Wisteria Von Vexx's Arc

Chapter 6 of 13

She woke to footsteps in the hall outside her door. Heavy boots, deliberate. Alastair never knocked—he didn't need to. She sat up as the door opened, already bracing for whatever conversation was coming. But he didn't speak. He crossed to her desk and stopped in front of it, staring down at the burned music box. She wanted to explain, to frame it somehow, but the words stuck in her throat. He picked up the box carefully, turning it over in his hands. The tarnished key caught the morning light. He didn't ask what it was or why she'd kept it. He just looked at her, and she saw the exact moment he understood. Not just the box itself, but what it meant that she'd finally stopped hiding it. The silence stretched between them, and for once she didn't try to fill it with justification or strategy. She just let him see. Alastair set the box back on the desk and moved to the black coffin that had been hers since she'd first arrived at Nightshade Grove seventeen years ago. He ran one hand along its edge, counting the seventeen scratch marks carved into the velvet lining—one for each year she'd spent making herself indispensable. She'd never told him about those marks. Never explained how she'd carved them in the dark on nights when the fragility felt too close. He traced the deepest one with his thumb and said, "You don't have to keep counting anymore." It wasn't a promise or a reassurance. It was an acknowledgment that he finally saw what she'd been fighting against all this time. She nodded once, and something in her chest that had been clenched tight for seventeen years finally loosened. The ritual was still unmastered, her position still uncertain, but she was done carrying the weight alone.