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“How long have you known you weren’t schizophrenic?” I relax my back into the leather chair, looking around the glass-and-steel office as I cross my arms across my broad chest and release a heavy breath. “Since I was fifteen.”
I was a kid screaming for help. Not because of a hallucination or delusion. No one was listening to me; they wouldn’t hear me. I was panicked, scared, and no one would believe what I had seen.
Because when Sage came back and one-year anniversary of Rosemary’s death was fast approaching, I started seeing things, hearing them in my ear. I saw them, and they ate at me until I thought they were real. Until I trusted what they told me and put weight in their false words.
I thought, holy fucking shit. They were right; I have schizophrenia, and I haven’t been on meds since freshman year of high school.
Feeling hope for the first time when I met Rosemary, knowing I had one person on this fucking Earth that knew the truth, and now what do I have left of that hope?
It has always been better to remain quiet than risk speaking words no one believes.
I hate it. Despise myself for living in fear, being stagnant, and not just moving the fuck on with my life. I was kidnapped, beaten, raped. So what? There are millions of people who experience that. I’m lucky. I shouldn’t feel so fucking sad.
The pressure alone is too much. The weight has shattered my shoulders, and I’m tired of suffocating. I can’t breathe, ever. Why can’t anyone see that? Can they not see me turning purple? The hands of my mind choking me?
“I wish I died in that basement.” A sob takes my voice, and I cry heavy tears into the speaker of the phone to a voice that owes me nothing. “I want to go back and die there. It took so much of me—why not just take it all? Why leave me this fucking empty!”
“Life left you empty so that you’d have room to fill it. We are only hollow if we allow ourselves to remain that way.”
I don’t have to be Coraline Whittaker, survivor of the Sinclair House of Horrors. I’m not the award-winning artist prodigy or the regal daughter of James Whittaker. I’m not the older sister to a girl I’ve trapped myself in this town for. I’m Coraline. I’m not okay, and right now, that’s enough.
I’d always thought it was beautiful, his grief. A living reminder of a love lost too soon.
“They say I’m dead on the inside.” “They call me cursed. I wonder which is worse?”
“I had to learn how not to live for the trauma and loss. I’m living in spite of it. Don’t let him win.”
They are brothers to me. Each of them. Thicker than any blood.
I’ve always believed love is like water, the way it flows between bodies and souls. You can’t stop the flow of it because one pathway is closed off. It just finds another exit.
That I’m not schizophrenic; I’ve never been. I kept quiet to protect Rosemary. Words wouldn’t form after I was released from the ward because I never wanted him to hate himself for not believing me sooner, for taking me to that doctor.
It’s always been better to remain quiet than risk speaking words no one believes.
It helps my cause because they won’t push me too much with this many eyes on them. I am, after all, the child who survived. Their own personal Harry fucking Potter. It’d be bad press if they showed how little they actually care.
The fact I teach art classes to Halo survivors is something that makes me look kind, but the thing is, I can’t actually give a shit about these things.
It doesn’t matter to them or anyone else that the piece that won that stupid fucking award was one I created in the days following my failed suicide attempt. That a voice and the will to create something bigger than me was all that kept me from dying.
I see her nearly every day for twenty minutes across my screen, and every time, I ask myself the same two questions. What version of her did I see the night she called me? And what makes Coraline Whittaker cursed?
“This is the last time, Silas,” Alistair says, conviction in his voice. “This is the last time I come back to that fucking place. Even if it kills me.”
“Welcome to the fucking club, chick. But Lyra here is good at picking up strays.” Sage places her hands on Lyra’s shoulders,
“One shot?” I arch an eyebrow. “Is it ever just one?” Sage smirks. “What do you drink?” I brush my flat-ironed hair behind my back, taking my time to feel the strands beneath my fingers. “Something other than tequila exists?” Briar, for the first time since she came up, cracks a smile. “Thank God,” she breathes, waving softly at Tinx. “I’m tired of getting vodka drunk with these bitches.”
It’s his voice. The same one that mumbled in my ear through a phone speaker and kept me from jumping to my death. It’s a blend of darkness and warmth, a low rumble that emerges from the depths of his chest. A single candle flickering in an abyss of nothingness.
I’m the spindle lover boys prick their fingers on. I leave them comatose with only the memory of my touch. I’m not the princess. I’m the rotten apple. The poison made to demolish happily ever afters. I’m no good for him, for anyone. “Let go of me.”
“Someone told me I survived for a reason. It was this, teaching you. Give yourself grace to find what yours is. Heal on your terms, not mine.”
For the first time, someone was desperate for me to talk. Needed it. I’d never known what that felt like, someone needing my voice. But with every word I’d muttered, she’d melted. Lost that wild look in her eyes and started breathing. “I need to get married.”
“We started it together. We end it together,” Rook adds. “We’ll finish this and leave this fucking hellhole behind. All of us.” “That means we have to follow the only trail we have right now,” Thatcher mutters. “And Rook isn’t going to like it.”
The very last words he ever spoke to me. “You’re mine, and I will come back for you, Circe. I will always come back to you. You belong to me only.”
Coraline Whittaker is a mystery to this town. To me.
That’s what makes this…odd for me. Having this connection with a person I hardly know. I do not know her the way most do, but I know her in a way no one else ever would.
“They say you don’t talk much. Yet, that doesn’t seem to be the case.” “With you.”
It is true that I don’t talk a lot, not to strangers or just for fun, but I like talking to her.
“Coraline Whittaker.” My head snaps to my right, just as her smooth hand loops through my arm, holding my forearm, and she leans into my body. The smell of lavender wafts beneath my nose.
There is this need in me to tell her that she’s safe with me. That for some reason, I know I’ll let nothing bad touch her. Not when I’m around. It’s probably because of her trauma, that connection between us.
“If my soon-to-be husband held me the way you did at Vervain, I’d kill him. This place tells stories. Stories of the evil you’ve done and the wicked traits you carry, Silas Hawthorne.” Her words catch the night wind, drifting like the tendrils of smoke. “Disloyal isn’t one of them.”
Ponderosa Springs loves a story. The scarier, the better. They told her she was a victim, that she would always be a victim. A cursed woman who had a habit of finding herself in toxic relationships, as if she consented to being kidnapped. They told me I had schizophrenia, that I had to be in order to cover up a crime
I’d once seen as a child. A man whose silence spoke to his mental illness and not his fear of never being believed.
Non timebo mala on the left. Vallis tua umbra on the right. The same words are tattooed along the outside of my left and right hand from wrist to knuckle. Rosie had started the tradition by engraving it on the present, knowing how much the words meant, and I’d continued it.
“No deal,” he grunts, the sound sending a tingle down my spine. “No one will believe that I’m unfaithful to my wife. They all know what happens when someone touches what belongs to me.” “I am not yours to own.” I seethe, my jaw tightening in anger.
“In private, you can call all the shots. But to the rest of the world? You’re fucking mine, and I don’t share.”
I’m far too wicked to deserve that sort of devotion. “No, Silas. I’m not afraid of love,” I say firmly. “But you should be afraid of me. I hurt people who try to care about me, Hawthorne. Don’t let yourself becomes one more victim of my wretched heart.”
She’s going to break for me. I’m not afraid of a curse, especially when they look like Coraline Whittaker.
“Your tattoo,” he says softly. “Why Medusa?”
Coraline Whittaker has awoken something in me. Desire, longing, need. An ache I’ve never felt for anyone before. I don’t need her to love me. It isn’t about love. I need her to be mine.
He knows that what we just did broke a wall I’ll never be able to rebuild. “It means you’re mine now, Hex.”
He makes me feel vulnerable. Makes me feel safe, like I can open myself up and know he wouldn’t run away scared by what’s inside.
“Silas, I promise to be your peace when the world provides only war. To be your secret keeper and safe haven. Today, I vow to be the one person who accepts you for who you are and who you will become.” She glances up at me, holding my gaze as she speaks the last line. “Till death do us part.”
