The Fake Dating Spell novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Ring

Pippa locked the shop door and turned the sign.

Wynne sat down on the flour barrel because her knees had stopped working.

Tavish crouched in front of her with the lens in his hand, and the thread lay across her lap between them.

"Say it all," she said. "Don't be gentle."

"It is a love ward," he said. "A binding that fixes one person's love on another. Yours is fixed on him."

"Lorcan."

"The ring is the anchor. The resin Pippa sold him melted into your skin the day he put it on."

"I loved him."

"You did," Tavish said. "The ward didn't make you. It keeps what you felt, and it will not let it go."

Wynne stared at her hand.

"So I couldn't leave him."

"Every time you tried to be angry, the ward pulled you back. Every time he said your name, it pulled harder."

"The ink," she whispered. "Writing his name."

"It fights when it's being pulled apart. It's pulling now, and it's losing."

"Why is it losing?"

He hesitated.

"The Show-Love," he said.

"Your thread has no room for a lie in it. Every hour you stay in it, the knot gets smaller."

Pippa made a small, shocked sound.

"The grey thing," Wynne said. "In the mirror. It's smaller than it was."

"Half what it was on the night of the ball."

She laughed, a cracked, awful sound.

"He did this to me and I wrote his spells for two years."

Tavish did not answer.

She saw something terrible in his face, a kind of shame, and she knew what it was before he said it.

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