’d called for Adair and begged for him to punish Valentine.

“Without me,” Adair sneered, “you are nothing.”

Had I sounded like him when I’d ranted at Val, told him his life was nothing without me? Now I knew how Val had felt, having his life teased through another’s fingers. I’d known what I’d done was wicked. I’d been afraid of losing Val and angry at the world. It had been wrong—I’d known that too, even then. Had I been free to remember, I’d have released Val from his cage. But Adair had made me forget, and so we’d become trapped, Val and I, circling the same impossible ending.

“So you see”—Adair stroked my cheek—“you are just a lost little boy with a clockwork heart. Everything you are, everything you will be, is mine to control.”

It did not absolve me of all I’d done, but his admission meant I hadn’t deliberately trapped Valentine in dreams for a lifetime. I hadn’t meant to hurt him.

I’d made a mistake in asking Adair for help, and that mistake had cost Val and me our lives and our love.

ChapterForty-Three

Valentine

Present Day

The lichen-covered gravestones leaned left and right. But the stone angel remained upright and untouched by the ravages of time.

Devere Barella.

Beloved son of Jacapo and Rosemary Barella.

Died in infancy.

The graves next to the child’s belonged to Jacapo and his wife, reunited in death.

Strange to have memories of a man who had never existed. He’d never grown up, never gone to school, never had friends, and never met me. Yet I knew he smelled warm and spicy, like cinnamon and toffee. I remembered his voice and how he’d chide me over something I’d said or done. He’d claimed to have saved my life, even as he’d denied it meant anything. He’d pulled a pistol on me, slapped me, made me tea, and his laugh had been so rare and precious a thing—rarer and more precious than any of the toys he’d made.

But none of it had happened.

Weeks had passed since I’d woken as Valentine Anzio, the last Anzio in Minerva village. The hermit who had rarely left his home, and when he did, he’d been a ghost of his true self.

---