40. Ebony
EBONY
I swirled the twenty-five-year-old Macallan in my glass, watching the amber liquid catch the flickering firelight, its color shifting like molten gold. This was supposed to be the whiskey of victors. A taste for the triumphant.
Yet as the smoke curled on my tongue, I couldn’t decide if I actually enjoyed it or if I had spent years convincing myself I did.
Colleagues always assumed it was my favorite. A bottle every Christmas, without fail. A glass ready and waiting at every meeting, a silent toast to my victories, my lineage, my power.
But sitting now in my father’s worn leather chair in his study, the same one I’d once stood beside as a child watching him sip from the very same cut-crystal glass, I wasn’t even sure if I liked the taste.
I swallowed the burn, wincing as it scorched its way down my throat, and forced myself to think it was pleasant. Delicious, even. A pleasure far greater than the power plays cloaked in intimacy that always left me hollow.
This, I told myself, was my victory drink. The sweet sting of conquest.
The Sochai was mine, firmly and unquestionably. No more whispers of dissent, no more grumbling fathers, angry over my ordered loss of their daughters.
Ciaran Donahue had inadvertently strengthened my grip by silencing them for me. Their depravities had died with them, and now, the society was free to evolve.
My era had begun.
The filth my father allowed to fester would be cleaned away, burned like the rot it was. I would rebuild the Sochai into something powerful, untouchable. I would steer it into a future no longer mired in the unspeakable crimes of the past.
Guilt crept in, unbidden and sharp, like the edge of a scalpel I hadn’t seen coming.
No. No. I slammed the door shut on it, but it slipped through the cracks anyway, a shadow I couldn’t escape.
I’d done what I’d done for a reason. For a good reason! Why couldn’t that be enough now? Why wasn’t it enough to silence the echoes of their screams in my head, the way their frightened eyes would haunt me in my sleep?
The Sochai had become an evil thing. A rotten tooth, blackened to the root. A diseased lung, festering with every breath.
There was no cutting around the infection, no delicate excision that would save it. Even my surgeon’s hands—the steadiest, most precise in the country—weren’t capable of that kind of miracle .
No one’s hands were. The rot was too deep. The nastiness that had taken root required death.
Only from the ashes could something clean, something pure rise up. That was the truth I’d clung to, the truth I still held on to like a lifeline in this sea of whiskey and regret.
Those girls—those innocent girls —they couldn’t remain. Not when they’d started to remember.
They were a case of sepsis waiting to happen, poised to infect everything I was trying to salvage. Keeping them alive would have tainted the waters I was working so desperately to clean. They had to go.
I made the decision because it was the only decision.
And yet, no matter how many times I told myself that, the weight of it pressed down on me like a lead apron. Their blood clung to my soul, an unrelenting stain I would carry to my grave.
A surgeon didn’t weep over the leg she amputated, even when the patient survived and went on to change the world. She didn’t cry for what was lost when the sacrifice ensured a future.
So why couldn’t I? Why couldn’t I stop feeling this hollow ache, this gnawing grief that tore at the edges of my resolve?
The empty glass trembled in my hand as I reached for the bottle, my fingers unsteady.
The Macallan spilled, sloshing onto my father’s oriental rug, soaking into the dark velvet robe I’d wrapped around myself like armor.
The robe that had concealed the weakness in my legs as I tore the sheet off Ava after watching that boy fuck her.
The robe I had clutched tightly around me as I contemplated the unthinkable—murdering my own daughter to save myself.
But I hadn’t. I had let her go.
As the fire crackled and my victory settled in my chest, I felt an ache I hadn’t anticipated.
I would never see Ava again.
The girl I saved. The girl I loved, though I could barely say it, barely admit it even to myself. The girl I tried so desperately to protect—from them, from herself, from me .
I tipped back the glass again, but the burn this time was hollow.
My mind flickered back to that day in the hospital room, to her youthful dark eyes locking on mine, wide with confusion and terror.
I hadn’t seen her as anything more than an order then. Another test of my loyalty to my father. Another step toward my heirship that I was too afraid to refuse.
But when I was forced to rip her baby from her, it changed me—something maternal, buried deep inside me, sparked to life.
I swore that day I would fix this. Fix her. Fix everything.
And when her foster father died and she was left to fend for herself, I saw it as a sign. I took her in. I saved her because it was the only way I could save myself.
And now, I had lost her.
She had been my last connection to my humanity. Physical proof that I was still good underneath.
See, another human cared for me, perhaps even loved me.
The ache grew heavier as I poured another drink. The weight of it pressed on my chest, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
My hand shook as I gripped the glass, the fine crystal threatening to shatter under the pressure. I stared into the fire, willing it to burn away this unbearable grief.
“Hello, Mother.”
I froze, the glass slipping from my fingers and hitting the rug with a dull thud.
I turned toward the doorway, and there she stood.
Ava.
Her dark eyes, so achingly familiar, met mine with a cold fury that stopped my heart.
I blinked, certain the whiskey was playing tricks on me. Certain the grief had twisted itself into cruel hallucinations.
She looked so real.
Like all those times she came to lean against the intricate white molding with her schoolbag slung over one shoulder and a heel crossed over the other.
All those times I made her wait for my attention, my love.
I could feel those long seconds as I sat there, staring at the doorway, willing my cruel hallucination to stop haunting me.
But she didn’t vanish. She didn’t waver.
She stepped forward, the firelight catching her sharp cheekbones, her defiance carved into every inch of her face.
“Did you miss me?” she asked, her voice cutting through the silence like a blade.
And just like that, the weight on my chest shifted. Triumph curdled into something darker, something I couldn’t yet name .
Ava had returned.
But she hadn’t come home.
“Stupid girl,” I hissed. “Now I have to kill you.”