Hilda looked up from the book she was reading as a knock at the library door disturbed her. She had been curled up in her armchair, trying to distract herself from all she had to think about with words. It had not been working, but sitting in the dim, golden lights, wrapped in the scent of wood and old pages, was enough to make her feel slightly more at ease.

That all went away when Alastair peeped through the door, his blue eyes glinting. She had allowed him to stay, offering him the spare bedroom that was furthest away from the main quarters of the house. He had taken the hint. They had not spoken since the dinner with Remy, and yet now here he was.

Hilda straightened, folding down the page she had been attempting to read and placing the book down on the desk. She was in her pyjamas—a green silk dressing gown covering a golden slip dress—and her hair was still damp from her shower. It made her feel exposed, but she tried not to show it in her expression as she stood up and crossed her arms across her chest.

Alastair was the first to talk. "I thought I would find you in here. May I come in?"

Hilda sighed. "If you must."

He did so timidly, shuffling in and shutting the door behind him as his eyes roamed the walls, which were covered in shelves of books. "This was always my favourite room in the house. I would hide in here for hours."

"You always have loved hiding," Hilda answered coldly. "Is there something I can do for you, Alastair?"

He snapped his gaze away from the books, meeting Hilda's eyes with furrowed eyebrows that said he was worried about something. "It has been three nights since Maksim escorted the mortal girl home. He has not returned yet. Are you not in the slightest bit concerned?"

Hilda felt defensive, the question sounding almost like an accusation. "Are you truly questioning my parenting skills?"

"No. Of course not. I am merely wondering where he is."

"He is in the Mortal World with the girl that he loves. For them, it has only been a day, at most. If you knew him, you would know it was inevitable that he would stay there longer than a few minutes."

Alastair looked down in shame, though it was clear he still did not understand. "I still cannot fathom how you let him fall in love with a mortal."

"The heart is not something that can be controlled. If it was, we would not be standing here." Hilda pursed her lips, remembering how it had felt to feel the way that Maksim felt now. It was strange to look at the warlock in front of her, the warlock whom she had known so well, and try to hate him the way she should have. "Besides, considering our other children are currently preoccupied with the art of dark magic, Remy Morgan is the least of our worries. If one of my children deserves to be happy, it is Maksim. If that means him disappearing every now and again, it is something I can live with."

"And if he has another ... episode?"

She remembered the charred edges of her carpet where Maksim had supposedly burnt it away with his own tainted magic and tried not to flinch. "If anybody can prevent that, it is her."

He looked at her in wonder, taking a step forward. "You have a lot of faith in her."

"If you do not, you are a fool. You would know that if you had been here."

Alastair nodded, inching to the books and tracing his fingers across the spines. For a moment, it felt as though Hilda was with him again—truly with him—watching him fall in love with every book that he read as he mumbled about how much he loved her and his family. They had spent hours, decades, in this library, talking about everything that came to mind until they no longer needed words, but glances, to communicate. She would often come home after work and find him curled up in the very armchair she had just been sat in, a book still open on his lap, his eyelashes casting shadows on his cheeks. She had to remind herself that that life was gone. Her husband had left her. Now she spent her days here alone.

"For what it is worth, I am sorry for leaving. I was selfish. It is only now I realise what I have missed." He turned his gaze to her, his expression softer than it had been a moment ago.

"If you are looking for forgiveness, you will not find it here," she said quietly, leaning against the desk.

"That is fair." He nodded. "Still, it is good to see you again, Hilda. Despite what you might believe, I have missed you."

"Do not," she whispered quietly, feeling as though her breath had been taken from her suddenly. She had wished for this for years. Now it was happening, it only made it hurt more. "You have no right to say such things. I do not want to hear them."

He did not appear to have heard her. "Do you remember what it felt like, to be so in love?"

She didn't—couldn't—respond, so he continued.

"Do you remember how we would laugh? How we would spend days lying in bed together before we became parents, memorising one another's body? I have not forgotten. I could never forget how much I loved you. Even now, standing in this house, walking the corridors and allowing my feet to remember what my heart could not, I remember."

"And yet still you left. Why?"

He swallowed guiltily. "That love lessened as we grew older. Immortality might mean our heart beats forever, but our love does not. You know that."

"No, I do not. I would have loved you for an eternity had you let me."

"And yet you grew colder. You started to work more, care more about everything but us. I did not know why. I stayed awake at night wondering why things had changed, why you did not look at me the way you used to."

Hilda scoffed at this, shaking her head at the absurdity of his words. "I grew up, Alastair. We stopped being children. We had a family, different priorities. Of course things changed. What did you expect, that we would have two children and continue to stay in bed every day, to read to each other in this library and ignore our responsibilities? Just because my way of loving you changed, it does not mean it dimmed. I still needed you, and you left."

"I was afraid." He raised his voice, his arms falling to his side. "I saw things in Ackmard that I had once seen in you and Erika. A darkness. I saw that you did not even notice, and I did not know what to do. I felt as though I had nothing—nobody. I was afraid of it happening again, of being looked at by a child with black eyes and feeling that same hollowness, and then having to give that child away. No matter what we did, or where we went, it always haunted us. I woke up one day and realised I was tired of being trapped by it, and tired of feeling as though I was the only one who was."

"How dare you act as though it was my fault? I paid for my sins. I thought about Erika and all of the evil I had committed every day. I was haunted, too, far more than you could ever be. Do not use my past as an excuse for your own mistakes."

He fell silent, collapsing into an armchair opposite Hilda with his head in his hands.

Hilda worried at her lip, an anxiety gnawing at her stomach as she looked at him. There had been something she had always wondered, and she finally had the chance to ask. "Did you ... Was there someone else? Is there someone else?"

He did not look up as he answered. "I am married."

"And do they know you are here?"

"No. I told her I was working."

Hilda inhaled carefully, imagining Alastair, her Alastair, doing the things that they had once done. She imagined another witch brushing past his arm in the kitchen before he went to work, another hand intertwined with his as they walked through red Refilyn forests. Then, she wondered if they did those things alone. "Children?"

"No. It felt wrong to have more when I have been so useless at taking care of Ackmard and Maksim."

"You are right," she answered tersely. "It would be wrong."

Before he could respond, they were interrupted by the creak of the door opening. Maksim stood under the threshold, his face flushed and his hands in his pockets. His eyes looked bluer than they had in a while, and for that Hilda was relieved.

"Maksim," she greeted. "I am glad to see you are back."

"I am not so glad to see that he is still here," he responded, glancing at Alastair bitterly.

"I wish to stay for a while longer; help to resolve the issue with your brother," Alastair said.

"My brother is murdering people in cold blood with our equally evil sister. I would label that as something slightly bigger than an 'issue.'"

"Maksim, I would like to speak to you alone. Say goodnight to your father," Hilda ordered, straightening up from the desk without daring to look at Alastair.

"Goodnight to your father," he retorted without pulling his gaze from his mother.

"Maksim," she repeated, her voice harsher this time.

Maksim rolled his eyes. "I am not a child. I think we are past goodnight's and lullabies, don't you?"

With that, he left the library, disappearing down the corridor. Hilda was about to follow him before stopping herself, turning to look at Alastair. He met her gaze with a hopeless sigh.

"Your presence here is quite distressing for him. It would do you well to stay in your own quarters from now on, if you insist on staying at all. Is that clear?"

Alastair nodded. Hilda made a silent vow not to get wrapped up in the past again the next time she saw him. It only made her weak.

She left the room without looking at him again and slammed the door shut firmly behind her.

AN: helloooooo sorry for the lack of updates, i finally finished my uni degree! i plan on updating this book once a week purely because i know a lot of people still care about it (or did last time i updated--now i've been gone so long maybe not). I will be focusing on something new in the meantime. i just want to say again i'm sorry for my lack of consistency and thank you if you still read this despite that. also, thank you for 44k reads on spellbound, it's truly crazy that people still read it.