Chapter 129: Can two keep a secret?

BONNIE

"But it does not matter." Fia’s grip on my shoulders didn’t loosen. If anything, it tightened, her nails pressing crescents into my skin through the thin fabric of the infirmary gown. "It is not where my story ends. I know that. It cannot be where yours ends either."

"You don’t understand—"

"I do. I do. More than anyone in the world, I probably do. So I have to disagree there. I understand more than you think." Her voice cracked on the word think, and something in her face shifted, the anger folding into something rawer, more exposed. "You have to go past it, Bonnie. You have to allow yourself to live. Not just survive. Live. There’s a difference, and you’ve been so busy just breathing through each disaster that you’ve forgotten there’s supposed to be more on the other side of it."

I shook my head, my throat too tight to argue properly.

"You have to let go of your anger," she continued, softer now, though no less insistent. "Even the righteous parts of it. Especially those, because righteous anger is the kind that convinces you it’s justified in burning down everything around you." She released one of my shoulders, reaching up to press her palm flat against my sternum, right over the place where the hollow feeling still sat like a stone. "The world will move regardless of what you do with your grief. It doesn’t wait for anyone to heal properly first. You either move with it, or you die in the past, replaying the worst moment of your life on a loop until it’s the only thing left of you."

"So... which is it, Bonnie?"

I stared at her, at the bruise blooming darker across her cheek with every passing minute, at the split lip she’d earned defending herself against a version of me I couldn’t remember and didn’t recognize.

"I don’t know how," I whispered. "I don’t know how to just let it go. Every time I think I’ve found solid ground, something else collapses under me. My mother. The retainers. Now this. Now you. How am I supposed to move forward when I can’t even trust my own hands not to hurt someone?"

"You learn," Fia said. "The same way I did. The same way anyone does. Slowly. Imperfectly. With people around you who catch you when you fall, instead of pretending you’re strong enough to never fall at all."

"I could have killed you."

"I doubt it, but the big picture remains that you didn’t."

"You implied that I wanted to. That whatever took over me in that moment wanted to."

Fia’s jaw tightened, but she didn’t step back. "Then that’s the part you have to face. Not pretend it wasn’t there. Not bury it so deep you forget it exists until it claws its way back out and does more damage than before. If I had to guess, you had that breakdown because you have buried pain and misgivings for so long. You have to look at it directly, Bonnie. Whatever that thing is, wherever it came from, it lives inside you. It was you. Forgetting it is not enough. Running from it only feeds it."

I thought of what I had discovered in the dreamscape. The idea that my father could have been that man.

It had been another thing I had bottled up and thrown into the abyss of my mind, and even now, as she was talking me through it, I still did not want to talk about it.

I didn’t tell Fia about it. I couldn’t, not yet, not when I barely understood it myself, not when saying it out loud might make it more real than it already felt.

"What if facing it makes it stronger," I said instead. "What if acknowledging it just gives it more room to grow?"

"And what if ignoring it is exactly what already made it this strong?" Fia countered. "You’ve been swallowing pieces of yourself for years, Bonnie. It is clear to me now. Every time something hurt too much to process, you buried it. Every time you did something you couldn’t live with, you found a way to forget it happened. That isn’t healing. Or does that sound like a healthy coping mechanism to you?"

The words landed harder than I wanted them to, because some part of me already knew she was right. "I hate to admit it. But nothing scares me more than change I did not anticipate. I hate a life of surprises, and it is like there is just one thing after another with me."

She sighed. "This is about the goddess situation, isn’t it? About what she said to you. It must be scary, I am sure. You must have been mad about it too. Having all that thrust on you after you said yourself that you felt abandoned by her."

"It is not just that, Fia. The thing is, I don’t even know what I am anymore," I said, my voice barely holding together. "A werewolf who might not fully be a werewolf. A healer who almost harmed the one person that is like her in this world and... I cannot even remember how it happened." I paused there as the words that were to follow scared me to death. "I found out something else about myself, and it scares me... It terrifies me to say it out loud."

"Do you want to share? No pressure, of course."

I shook my head. "No."

Fia nodded immediately. She didn’t push. "Okay."

The simplicity of it almost made it worse.

She didn’t ask why. She didn’t tell me I needed to talk about it. She simply accepted the answer, her hand falling from my chest as she gave me the space I had asked for.

I swallowed.

"But..."

Her eyes returned to mine.

"If telling you means this doesn’t happen again..." My voice faltered. I looked down at my hands, at the fingers that had become something I no longer trusted. "If it means I don’t just blank out and hurt people I care about, then maybe I should."

Fia remained silent.

I rubbed my palms together, trying to rid myself of the sensation that they still carried.

"Because I keep imagining... What state would Lysander be in if you were like this?" I asked.

Her expression changed.

I shook my head quickly before she could answer. "I know... I know you told me that I didn’t touch him. I know that. But I did." My throat tightened. "His psyche exists, Fia. And he has seen me in a different light. He is literally fighting for me right now."

"It has to be your choice," she said. "Do not force anything out."

"It is mine." I swallowed. "I... I want to say it. I bottle everything up. You are right."

I looked away, gathering the courage to finally say the thing I had been refusing to acknowledge.

"When you asked about the identity of the man in my dreams, I lied."

Fia’s eyes fixed on me. "Huh?"

"I know who he is," I continued even as my throat tightened. "He told me himself."