Page 309 of Once Upon a Fable

I sat up in bed, staring at each of my family, imprinting their small, dark shapes into my heart. “Zan is right. We love each other. Therefore, we’re stuck with each other. But I promise you, I will get us free. I...I have a plan. I just need to wait for the right time.”

“What are you planning?” Wes asked.

I shook my head. “The less you know, the better. But Mal is right, too. Storymaker has to die.”

He had to die because if he didn’t, then we all would. And the thought of watching my family be butchered after being subjected to sexual fucking servitude was enough to make my hands ball and heart smoke with everlasting hate.

I would never leave them.

I would die doing whatever I could to protect them.

I would do that because I loved them.

And love was the cruelest prison of all.

I gasped, sucking in air as my mind returned to the library, and my body jerked in the wingback. I flopped over my legs, inhaling hard as the room spun with books and pages, all blurring together in mockery.

Books that I’d read, cover to cover, countless times over. Stories of bravery, fantasies of dragons and shapeshifters, romances where the hero always saved the girl.

I bared my teeth and growled at them all. Useless tales. Utter bullshit. The real stories of love and sacrifice were far less pretty and very rarely tied up with a happily fucking ever after.

Gemma.

Flinching, I groaned and shook my head. I didn’t want to think about her either. About the way her eyes glowed with pain. The way her voice caught with misery.

She’d argued with me, she’d pushed me, and she’d almost made me snap. But then she’d given in. She’d shrugged as if she was as lost as I was.

And then, she left me.

My breath hitched, replaying the way she’d shrugged before heading out the door. My heart had folded in on itself, burning to ash.

It still hurt—throbbing as if she’d ripped it free from my chest.

Who’d have guessed I’d be defeated by a simple, sad little shrug?

A shrug that said I’d hurt her more this morning by not even touching her than I had in any other interaction.

Christ, I didn’t even understand what she was shrugging about!

And why did something so innocuous as that punch me right in the heart and leave me empty and bereft and so many other complicated things?

That shrug had felt monumental.Familiar. It felt like a weapon that’d already successfully annihilated me before.

Yet...I can’t remember if that’s true.

I collapsed deeper into Storymaker’s wingback, wedging my elbows onto my knees and cradling my pounding head in my hands. My broken arm throbbed and the cuts on my hands that I couldn’t recall earning stung as I dug fingernails into my scalp.

Every part of me hurt.

I’d woken this morning, shivering my ass off in damp clothes with stairs cutting into my body, and for a flicker of a moment, I pictured abath. A star-studded sky. A kiss...

But then, it’d vanished.

Just a dream.

Nothing important.

Until I’d found her in the library, and she told me otherwise.