Never Yours ✔️

Ch. 31

Arysa ran her fingers across the books lining the shelves as she walked, scanning date after date, collecting dust on her fingertips.

No one had been down here in years.

She stopped, her hand coming to rest on a thick volume, the year of the Green Harvest. She pulled it out and held it in her palms, but she didn't open it. She considered not opening it at all, and taking it straight to Kryssa, but something stopped her.

She remembered all the stories Ashlyn had told her about their parents, about their mother's laugh, and their father's quiet voice, about nights spent with them in the study learning to read and and days playing tag in the estate yard when the servants were doing a grand clean of the house. She remembered his tales of her trying on mother's jewelry and him father's big shoes, of sneaking into the library late at night so that he could read to her, of the scent of mother's perfume and the smell of the cinnamon that she hung up in every room. She remembered how he told her about the way their mother would tuck them in at night and sing quietly to them, a tune neither could remember, of how father woke them in the morning with a new riddle each day.

She barely remembered them herself, a glimpse of sunlight glancing off mother's blonde hair, a hint of a raucous cacophony of laughter, a dog with fur that trailed all the way down to the floor, the taste of apple cinnamon cake, and dancing in an empty ballroom in circles with one hand clasped in her mother's and the other in her father's to a music only they could hear.

She didn't just owe it to Ash to figure out what happened to them. She owed it to herself.

So she opened the book.

Her eyes scanned page after page, month after month, but there were holes in every place she looked, missing information, vague details, things left out in every story.

She shut the book with a snap. There was nothing here she didn't already know.

Kryssa's parents had been accused of assassinating her own. Evidence had been found convicting them. They escaped before they were sentenced. But the events that led up to the assination, the events immediately afterwards, what the evidence was, how the Windsvales escaped, all of it was so eerily vague and undetailed. None of this made sense.

Her uncle had explained it to her as soon as she and Ashlyn had settled into the castle. The Windvales were afraid of the Rosewoods' power. The Rosewoods stood in the way of their rise. So they eliminated them. But though that had consoled her as a child, it didn't make any sense now.

Perhaps it was the truth, and everything just got so muddled in the choas of the king's sister's murder that the records were neglected. Or perhaps something else had been going on. But what were they hiding?

And if Kryssa was right, and her parents weren't behind the assasasination of Arysa's, then who was?

She tucked the book into her bag and started out of the records room.

She felt his eyes before she saw the flutter of his cloak. He stood beside one of the pillars down the hall, watching her with dark eyes. He didn't approach, didn't speak, just watched. She didn't look at him, simply turned and started down the opposite hall.

He'd been reverting to his old habits, watching her, stalking her, lingering around her but never coming too close. It was almost as if he was afraid of something, almost as if he was afraid of her.

But that didn't give her any consolation.

Whatever was going on with him wouldn't end well for her, that she was sure of. And if he was able to succeed with his plan, if he was able to find a way to stop her from using mystic, then all of Rahaida would die.