Isabella sat up slowly.
Her movements were careful, the way someone moved when their body felt unfamiliar, like clothes that had been worn by someone else for a long time and were only now being handed back. She looked down at her own hands. Turned them over. Flexed her fingers, one at a time, watching them with an expression that didn't have anything in it yet.
Not relief.
Not fear.
Just.....nothing. The specific blankness of someone encountering something they didn't have a name for because they'd never experienced it before.
"I'm..." she said. Quietly. To no one in particular. "This is my body."
"It is," Mephistopheles said. Gently, for her.
Isabella looked up.
Her eyes found me first.
And then, a beat later, found Mephistopheles, standing beside me in a form Isabella had never seen, black hair and white streaks and a face that resembled mine, and something in Isabella's expression shifted into open confusion.
"You're....." she started.
"Free," Mephistopheles said simply. "Both of us."
...
Isabella looked back at me.
And then, slowly, color started rising in her face.
Not the blank kind from a moment ago. Something else entirely. Her eyes had gone wide, and she was looking at me with the particular horror of someone whose memory had just caught up to the present, piece by piece, in real time.
"Oh," she said.
"..." I said.
"Oh no."
"Isabella—"
"I remember," she said. Her voice had gone very small. "I remember all of it. While she was.....while I was....." She put both hands over her face. "Oh my god."
Mephistopheles, beside me, looked extremely pleased with herself for approximately one second before catching the look I gave her and adjusting her expression to something marginally more diplomatic.
"That's," I said, carefully, "not the most important thing right now."
"It is a little bit the most important thing right now," Isabella said, from behind her hands.
"It's really not."
She lowered her hands, slowly. Her face was still red, but underneath the embarrassment something else was surfacing. Something heavier.
The blankness from before was gone. What replaced it was worse.
...
"Can I....." she started. Then stopped. Started again. "Can I tell you something. Both of you. I think I need to."
"Of course," I said.
Mephistopheles, quietly, moved to sit on the arm of a nearby chair, giving the room a little more space without leaving it entirely. Present but not crowding. I sat down across from Isabella, close enough that she didn't have to raise her voice.
Isabella looked at her hands again.
"My father," she said, "raised me to be useful."
She said it plainly. Like a fact about the weather.
"Not loved. Useful. There's a difference and I didn't understand there was a difference until very recently, because no one ever showed me what the other one looked like." Her hands twisted slightly in her lap. "Everything I did growing up was evaluated. Grades, magic theory, social standing, who I was seen with, how I presented myself. All of it. Constantly. And when I did well, I wasn't praised. I was simply.....not corrected. That was the closest thing to approval I ever got. The absence of correction."
She glanced up at me, briefly, then back down.
"I used to think that was normal," she said. "That everyone's parents were like that. It took me a really long time to figure out they weren't."
...
"There's a thing you used to say," Isabella continued. Her voice had gone quieter.
She looks at with wet eyes "Before you got entangled into this supernatural mess".
She lowered her head as she continued.
"When I asked you about..... becoming my boyfriend I remember those words…that I still don't have a full understanding of.
Emotions.
Why I didn't seem to feel things the way other people described feeling them."
She paused. "You told me to learn about love first. Before I tried to understand anything else. Like it was a prerequisite. A subject I hadn't passed yet."
She laughed. It wasn't a real laugh. It came out broken in the middle.
"I spent years trying to figure out how to 'learn' it. Like there was a textbook somewhere. Like if I just studied hard enough I'd eventually understand what everyone else seemed to understand without trying." She shook her head slowly. "I never did. I don't think I ever got close."
"Isabella—" I started.
"And then," she said, talking over me, like she'd been holding this and needed to get all of it out before she lost the nerve, "I heard you'd gotten involved in something dangerous. The supernatural politics, the factions, all of it. And I felt something. For the first time in my life I felt something that I couldn't explain and couldn't ignore and didn't have a framework for. And I thought....."
Her voice cracked.
"I thought maybe this was it. Maybe this was what you meant. Learn about love. Maybe this feeling, this fear of something happening to you, was the thing I'd been failing to learn my whole life and I'd finally found it by accident."
She pressed her lips together.
"So I summoned her." A small nod toward Mephistopheles. "I gave up everything. My freedom, my body, all of it, because some part of me thought that if I did something big enough, something that proved I felt this thing.....maybe it would count. Maybe it would be real. Maybe you'd..."
She stopped.
"I don't even know what I wanted from you," she said, very quietly. "I don't think I ever knew. I just knew I felt something and I had no idea what to do with it except throw everything I had at it and hope that counted as proof."
...
The room was quiet for a long moment.
Isabella was looking down at her hands again. Her shoulders had started to shake, very slightly, the kind of shaking someone did when they were trying very hard not to cry and losing.
"I'm sorry," she said.
The words came out small. Worn down. Like she'd been carrying them for a long time and had finally found somewhere to set them.
"For all of it. For the drink Victor was supposed to give you. For everything that came after. For dragging you into all of this in the first place because I didn't know how to..." She pressed a hand against her mouth. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."
And then she broke.
Not loudly. Isabella didn't seem to know how to cry loudly, the same way she didn't seem to know how to do most things that came naturally to other people. It came out in small, choked sounds, her shoulders curling inward, her hands pressed against her face like she was trying to hold something in that had already gotten out.
I moved without thinking about it.
I sat beside her and put my arms around her, and for a moment she went rigid, like she didn't know what this was either, like even this was something she'd never been taught.
Then she leaned into it.
All at once. Like something that had been holding itself upright for twenty years had finally been given permission to stop.
"It's okay," I said quietly. "You don't have to apologize anymore."
"I do," she said, muffled, into my shoulder. "I really do."
"Then you did. Just now. That's enough."
She cried for a while.
I didn't say anything else. There wasn't anything else that needed saying. Mephistopheles stayed where she was, quiet, watching with an expression that had none of the mischief left in it at all.
...
Eventually the shaking slowed.
Isabella pulled back, just slightly, wiping at her face with the back of her hand, looking embarrassed and exhausted and, underneath both of those things, something that looked almost like relief. The real kind this time. Not the blankness from earlier.
"I don't know what happens now," she said. Quietly. "I don't have a father who wants me back. I don't have a contract anymore. I don't really have.....anything."
"You have tonight," I said.
She looked at me.
"And tomorrow, probably," I added. "And the day after that. We can figure out the rest as it comes."
Mephistopheles, from the chair, made a soft sound. Almost a laugh, but warmer.
"That's very you," she said. "Solving an entire life's worth of trauma with 'we'll figure it out.'"
"It's worked so far."
"Has it though."
"...Mostly."
Isabella, between us, let out a small, watery laugh of her own. The first real one I'd heard from her.
It wasn't much.
But it was something.
...
A/N: Hi There Readers,
I have something to say...you Know That This chapter marks Valerian's Seventh and Eighth official love interest...
So I kind of feel isn't The Title of the book pretty much meaningless now...
I mean it's supposed to be Five wives but somehow now it's Eight
Maybe it's time I send a email to Webnovel to change the book's name..
What do you think? Let me know in the comments...
Also join the Discord and patreon..
(づ｡◕‿‿◕｡)づ
