Chapter 64: Shattered Truths
There are few things in this life more stomach-churning than a silence you didn’t ask for.
Not the kind of silence that’s restful, holy, or laced with moonlight and mutual understanding. No—this was the other kind. The silence that follows a scream. The silence after a blade is drawn. The silence that presses its teeth into your collarbone and dares you to keep breathing. It didn’t feel like stillness. It felt like absence. And not just of sound, but of meaning, of safety, of him.
"Aria?" I called out, already knowing I wouldn’t like the answer.
My voice cracked halfway through, broke like a violin string pulled too tight by panic. "Aria!"
But the Tower offered me nothing.
No breath. No rustle of fabric. No trace of his perfume, which always smelled faintly of jasmine and rusted secrets. There was no comforting click of his boots on marble. No sarcastic quip about how dramatic I was being—how he knew I’d come looking for him the second he stepped out of sight. Nothing. Just the cold echo of my own voice bouncing back at me like a ghost in the shape of guilt. The corridor stood still. The air felt too clean, like it had already been swept of witnesses.
He was gone.
And I mean gone. Not just out of sight or off to the side. It was as if the Tower had opened its throat and swallowed him whole—bones, soul, and all—and was now licking its teeth clean, basking in the taste of our confusion.
I stumbled forward, too fast, nearly tripping over my own feet. My boots slapped against the marble with an urgency that made my ears ring. I reached the mirror he’d entered and slammed my palm against the glass. It was solid. No give. No resistance. Just smooth, cold perfection.
The reflection staring back displayed Miko’s delicate features, blinking at me from the other side, warped slightly by the angle and the panic that carved hollows into his usually unreadable expression. I hated the softness of it. Hated how helpless I looked in someone else’s face. I pressed my forehead to the glass, breathing hard.
"Fuck," I muttered. And then again, louder, a desperate rhythm building in the hollowness of my chest. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."
The others stood behind me, all frozen mid-motion, as if any one of them might become the next to vanish. Leo’s borrowed body twitched with restrained movement, Willow’s magic flickering along its fingertips like it didn’t know where to settle. Meanwhile, Leo, still trapped in Willow’s elegant frame, looked like a man who had wandered into a mirror maze mid-identity crisis. Miko—in my body—simply stared, eyebrows raised but unreadable, like he’d just been handed a script he didn’t remember auditioning for.