Page 8 of Freed By Wrath

She never fought to become the center of the room, always hovering just outside of it instead, standing at the edge of the events, groups of friends or even family, laughing softly at jokes most people missed, those big dark eyes constantly wandering, drinking everything in with a kind of restless curiosity that never quite matched the life she seemed to be living.

I could never explain why she fascinated me, but every time I looked at her, I couldn’t take my eyes away, and I always had the strange feeling she was holding herself back. Like there was a bigger version of her pressing against her own skin, waiting for permission to exist while instead she kept making herself smaller so everyone else could stay comfortable.

Then that Halloween happened, and suddenly she wasn’t standing at the edge of the room anymore. Her fiancé was gone, Serena too, people started leaving, and she ended up in the middle of us, me and my two best friends, laughing so hard she had to grab Isaac’s arm to stay upright, face paint smeared beyond recognition, singing songs she barely knew, completely uninterested in finding a polite excuse to leave.

In that moment, she wasn’t trying to fit. She simply… did. And the second I saw that version of her, I knew I’d been right all along. Valerie had never been quiet. She’d only been quiet around the wrong people.

I keep focusing on her and how she doesn’t look happy.

Well, she doesn’t look unhappy either, which somehow feels worse. She looks like someone who stopped measuring the difference between the two a long time ago.

I find Daniel Cross twenty feet away, deep in conversation with someone I don’t recognize, one hand already on the man’s shoulder, laughing at something that probably isn’t that funny. He hasn’t looked at her once in the ten minutes I’ve been standing here.

She hasn’t looked for him either.

I eventually watch her drift to the edge of the garden where the lights thin under the trees and the crowd noise fades a bit. She closes her eyes. Tilts her face up and breathes.

A familiar ache blooms beneath my ribs, and I let myself feel every second of it.

The party moves on around us, completely indifferent. A group nearby bursts into laughter at something. Someone in a full werewolf mask nearly walks into a waiter carrying champagne, and everyone within five feet thinks it’s the funniest thing they’ve seen all night. A fog machine somewhere near the far hedge pushes low white smoke across the grass, curling around people’s ankles like something alive, and the DJ has shifted into something with a darker pulse—strings and bass, the Halloween playlist designed to make the back of your neck prickle.

Nobody notices her standing at the edge of it all.

But I do.

Of course I do.

Her auburn hair alone cuts through a crowd like a signal fire, the particular shade that sits somewhere between copper and rust, catching light even where there isn’t much of it. Tonight it’s pulled back just enough to show the line of her jaw, the curve of her neck, the small horns nestled into it that she probably thinks nobody notices.

Yet, I notice.

I notice everything about her with the specific, involuntary attention of someone who’s been trying not to for years. She’s smaller than I remembered—or maybe I just let myself look more honestly now that nobody is watching me do it. Either way, she’s devastatingly beautiful. The kind of beautiful that doesn’t announce itself, just sits there quietly being impossible to ignore, and the worst part is that I really believe she has absolutely no idea of the effect she can have on someone. On me.

It hits me somewhere low and certain, the way things do when you’ve been lying to yourself for long enough that the truth has to physically knock you over to get your attention. Three years passed of all of us telling ourselves it was ‘just the alcohol’.

That her smiles were not meant for us.

That her kindness was just that. Kindness.

After all, she was taken. She was fine. She was happy.

So we spent three years convincing ourselves that my fixation, the same I know my best friends feel about her smile, her voice, her presence, would eventually fade. That the memory of her would eventually blur around the edges. That I’d stop searching for copper hair in crowded rooms and feeling that stupid flicker of disappointment every time it belonged to someone else.

But it never happened.

She never blurred.

If anything, she only became sharper.

I keep my eyes on her, and notice she looks relieved.

That’s the part that gets me. Not the dress, not the hair, not the way the amber light turns her into something out of a painting. It’s the way her whole body exhales the moment she thinks no one is watching. Like she’s been holding her breath for hours and only now, at the edge of everything, alone in the dark, is she finally allowed to let it go.

That’s not what happy looks like. I’ve seen enough of it, and enough of the opposite, to know the difference.

This is someone performing ‘fine’.

The smile she’s wearing when she drifts back into the crowd is the wrong kind. Too measured. Too aware of itself. The real one, the one from that Halloween, the one I told myself I was coming here to see one more time and then let go of forever hasn’t made a single appearance.