Chapter 149: Tick tock 1

BONNIE

The pop came a half second before the blood did.

Willow’s head, still suspended in my ’alleged’ grip, simply gave way. It happened too fast to properly see, only to feel, a hot spray hitting my face and arms and chest, thick and warm and immediately wrong, the smell of it flooding my mouth before I even thought to close it. My hand fell open on instinct, and the same sick feeling snapped back into me so hard it felt like something tearing loose from my own ribs.

I staggered back.

The room tilted, floor and ceiling trading places for one nauseating second. Faces swam in front of me, Bradley’s, Fia’s, the woman I didn’t know, all of them turning slowly, impossibly, into something wrong. Their mouths stretched too wide, hinges I’d never noticed splitting open at the corners. Their eyes sank backward into their skulls, hollowing into dark pits, and every one of them started speaking at once, the words overlapping into a single, screeching chorus that seemed to come from inside my own skull rather than the room.

You monster. You did it. You put us at a disadvantage. You lack control. You lack control. You... lack control.

I pressed both hands over my ears, but the sound didn’t come from outside me. It crawled up from somewhere behind my sternum, and the walls kept bending inward, breathing, closing. I took a step back. Then another. My heel caught on something wet and slick and I nearly went down entirely.

Then hands found my shoulders.

Lysander.

He looked wrong too for one horrible second, his edges blurred and smeared with light, too bright to look at directly, like staring into an open lamp. But his voice cut through the noise clean and steady, an anchor thrown into water that had no bottom.

"Bonnie. Look at me. Calm down."

He took my hand and pressed it flat against his chest, holding it there with both of his own.

"Follow my breathing."

I felt it beneath my palm, the slow, deliberate rise and fall of his ribs, exaggerated and patient, and I latched onto it the way you latch onto a rope thrown at the exact moment you stop believing you’ll be caught. In. Out. In. Out. The demonic faces receded first, melting back into ordinary, horrified expressions, the hinges of their jaws closing back to where jaws belonged. Then the screeching quieted. Then it stopped entirely, leaving only the ringing in my own ears and the frantic hammer of my own heart still trying to escape my chest.

I realized, distantly, that I’d been having a panic attack. A full one, the kind that used to send me curling into corners as a child, except this time someone had actually noticed and actually stayed.

"I didn’t do it," I said, my voice cracking apart on every word. "I swear I didn’t do it. I felt my grip loosen. I felt myself letting her down. And then it just, it wasn’t me anymore. Something took it from me."

"I believe you," he said, immediate, no hesitation in it at all, no careful pause where doubt might have lived if he were being honest instead of kind.

Bradley crossed the room toward us, his boots leaving wet prints in the blood still spreading across the tile, his face grim in a way that made my stomach drop lower.

"This is not good," he said, low, urgent, glancing once toward the doorway like he expected someone important to be standing there already. "If Queen Edelina discovers this happened, your abdica—"

"So handle it," Lysander said, cutting him off before the word could finish forming in the air between them.

Bradley’s jaw tightened, a muscle flexing hard beneath his skin, but he nodded and turned toward the sentinels still gathered near the walls, weapons lowered now but not yet holstered. "Scout the estate," he ordered. "Confirm the grounds are secure. Find whatever sentinel Willow was impersonating before all this started. Bring the healers and Omegas back in once it’s clear." His eyes swept the wreckage around us. "And get this place cleaned up. All of it."

He strode off with two of them trailing behind, already barking further instructions I couldn’t fully catch.

"What was he talking about?" I asked, my voice still unsteady. "The abdication thing."

"It’s nothing," Lysander said.

"That didn’t sound like nothing. Tell me."

"I’ll handle it," he said, meeting my eyes fully. "Because I know you didn’t do this."

But the doubt had already settled in, cold and horribly familiar, an old coat I’d never quite managed to take off. "I actually don’t know that," I said. "Maybe it was like the time with Fia and Johann. Maybe I just don’t remember doing it because some part of me did do it and buried the memory the way I’ve buried it before."

"No." His hand tightened around mine, firm enough that I felt the pressure travel all the way up my arm. "I was there. I was watching you the entire time. If that were true, trust me, we would know. I... would know."

Fia approached before I could argue further, her arms wrapped tight around herself, something shaken in her posture that hadn’t been there a few minutes earlier, before all of this. "That witch used the red," she said, her voice thin. "That’s supposed to be ours. Healer blessing, passed down through werewolf bloodlines that barely exist anymore. How does something like that happen at all?"

"I wish I knew," I said, and meant it more than she probably realized.

The blonde woman, Madeline, walked over then and offered a small, formal bow before turning her attention fully to Fia. "It’s nice to see you again," she said, something careful in the courtesy, like two people testing whether old ice would hold their weight.

Fia swallowed visibly. "How have you been, Madeline?"

"Good, actually. How is Cian? And your children?"

"They’re fine," Fia said, clearing her throat.