Hades
I cuddled up next to her, drained and… afraid. I took in her scent—the sa lavender and honey that had beco my lifeline. She was asleep… or so I thought, until she stiffened.
"Sorry, I didn't an to wake you," I murmured, burying my face in her neck—only for to stiffen. Her pulse was pounding, as loud as war drums.
"Eve?" I whispered, raising my head.
But she did not look in the face, her body stiff and twisted away from .
I let the silence perate the air fully, waiting to see if she would look at on her own.
"Love?" I called again, tucking her hair behind her ear so I could see so part of her face. "What happened?"
Just when I thought I was not going to get through to her, she finally shifted, moving and facing . She didn't reply to my question.
I swallowed, made even more uneasy by her strange behavior on top of everything else that had just happened. All that Felicia had said. The mory card that was now with the forensic team—to see whether or not she had handled it, as Felicia had claid.
Suspicion blood like a poisoned flower in my chest, twisting and spreading until I could barely breathe.
"Eve," I said again, more gently this ti. "Talk to . Please."
Her eyes finally t mine, glossy with unshed tears, her lips parted as though words were on the tip of her tongue but refused to co out. I could see the war behind her gaze—fear, guilt, and sothing else. Sothing I couldn't na.
"I just..." she started, then trailed off. Her hands fidgeted in the sheets, twisting the fabric between her fingers.
I took her hand in mine, stilling them. "Whatever it is, you can tell ."
She shook her head slowly, then blinked, letting a single tear roll down her cheek. "Hades..." Then her eyes flicked to my ear, and her mouth snapped closed.
Instinctively, my finger went to my ear, where the erald earring still was, dangling like it had been for five years.
I caught the way her face fell, but she covered up her pain with a nervous smile. She wiped her tears. "It's nothing. Just a nightmare," she whispered.
But for whatever reason, every cell in my body recoiled from the lie. I had seen her after her nightmares—the worst of them. The ones after Jules had died. The ones where death still haunted her. I had been a witness to all of them. But this…
This was different.
The way she almost couldn't et my eyes for more than a minute before they darted away. The way she was unconsciously pulling away and not lting into for warmth.
It reminded of how she had acted in the past whenever questions were raised about lies she'd told, secrets she'd kept—only to later confess her true identity.
Bells began to ring—deafening and dreadful—echoing in the deepest corners of my mind.
Still, I didn't let it show. I exhaled slowly, brushing her hair back from her face again like I always did. Like everything was fine. Like I didn't feel the ground beneath us quietly splitting open.
"Alright," I said softly, forcing a smile I wasn't sure reached my eyes. "Just a nightmare."
She nodded—too quickly. Too eagerly.
I pulled her closer, wrapping my arm around her waist, trying to ignore how tense she was, how unnatural it felt. For a mont, we just lay there in silence. But it wasn't the kind of silence we used to share. It wasn't peace. It was avoidance.
I rested my chin against her head, closed my eyes. Pretended.
But inside, my thoughts raced. Every word Felicia had said was playing on loop. The mory card. The blood. The strange, trembling way Eve looked at now.
I wanted—needed—to believe her. That it was just a nightmare. That nothing had changed.
But sothing had.
There was a shift in the air between us—subtle but suffocating. Like winter had crept into the room without us realizing, icing over the warmth we'd fought so hard to build.
She wasn't holding the sa way.
She wasn't breathing the sa way.
And I wasn't believing the sa way.
I kept my grip gentle, my voice low as I whispered, "I've got you, Eve. I'm right here."
Even if everything in scread that the truth would rip us apart.
Or maybe I was just projecting. I had hidden things too—things I was starting to believe were better left unspoken until I knew definitively that Eve had no more secrets.
"About Felicia…" I whispered into her copper locks.
Before I could continue, I felt her heartbeat speed up. She was afraid…
Or was it sothing else?
"What about her?" Eve tried hard to sound calm, but her voice was so high it cracked.
"What happened between you?" I asked, recalling how she had been levitating, sucking everything into a void I could barely get out from.
It made question things now. Why did Felicia's accusations—which should have been just nonsensical ramblings of a narcissist—have such a profound effect on her?
Only for Eve to wake up and begin acting odd.
The rose color from my world was slowly receding, no matter how much I tried to hold on to it.
I kept telling myself that it was nothing.
It had to be nothing.
The truth would be revealed soon—but Eve had no idea of that. So this was just , testing…
The lump in my throat hardened as I waited for her to tell the truth.
Tell about what Felicia had accused her of, monts before her bizarre reaction.
The silence that followed tugged painfully at sothing deep in my chest.
The silence wasn't passive. It was strategic. Calculated.
Eve was thinking—asuring.
Not how to share the truth, but how to manage it.
How to navigate .
And that realization crushed more than any confession might have.
It pulled back to the night I had asked her why she had called herself cursed when the Flux took over.
The image of her wide-eyed as she spilled lie after lie of an elaborate story replayed in my mind like a requiem.
"I—" she started, her breath hitching in her throat. "You know how she is. Probably her old tricks."
Her voice was feather-light, wavering at the edges as though she herself didn't believe the words coming out of her mouth.
"Probably her old tricks," she repeated, weaker this ti. "Always trying to hurt what we have with questions and riddles."
But what we had was no longer the unshakable truth I once held onto like gospel. It was a delicate thing now. Fragile. Fractured.
"Is that all it was?" I asked, my voice calm—too calm—the kind of calm that precedes a storm. "Just Felicia… playing gas?"
Eve nodded, still avoiding my eyes. "Yes."
Another lie. I felt it like a bruise pressed too hard.
"What exactly did she say?" The hamr was raised, aiming for the final nail in the coffin. "Don't you rember?"
I waited with bated breath.
She shrugged. "It's a bit fuzzy. I don't really rember."
The hamr made its mark.
And sothing in that had begun to live again… withered.
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