Bram isn’t Declan. Latham used him, but he never meant to hurt me. I stand and press my hand against his cheek.

“What are you doing?” Talon’s voice echoes off the walls like a blast. My gaze snaps to Latham, and my stomach plummets. His restraints are gone. They must have broken in one of the spells Lars and Bram were exchanging. And now Latham has crawled to the center of the room and gathered Gran’s bones in front of him. The bones from the jar—from my hand—are clutched in fingers, still wet. Skin still clinging to them.

He’s trying to heal Gran’s bones to change the past. And my bones will give him the power to do it.

I throw myself toward him, and try to wrestle the bones from his grip, but the spell has already started. The moment I make contact, a tug low in my belly yanks me into a vision with him. The paths feel like his paths always do. His familiar yearning for vengeance flares inside me—white-hot, insistent, all-consuming.

But with a start I realize it’s not Latham’s path I’m seeing. It’s my own.

I watch myself convincing Niklas to steal climbing equipment from the Mason training room, pressuring Jacey to use unbound magic to make a potion to drug Rasmus, and then doing nothing when his reputation is destroyed. All because making Latham suffer was more important than anything else.

A sharp moment of clarity steals the breath from my lungs.

I’ve been making the same mistakes as Latham. His whole life was consumed by a burning desire for revenge. He had something lovely with Avalina, but he let his bitterness become more important than anything else. He was willing to let happiness slip through his fingers in pursuit of making those who had wronged him suffer.

And I just sacrificed Tessa chasing my own retribution.

I struggle to break free from the bones and push Latham out of the way, but his magic is too strong. He’s going to win. He’s going to change the past into something horrific.

Unless … an idea circles at the edges of my mind. It could work, but it means giving up the only thing I’ve wanted since the moment my mother died.

Once, when I was a little girl, I told my parents a rumor I’d heard about a boy who had bitten another child, and then when his tutor reprimanded him, he bit her too. My father asked the boy’s name, and when I told him, his eyes went soft with sympathy.

“No one gives grief like the grieving,” he said. Later I asked my mother what it meant.

“It means sometimes when people are sad, they do things that make other people sad too.”