Frigus . Sirius Black (Mortem BOOK 2)

chapter ninety-two

June 23rd, 1981 

Nephera had never felt this before. Betrayal.

She had known pain, raw and unrelenting, the kind that lingered long after the wound had closed. She had endured fear, anxiety that clawed up her throat and gnawed at her bones until she could barely breathe. She had lived through disappointment, through the kind of grief that hollowed a person out until there was nothing left but the echo of what once was. But betrayal was something new. Something different.

It burned red hot beneath her skin, scorching her from the inside out, yet at the same time it froze her veins solid. It was fire and ice colliding, a contradiction of agony that left her breathless. The world around her felt wrong, as though it had shifted slightly out of place, like reality itself no longer trusted her to stand on it.

She wanted to scream. To curse. To break something until the sound of it drowning out her thoughts. But all she could do was stand there, the weight of everything pressing down on her shoulders until she thought she might crack beneath it.

Sirius had betrayed her. The one person she had trusted without hesitation, the man who had seen every piece of her darkness and stayed anyway. He had lied, and Remus, steady and dependable Remus, had helped him do it. The two people she believed would never shut her out had done exactly that.

She had no one to go to.

Peter had been distant for months now, eyes darting away when she spoke, a strange edge to his voice when he did. She could feel the resentment simmering beneath his words. Maybe he was angry with her. Maybe he always had been. Maybe he was just too much of a coward to admit it.

James was gone, hidden away with Lily and the baby, living in a world apart from all this chaos. Untouchable.

And everyone else, Ellie, Tony, Regulus, Ailani, Fabian, Gideon, all dead.

The names played like a requiem in her mind, a roll call of ghosts that would never answer back.

There was no one left. No one who had not lied to her, died for her, or disappeared entirely.

She was alone.

For the first time since the war began, Nephera Winchester, the witch who had frightened even Voldemort himself, felt utterly, devastatingly alone.

Even when she and Sirius had broken up, it had not felt like this. Back then, she had been angry, hurt, yes, but it was a clean sort of pain. Something sharp, contained, something she could channel into her work or drown in firewhisky and fury. She had isolated herself, shut everyone out, but even then there had been a strange kind of control to it.

This was different. This was chaos. This was anger and sadness and grief all mixed together into something that burned and froze her all at once. It was raw, unfiltered, and it terrified her because she did not know what to do with it. For someone who had built her entire life around control, who had always needed to be one step ahead, this was the kind of pain that stripped her of all footing.

And homelessness, she thought bitterly. Because there was no way in hell she was going back to Grimmauld Place after everything that had just gone down. She couldn't even picture walking through that door again, couldn't imagine the sight of him waiting for her there. She didn't want to see Sirius, didn't want to speak to him, didn't even want to think about him.

And yet -

And yet she had just killed her father. They had just killed her father.

The thought made her chest tighten, not out of regret, but out of confusion. She did not know what to feel. Relief, perhaps. Or horror. Maybe both. It all blurred together until she could not tell one from the other.