Chapter 125: Other-You

LYSANDER

She flicked her wrist.

Fia flew backward, her body lifting off the ground and hurtling toward the stone wall. She twisted in midair, her own power flaring, and she managed to redirect the momentum, landing hard on her feet but stumbling, her boots scraping against the courtyard.

Bonnie didn’t hesitate. She charged.

Not on foot. She launched herself through the air, her body surrounded by that same bubble-like force, and she hit Fia like a cannonball. They collided with a sound like thunder, rolling across the stones, and I ran toward them, shouting something, anything, but my voice was lost in the roar of displaced air.

They separated, both rising to their feet in the same fluid motion. Fia raised a hand, and a pulse of force rippled outward, but Bonnie deflected it with a sweep of her arm, the energy dissipating against her palm like water breaking against a rock.

"Don’t make me hurt you," Fia warned, her breathing heavy. "Please."

"You can’t," Bonnie replied, and she smiled.

It was the worst smile I’d ever seen because there was something empty yet certain about it. The smile of someone who had crossed a threshold and found the other side peaceful.

She thrust both hands forward, and Fia raised a shield, a visible dome of compressed air that shimmered in the morning light. Bonnie’s attack struck it, and the dome cracked, spiderwebbing from the impact point, and Fia’s eyes widened.

"How are you..." Fia muttered, reinforcing the barrier.

"Powerful?" Bonnie finished for her. "Angry? Broken?" She struck again and again, each blow landing with the force of a sledgehammer, and the cracks spread. "I’ve been holding back my entire life, Fia. I’ve been small. I’ve been quiet. I’ve been good." She punctuated each word with another strike. "And where did it get me? You were right about what you said. Where did being good ever get anyone? To defeat your enemies properly, you have to be willing to be worse than they are. Bonnie might not have taken that as she should. But I did."

Bonnie might not have taken that as she should. But I did.

The words hit me harder than any of the blows she’d landed. Bonnie might not have. As if Bonnie were someone else. As if the woman standing in that courtyard, her hands trembling with restrained power, her voice flat and certain, had already filed away the person I loved as a separate entity — someone gentler, someone smaller, someone she’d decided to leave behind like a coat too thin for winter.

"Bonnie," I said her name like it could anchor her, like sound alone might drag her back into her own body. She didn’t turn. I don’t think she heard me at all, or if she did, I don’t think the name meant what it used to.

I’d seen her break before. I’d seen her grieve and rage and go quiet in ways that frightened me more than the rage did. But I had never heard her talk about herself like she was reporting on a stranger. That was the moment I understood — This was not Bonnie.

So who was this?

Fia seemed to clock the same thing I did, and it broke her concentration.

Bonnie, however, did not. The shield shattered.

Fia stumbled backward, her hands coming up in a defensive posture, but Bonnie was already inside her guard. She moved differently now, her body loose and lethal, and she struck Fia in the chest with an open palm that sent her sliding backward five feet, her shoes carving grooves in the dirt.

Fia coughed, clutching her ribs. "Bonnie, please."

"Please what?" Bonnie advanced, step by step, her feet never quite touching the ground, drifting just above the stone like a specter. "What would you demand of her? That she go back to being invisible? Accept that her old friends are dead because some prince decided his grief mattered more than their lives? Please believe that the law will protect her when it has never protected anyone like us?"

She struck again, a backhanded blow that Fia barely managed to block, the impact sending shockwaves through the courtyard. The sentinels were running now, scattering for cover, and the smaller nobles that were around had fled entirely, leaving only me, my bastard of a cousin, and these two women tearing the world apart between them.

Fia fought back. She landed a solid hit, her fist connecting with Bonnie’s shoulder, but Bonnie didn’t flinch. She absorbed the blow and returned it with interest, her knee coming up into Fia’s stomach, doubling her over. When Fia tried to retreat, to create distance, Bonnie followed, relentless, her telekinesis, if that was what I could even call it, pulling at Fia’s limbs, disrupting her balance, and most especially keeping her close.

"You’re better than this," Fia gasped, blocking another strike.

"No," Bonnie corrected, her voice flat. "We are not. No one should ever be better than this. Why should the victims be the bigger people? Why can’t the beasts be the ones to do it!? Time and time again."

She caught Fia’s wrist, twisted it, and drove her elbow into Fia’s spine. Fia went down, her knees hitting the stone, and Bonnie stood over her, one hand raised, the bubbles forming again, swirling around her fingers like a weapon waiting to be unleashed.

"Stay down," Bonnie commanded.

Fia tried to rise, only for Bonnie to strike her with the invisible force, a hammer blow that flattened her against the courtyard. Fia’s cheek hit the stone, blood welling from a split lip, and she groaned, her body going limp.

Bonnie stood over her for a long moment, her chest heaving, her hand still raised. She could end it. One more blow. One concentrated burst of force. Fia wouldn’t survive it, not at this range, not with her defenses shattered.

I needed to reach her.

"Bonnie," I called out, my voice hoarse.

She turned her head. Her eyes found mine, and for a second, I saw her again. The girl who had knelt beside a dead man and begged the goddess for mercy. The woman who had trusted me and whom I had failed.

"Don’t," I whispered. "Please. She’s a friend. She was only trying to help you. We are only trying to help you."

Bonnie looked down at Fia, who was breathing shallowly, consciousness flickering. Then she looked back at Johann, still suspended in the air, his body gone limp, his chest barely moving.

The bubbles around her hand thickened, condensing into something denser, something final, and I understood with a lurch of horror that whatever was wearing Bonnie’s face had decided he was next.

"No." 𝘧𝓇ℯℴ𝓂

The word tore out of her, but it didn’t sound like the voice that had been speaking a moment ago — flat, certain, and amused by its own cruelty. This was smaller. Cracked down the middle. This was Bonnie’s voice, the real one, clawing its way up from somewhere she’d been buried.

Her raised hand trembled.

"No," she said again, louder, and this time her whole body shook with it, the bubble of force around her fingers flickering, guttering like a candle in the wind. "No, no, no — get out, get out —"

She staggered, one hand flying to her own skull as if she could physically dig the thing out of her head. The force around her sputtered and collapsed entirely, and for a moment she was just a woman again, swaying on her feet in the middle of a courtyard she’d nearly turned into a graveyard.

"I won’t," she gasped, to no one, to something only she could hear. "I won’t be that. I won’t—"

Her knees buckled.

I was already moving. She went down hard, and I got my arms under her a half-second before her head would have hit the stone, her whole body gone slack and impossibly light, like whatever had been driving her had taken all its weight with it when it left.

"Bonnie," I said it into her hair, my hands shaking worse than hers had been. "Bonnie, stay with me. Stay with me."

Her eyes were open for one more second, and then they rolled back, and she went still in my arms.