✓ | Hushed Whispers ⋆ Will Herondale [2]

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE: CONFESSING

◤I don't have a choice. I either make someone loathe me or I watch them die of my hand. That hurts. I am brutal and I am cold and I crush everyone I love before someone else gets a chance to do so. Either I do that or I lose them forever. And I cannot live without them, without her.◢

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CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE: CONFESSING

CHARLOTTE Branwell seemed to have been making a habit of constantly functioning under pressure. Stress and troublesome thoughts became her loyal companions, gracing her face with signs of fear and worry.

"And you've absolutely no idea where he is?" The woman asked for the third time, lifting her face up from the hands it had been buried in. She spared a glance at Marie, Tessa and Jem who had arrived at the Institute only hours before. "Will is simply - gone?"

"Charlotte," Jem's voice was cautious as he began comforting the woman.

All the residents of London Institute were gathered in the drawing room. While Jem stood, Marie and Tessa were sitting on the sofa. Sophie was by the fire, effortlessly awaking the red flames with lumps of black coal. Henry was positioned behind the wooden desk, a copper instrument occupying his attention. Jessamine was on the chaise and Charlotte in the armchair nested next to the fireplace.

"It isn't as if this is unusual. When do we ever know where Will is at nighttime?"

"But this is different. He saw his family, or his sister at least." Charlotte sounded disturbed, deeply shaken with the boy's disappearance. "Oh, poor Will. I had thought perhaps he was finally beginning to forget about them..."

"No one forgets about their family," Jessamine voice cut like a sharp edge of a blade. Her hands were tightly grasping a paintbrush, watercolors spilling against a white sheet of papers which was neatly unfolded on a table beside her. It was only recently that the Lovelace girl fell in love with arts, her mind pursuing in convincing her that Shadowhunter life wasn't the life meant for a lady like her.

"Well, no, of course not," Charlotte responded, "but perhaps not to live with the memory constantly, as a sort of dreadful weight on you."

Talking about family made Marie's insides shut. The recent discovery of her family's infamous history opened wounds she knew were never going to fully heal.

"As if we'd know what to do with Will if he didn't have the morbs every day," Jessamine commented. "Anyway, he can't have cared about his family that much in the first place or he wouldn't have left them."

Tessa couldn't suppress a gasp. "How can you say that? You don't know why he left. You didn't see his face at Ravenscar Manor-"

"Tessa is right, Jessie," Marie glanced in Jessamine's way. "You can be quite cruel sometimes. You should try putting yourself in someone's shoes and imagining how it would feel."

"As if! God, Marie, Are you blind?" Jessamine lifted her gaze from the flowers she was painting. "You are always so eager in your wish to defend William, as if he had never done a single thing wrong in his life. Why don't you stop for a minute and think about the possibility that perhaps he just hates all of us? His family? Maybe they hate him too." She paused for a second. "Maybe he doesn't want us trying to follow him. He is Will Herondale, after all. Heartless and incapable of caring."