Page 96 of Innocent Until Proven Witch

Witch. Curse. Monster. Murderer.

The chamber seems to echo with all of them at once, my vision blurring at the edges as the relic feeds on every wound I spent years convincing myself had healed.

“They never wanted you,” something whispers through the pressure. “You were always alone and always will be,”

The pain twists through my chest with the particular cruelty of a truth I never fully managed to disbelieve. The festivals I watched from the lighthouse. The celebrations I was never invited to. The friendships that dissolved quietly beneath gossip until I stopped expecting them to last. The loneliness that became so familiar I stopped recognizing it as loneliness and started calling it normal. I take another step toward the relic and then another, and the effort feels impossible, the voices multiplying with every inch of ground I gain.

“They hate you,” the pressure insists, and the worst of it is that part of me still believes it — after everything, after all these months and all the ground I thought I had recovered, some part of me still believes it. The realization nearly breaks me. My legs shake. The relic senses the weakness and the pressure doubles, my breathing going ragged in a way I cannot regulate, and the darkness reaches deeper into the spaces I thought I had fortified and finds them wanting.

A hand catches mine.

Warm. Steady. Real in the way that cuts through everything else. The chamber and the voices and the relic's pressure all recede by several degrees at once, and I open my eyes to find Finn standing beside me, rainwater dripping from his hair and blood staining one sleeve, his breathing heavy from the climb and the storm and whatever he fought through to reach me. His grip does not waver.

"I'm here," he says, and three words carry the weight of a much longer sentence.

The relic pulses. The darkness pushes harder. He does not let go. "You weren't supposed to follow me," I say, and even as the words leave my mouth I am aware of how unconvincing they sound.

Finn almost smiles. "You know me better than that." Despite everything, a laugh escapes me — small and broken and entirely real — and it fades quickly because the relic is still surging and the pressure is still there and the memories have not gone anywhere, only quieted slightly in the presence of his hand around mine.

"It won't stop," I admit, the confession costing something I cannot quite name.

"What won't?" he asks, his voice dropping to match the intimacy of what I am about to say.

I look toward the relic and then away again, because the shame is still there regardless of everything I know about it. "The voices," I say, and the words barely reach the air. His grip tightens immediately, and I know the bond has given him enough of it to understand without requiring me to elaborate, which is both a relief and its own particular vulnerability.

"Look at me," Finn says. I do — not because I want to but because I need to, because the relic is using my isolation as a weapon and I need something that contradicts it. The certainty in his eyes catches me off guard, the absolute and uncomplicated confidence that has no trace of performance in it. "None of that was ever true," he says, and the words go directly into the old wounds that the relic has been pressing on, and I feel them land there.

He steps closer, his voice remaining steady and unhurried in the way it always is when he is most certain of something. "The town was wrong. The council was wrong. The people who spent years watching you and choosing the easier story over the true one — they were wrong." Emotion builds inside my chest, dangerously and painfully, and he does not look away from me for a moment of it. "You come from a legacy of greatness. Your grandmother protected this coastline, and you have protected it, and every person alive outside these cliffs owes something to your family whether they understand that yet or not."

The chamber shakes around a violent pulse of energy. The storm howls overhead. Finn ignores both. "I am honored to stand beside you," he says, and the simplicity of it — the complete absence of qualification or condition — hits harder than anything else has in a very long time, because he means it without reservation and I can feel the truth of it through the bond, unambiguous and unadorned.

The years of rejection still hurt. The scars remain exactly where they have always been. But they do not feel quite as definitive as they did a moment ago, and the difference between carrying something and being crushed by it is sometimes nothing more than someone standing close enough to share the weight. Finn squeezes my hand. "They don't get to define you," he says quietly. "They never did."

The statement settles past the fear and past the shame and past the loneliness, reaching something deeper that the relic has not managed to touch, and I straighten with the deliberate intention of someone choosing a direction. The relic reacts instantly, energy surging through the chamber as the storm screams above us, the artifact recognizing resistance the way a living thing recognizes a threat. Good, I think. Let it.

Finn grins beside me, and the expression is so familiar and so entirely out of place in a trembling underground chamber facing an ancient artifact in the middle of a catastrophic storm that I roll my eyes . The reaction surprises both of us. The grin widens into something that has no business being as comforting as it is under these circumstances.

I squeeze his hand once and turn toward the relic. Power gathers beneath my skin in response to the intention behind it, and the relic pulses back with the force of something that has been waiting for this confrontation and believes itself ready for it. The chamber trembles violently. Finn steps with me, shoulder brushing mine, hand still holding my own with the steadiness of a promise already kept. I meet his gaze one last time — ready, determined, and carrying something that feels, longer than I can measure, like certainty rather than endurance. Then we turn together toward the heart of the tempest, and force all the energy towards it one blaze.

38

FINN

The first push goes wrong.

The recoil nearly shattered my ribs. The moment our combined power hit the crystal, the relic didn't just resist—it screamed back with a pressure that turned the air into a physical weight. The white light of our blaze vanished, replaced by a violent shockwave that detonated outward, sending the floor beneath our feet splitting into a jagged maw.

"Move!" I didn't think, only reacted, hauling Reina sideways as a chunk of the ceiling the size of a truck tire pulverized the stone where she’d been standing a second before

The smaller chamber beyond is quiet by comparison — old, dry, untouched by the storm raging through the tunnels outside. Dust drifts down from the ceiling in the sudden stillness. I get my back against the stone and pull Reina in against my chest, both of us breathing hard, her whole body trembling under my hands.

"Reina." Her name comes out rough. "Talk to me."

She doesn't answer. Her eyes are open but unfocused, fixed on nothing, her breath coming in short, broken pulls that have nothing to do with the climb or the blast. I feel it through the bond before she manages to say it — that same crushing weight from the cliff path, except worse now, the voices the relic dredged up earlier still clawing through her even with the artifact two rooms away.

"They're still there," she whispers. "Finn, I can hear them. I can't — I can't push past it. We need both of us to force that thing back and I can't even stand straight⁠—"

"Hey." I catch her face in both hands, forcing her eyes to mine. "Look at me. Not the voices. Me."