39. Never Eleven
thirty-nine
Never Eleven
W isps of thin, white cloud drifted across the space between us, mingling with the condensation in every whisper of our breath.
The chilly quiet was forbearing while the gruesome truth settled in, digging claws into our flesh and latching onto the stonework like a weed ready to burrow in between the cracks and make a home somewhere it didn’t belong.
Lucais was a pale statue in the gloom. His hair was nearly white, like the light was draining from his body, and his eyes were hardened. I didn’t blame him. The truth was stuck to me, sticky as blood, and he didn’t deserve to be splattered with it.
His voice entered my mind, cool and even toned.
Tell me everything.
“It happened before Brynn was born,” I said, starting at the beginning because I had no other choice.
“My mother was pregnant with a baby boy, and he died. Ten years ago. Stillborn. It was my fault.” The admission tumbled out of me, despite the fact that tears pricked my eyes with needlelike precision, and each word felt like I was choking rocks down my throat.
My hands shook so hard at my sides that I had to clutch the oversized sleeves of his shirt in my fists to keep some semblance of control.
“They only wanted to have that baby because of me—because I wasn’t his child, so they tried to have one of their own to save their marriage. ”
Lucais arched a brow as if to question my sources.
“She told me so herself without really saying it out loud,” I croaked. “She said my little brother was going to fix our family. I didn’t know that she’d cheated until I’d already met you, and then, all of it made so much sense. He was conceived because of me, and he died because of me.”
I swallowed, hard.
“My father—the man in your dungeon—was blind drunk one night, and I got angry with him. I was sick of the way that he behaved, the way he treated me when he thought she wasn’t looking, and I started to feel so pathetic and weak for taking it all the time.
I decided to stand up to him, even though he was so much bigger than me.
It was stupid, but the voices in my head convinced me that I had no other choice.
They told me that I was going to die if I didn’t do something to prove that I wanted to live, and they said that they would help me, and honestly… I believed them.”
A howling cut into the air as furious wind tore through the obstacle course of palace spires high above us. But Lucais lifted a hand, and the wailing sound was immediately muted.
“I couldn’t control it,” I blurted. His steadfast attention spurred me on.
“I often felt something trailing me, lingering around my hands like some kind of immaterial bracelet, and I heard it speaking to me whenever I needed someone the most. It was always there if I was lonely, but I never really acknowledged it, even when I felt like it was asking me to let it go free, and I shouldn’t have given in to it that night.
“As soon as I unhooked it, the voices took over.
He started verbally, like he always did, and for the first time in my life, I yelled back at him instead of cowering under the blankets or the table.
I screamed at him and told him that he needed to pull himself together.
I asked him what gave him the right to bring another child into a miserable home like ours.
How would a baby sleep soundly when he was always shouting at me?
“He was livid. He roared at me like some kind of monster, saying I had no right to speak to him that way, and that if I pushed him any further he’d send me packing to a boarding school and I’d never be allowed to come home, and that he wouldn’t give a fuck what my mother said about it.
He’d do it when she wasn’t around to stop him.
“It escalated so quickly from that point on that I can’t remember what happened next, but suddenly, he couldn’t breathe.
He was choking. And even though I wasn’t touching him, I knew I was the one doing it.
I was strangling him to death, and there were objects lifting into the air all throughout the room—the television remote, coasters, books, lamps—but my hands weren’t touching a single thing.
“I thought about trying to stop it, but it didn’t feel like the right thing to do, so I just stood there and watched.
I just watched him fighting for a gasp of air until he collapsed, but he fell forwards, which put my feet within his reach, and he pulled me down to the ground with him before I could step back.
He managed to hit me hard enough to break whatever trance was happening, leaving me alone and undefended.
“At the time, I thought that the force of his fist had momentarily disabled the powers I had, but I realised a few weeks later that it wasn’t him at all. My power wasn’t good for anyone—not even me—and I couldn’t control it no matter what was happening.”
I shivered, recalling the next occurrence of that night, and suddenly a tasselled blanket was wrapped around my shoulders and my feet were in my boots.
Lucais hadn’t moved a muscle, though. He stood there, his face a mask of impenetrable concentration as he watched and waited for me to complete my confession.
“He started to beat me like he never had before,” I whispered, throat tightening.
“Only once across my face, which was the hardest, and the rest on less obvious parts of my body. By the time my mother heard me screaming and came running out of the shower, he was scrambling to secure his hands around my throat. I was kicking him as hard as I could with the one leg I’d managed to pull free from underneath him.
“My mother intervened, but he was in such a blind rage that he didn’t process the change when my face became hers.
He didn’t even care that her belly was round with his own child.
I left and ran to the neighbour’s house to get help, but I’m pretty certain he kept beating the absolute fuck out of her until he heard the shouting at the door because she was unconscious when I came back.
“For the longest time, I thought I had something to do with what happened to her pregnancy—like the voices had sought her out when they left me alone with my father in the living room, and maybe they tried to hurt the baby or something. It was my fault, no matter which way you look at it, but the thing that followed me around devoured all of the light. It was quiet most of the time like a shadow or an imaginary friend, which made perfect sense because the mood in the house was always so fucking dark,” I told Lucais.
And then I took a deep breath, bracing myself for the conclusion I’d been at all by myself for the last ten years.
“That baby was the only bright thing that had ever existed in that family…and I’m so sure that I accidentally snuffed it out.”
The tears were streaming freely down my cheeks.
I scrubbed them away, and my breath caught in my throat when my eyes came back into focus and I realised that Lucais’s face was wet, too.
As soon as our eyes met, he staggered a few steps to the side, falling against a nearby post as he wiped the bottom of his nose with his shirt and glanced around at the fog like he expected to find some kind of explanation inside it.
“You’re telling me that you…” Lucais’s voice shattered.
He dug the heels of his palms into his eyes and made a small, broken noise in his throat before he met my tearful stare again.
“You’re telling me that you spent more than half of your life thinking you killed the baby inside your mother’s womb? ”
I could feel the hysteria brimming the way it used to when I was in therapy, but I was well practiced with holding it back, because I’d never allowed myself to talk openly about anything that had happened that night.
I had only ever talked about the dreams—or at least, that’s what I had tried to do.
“He had me convinced that there was something wrong with me,” I said.
“And he didn’t even know about the shadows or the voices.
He used to make comments that I’d be jealous about the new baby.
That maybe I should stay with my grandparents after he was born so I wouldn’t cause an issue.
” I tucked my hands beneath my arms to ward off a soul-deep shudder, pulling the blanket tighter around myself and staring at the ground.
“I didn’t feel jealous. I didn’t really want the baby, but I never wanted to hurt him.
I thought maybe I’d done it by accident, though.
Like I hadn’t been careful enough, and I’d spilled the poison someone had put inside of me, and somehow it touched him. ”
“Your mother never thought to tell you otherwise?” Lucais’s tone was low but hard, and edged with something so menacing that it caused my head to jerk up in surprise.
“I never told her how I felt,” I confessed. “And she wasn’t capable of talking about it, so she never brought it up.”
His frown was as sharp as knives. “And-and-and—there weren’t doctors?
” he stammered, pointing at the ground like it was the guilty party while he glared at me.
“There weren’t any nurses? Surely, she went to hospital?
” Lucais demanded. He waited for me to nod.
“None of them determined that it had been caused by the fact someone three times your size had attacked her? None of them fucking reported him?”
Lucais’s expression was incandescent, an unstable blend of being both furious and flabbergasted at once, and I realised that my father had no working memory of what had happened to my brother or else the High King would have already glimpsed it.
I’d suspected as much, because Brynn had changed everything for them, but something inside of my stomach reared up with claws and teeth to have it confirmed.