“I should never have pushed it down inside me.” Noa met her sisters’ gazes. “Priscilla warned me not to. She told me not to shun who I was, that it would be as corrosive as acid poured straight onto the flesh of my heart. That it would hurt more than any pain I’d ever felt, to suppress myself. She told me to embrace all parts of me. No matter how fucked up they were. She told me to be completely myself … especially after years of being punished for who we were, how we were raised, our families.” Noa’s voice shook as she said that, but she cleared her throat and finished, “Pris told me to be Noa, and nobody else.”
“And who are you?” Beth asked gently.
“Both good and bad,” Noa said. Just speaking those words aloud freed something caged inside her. “Both darkness and light.” Like Diel. Just like Diel. Diel had worn a physical collar to curb who he truly was. Noa had worn one too—hers had simply been internal and invisible.
Dinah rounded the table and crouched down beside Noa. She searched Noa’s face—for what, Noa didn’t know. Dinah took hold of Noa’s hand. “You think because you have darkness within you, we would love you any less?”
Noa scanned Dinah’s beautiful face, her dark skin and deep brown eyes. “You helped me drown it. Suppress it.”
Dinah shook her head. “No.” Her voice was steel, the grip on Noa’s hand growing tighter. “You were falling apart. You were letting the guilt consume you. You shunned that part of yourself to protect your heart from shattering. We only wanted to support you. Help you in whatever way we could.”
Noa refused to let her mind wander back to that day. To the way she had crumbled, to the self-hatred that had made her break apart. She had sliced herself in two, and the only way to carry on had been to bury the violent side of her deep down. Because that anger, that pure rage that she had channeled into destroying the Brethren, had only helped take an innocent life. A young life she was meant to save. One just like her … like Diel …
“I can’t drown it anymore,” Noa confessed. Her sisters gathered around her.
Dinah lifted her chin. “We love Priscilla. Not despite of her darkness, but because that’s who she is. The darker side to her soul doesn’t make us love her any less than we do each other.” Dinah looked at each member of the Coven. “What we went through, what those men did to us … There’s no judgment for who we are, how we turned out. They condemned us. They punished us for who we are. We, this so-called Coven, will never judge anyone. That’s not who we are as people.”
Noa’s taut body began to relax as she drank in Dinah’s words. She thought of Priscilla and wondered what she was doing right now. How many Brethren had she had taken out on her own? Priscilla had always believed her path was one to be walked alone. Noa had known otherwise. Priscilla had seen herself as too different from the rest of the Coven to stay. But she had been loved by them all, unconditionally. Priscilla thought she could never be among them and truly be herself. But from the second Noa had seen Gabriel with the Fallen, seen the love and understanding that existed among them, she had known it was possible.
Priscilla belonged with them. They all shared the same goal. They had all experienced the same fucked-up childhoods.
She was their sister. It was time she came home.
Noa wanted Priscilla back. Especially now she knew she would never hide the darker side of herself ever again. Especially now that the Coven had found the Fallen—men just as ruthless and fucked up as Noa and Priscilla were.
“We love you,” Dinah said at last, and Noa smirked at her sister, and some of the frayed fibers of her soul seemed to seal themselves.
“And I love you witches too,” Noa said, humor in her voice, and her sisters, one by one, kissed her head. “Okay, that’s enough.” She shooed them away. Her sisters stepped back, laughing.
Candace waggled her eyebrows. “What’s wrong? Now you have Diel, do our kisses no longer measure up?”
Noa got to her feet. “Speaking of …” She headed for the kitchen door, then looked back. “I’m going to find him. Don’t wait up.” Noa had barely made