But what she didn’t know was how to cleanse it. How to move forward. How to heal it.
“If I fix my connection with Henrik, do you think everything else will settle as well?” Violet asked, voicing her biggest hope.
“Yes. It is because his earth cannot combine with your fire that he is likely becoming more and more stubborn while you are flaring more to life. Soulmates are not meant to be kept apart. It’s not the way of things. It’s time to become one.”
Ew. Her mother talking to her about sex? Not something she really wanted to go over right then.
“I’m scared,” Violet finally admitted, her voice cracking as she spoke. “Every time he touches me, he burns. It’s getting worse, every single time.”
“Have you tried not being scared?” Mabel suggested, a stupid suggestion.
Violet forced herself to laugh. “Do you think I would still be scared if I could simply stop it?”
Her mother, however, did not return her laughter. “I’m serious. Perhaps the reason it’s so bad is because you fear it. That which we fear most will always harm us the most.”
Her mother had that backwards, but she wasn’t going to correct her. Instead, she tried to redirect. They were, after all, almost out of time. “What are you going to tell the coven?”
“That you’re trying to calm your magic, and that maybe we should stop meddling in wolf affairs.” Her mother let out a long sigh, and she could hear her mother shifting around and cracking her fingers.
“Is that what you think?” Violet asked, not sure if she even believed her mother.
And yet, the conviction her mother spoke with immediately changed her mind. “That’s what I know.”
Chapter 25
HowlonghadVioletbeen laying on the floor of her mother’s office?
A day? Two days? Ten days?
Time no longer had any meaning. Nothing mattered save for fixing whatever was broken inside of her. Nothing mattered beyond connecting herself with her soulmate.
She screamed, for the longest time. She lit up every candle in the house over and over again, sometimes raising the flames so high it scalded the ceiling. The fireplace boomed and flared, pushing out billows of smoke. Fire consumed her, over and over again.
And now, there was no longer a fire. There was no longer anything. She no longer felt rage.
But she also didn’t feel emptiness.
All she felt was quiet... and the urge to go outside.
She had ignored that urge at first, instead spending time in her room, trying to make the best of the old situation. All of the magazines and art on her walls that had no sentimental feelings came down and eventually joined the fire, but everything with meaning, with purpose, with feeling behind it, it was all stacked up and set in an empty box, so that she could paste it into a notebook or something for the future. The old clothing she could never wear again, because it was either too distressed or too small, given how she had grown in her curves, were all bagged up, split between give away and throw away.
And once her room was stripped apart... she realized it wasn’t her room any longer. This was the room of a child, of a girl struggling to find herself.
If she was going to stay in Garoureve, then she needed to take over the master bedroom.
Only, it was still filled with her mother’s things.
Which left her standing awkwardly in the hallway, trying to decide what to do. Her mother hadn’t lived there in fifteen years. Did she even still want the items? Would she want Violet to pack the things up and mail them? Would she want to come and visit herself, to pick and choose?
She could call, of course, but calling somehow felt... wrong. She wanted to separate herself from the outside world while she worked on herself.
So instead, she spent time wandering the entire space, considering what she would change, what she would do.
Most of the furniture needed to go. Everything was older, dated, and her mother’s style. Violet wanted leather and fur and warm tones to fill the space. Her mother’s desk could stay, and the journals themselves were useful, but she needed more shelves so she could add sketchbooks and a place to store all of her art supplies.
And a tattoo studio. If she was going to stay a witch in Garoureve, she would also need to have a place to give tattoos to any shifters who wanted them. With Garoureve opening it’s pack line, other shifters would be venturing through. She wanted to do what she did best.
And then finally, once again, she had ended up on the floor, staring at the ceiling, feeling only peace.