53. Xander
Chapter 53
Xander
Four Seasons (Winter) — Vivaldi
T here are few joys left to me in this world, but one of them is the piano. Both of us children were trained on the piano, violin and flute since we could walk, and even though the piano has called to me little of late, I’m compelled to it now. My fingers skim across the keys, finding familiar and comforting chords that ease into my chest and soothe the sharpness inside of me.
The best part of it is that I don’t even need to see to enjoy it. I don’t even need my earphones in either. I can just be free to listen and feel the vibrations in the air. Let the waves of it crest and plunge into my ears in a rhythm that’s mine alone.
It’s here that my father finds me when he storms through the castle, a light-footed Francesca in tow. Two cosy peas in a pod. Perhaps she’s the son he wished he had.
Father’s heat slams into the room like a sledgehammer, dangerously vibrating the air around me. “You don’t know what you’ve done!” He stops a distance from the piano. My fingers never falter upon the keys.
His chest heaves with rage, his power licking furiously around him. But I answer him simply, not taking my focus off the keys. “I did what I had to do. Those worms would’ve tried to kill us in our sleep as soon as they had the chance.”
His chest rumbles. “That was our entire fertility team.”
“Mace’s team,” I correct. “And they betrayed us.”
“You have no proof. If you hadn’t broken your bond, I would have suspected you for this and cut out your cursed heart. Mace was not involved.”
Those words hover between us, my fingers trailing off gentle notes before I answer quietly. “You know it wasn’t me, but someone did let that dragon in.”
“Mace thinks it was the wolves.”
Ruben’s lot. “It wouldn’t be in their best interests to betray me.”
“Nor Mace’s!” he roars. “You are a fool and completely useless. The damage control itself!” He takes a step toward me. “Perhaps I should not have listened to Mace when he told me to take you back.” With that, he whirls around and storms out.
Shock makes my fingers trip over the keys. Mace. Fucking. Naga.
Francesca hovers for a moment. “This entire thing is your fault. That dragon wanted revenge for things you did. No one else but you .”
I continue playing as if they’d never come in. According to our database of records, the only dragons that pale in this country were Chen dragons. No doubt Nadine’s family felt slighted by my choosing of Francesca over her and wanted to assert their dominance. But to parlay with a serpent to gain entry was something no one expected. I knew Mace was cunning, but this is a game of a new level.
Five minutes later, I hear the roar of Father’s lungs as he coasts above the castle, crying out his anger and challenge to the world.
He patrols for hours, no doubt plotting his revenge against the Chens. We hear him every so often, fortifying the protections and roaring into the dark.
Eventually, I put my earphones back in and pay a visit to my sister and mother in their nightly drawing room. To my surprise, I can hear Spawn’s eagle’s breath from the corner. I’d left her with them, but had not expected her to remain in this form. The twins and Eugene have formed a nest of pillows and cuddle next to her, apparently finding comfort there.
Spawn is more shaken than I anticipated. Occasionally, her feathers tremble.
“Are you alright, Sissy?” I ask.
Selena lets out a long-suffering sigh from where she’s cocooned in a blanket on the couch. “We’re fine, Xander. Thanks to Lia.”
That stings, but I swallow it down. “Mother?”
“I am well, my son,” she says, sipping from a sherry glass, which tells me she’s not, in fact, well. She rarely drinks alcohol, yet her voice is louder today, her breath less laboured. “Xander,” she continues, and I turn to her keenly. “You should attend to your wife. I have a feeling she’s shaken by the events of today as well.”
The disappointment may have been clear in my body language because I can practically hear my mother give an uncharacteristic scowl. “You must attend to your duties. I fear she has not been happy.”
“Of course, Mother,” I say dutifully. “I will see how I can help her.” But I don’t leave. I stand there, lamely for a moment. Just…listening.
Emmerson coos to Spawn, stroking her feathers. Spawn exhales a long breath, her heart suddenly kicking up its tempo like the climax of a song. She swallows, then shifts as Delilah feeds her something. Cake, from the scent.
Suddenly, I realise from the silence that Selena is watching me. So is my mother.
“Xander,” Selena murmurs.
“I’m going,” I reassure her.
Feeling like I’m being dismissed from the drawing room, I leave without protest, shutting the door behind me. Something makes me pause outside the door.
Sometimes being without my sight feels akin to being lonely. I am missing a crucial part of me, so it only makes sense, I suppose. Inside the drawing room, Selena pours Mother another drink and Emmerson giggles at something.
Spawn makes a small bird sound that makes both hatchlings giggle. My heart clenches. That treasure haze is long gone, but something is making me linger by the door. I wish I knew why I was given this misfortune. Why I had to be the sole dragon bound to a Boneweaver.
Why I was the only one who’d had the gall to sever it. And why, at every turn, I was led further down the path to misery. I lean against the wall next to the door, listening to my family.
I’d done everything I could to return to them, so why does it still feel like I’m still utterly alone?
When Francesca returns to my room that night, I’m waiting for her in my chair by the fireplace.
Her bare feet slap against the stones before she tries to quietly open the door. “I thought you’d be asleep,” she says upon seeing me.
When I catch a whiff of her, that scent of my sire and his cum, I feel nothing. No spark of anger. No boom of fury. There is only dull emptiness. There is only the dark.
My voice sounds like it’s cut from cardboard. “I couldn’t do anything today. Because of the shackles.”
She pauses at the threshold to the bedroom, watching me for signs of violence. She swallows. “Well, it was supposed to be a punishment. Perhaps now you’ll understand what I’m going through.”
Through the dull shadows of my mind, a flicker of orange flame lights up a silhouette of dry, bare branches. I set my whiskey glass down. “I hope you don’t mean that witnessing the kidnap of my niece was intended as a punishment for me.”
She takes a step back from me and swallows again. Despite her fear, her tinny voice remains sharp. “I permit them to come off.”
I remain silent.
Francesca clears her throat. “We are leaving in the morning. It’s high time we visit my parents at their holiday home. They wish to see me before they return to Melbourne.”
“I’m guessing you planned this with my father already.”
“You’d be correct.”
“Was that before or after you fucked him?”
She’s silent with shock. I don’t know why, because she’s done nothing to hide it tonight. Or any other night.
“When you would not consummate the marriage, he offered…and I accepted.”
I snort. “Don’t think this will somehow protect you. He will use you for your body, and then when he tires of the novelty, he’ll return to the arms of one of his favoured mistresses. That’s how it’s always been.”
Her voice twists with fury. “You have no right to speak of such things! Not after what you did!”
I rise to my feet. “Where is the key?”
She reaches for the fine chain around her neck and pulls out the key from between her breasts. When she throws it, I snatch it out of the air and unlock the shackles, placing them carefully on the table.
My power returns like a tired candle spluttering back to life. I have to funnel my magic up and into my empty eye sockets. It pools there for a second, creating new eyeballs as my eyelids pop over them. I see white light first before that fades away and the darkened room comes into view, aglow with only the light from the embers of the fireplace.
Francesca stands frowning and defensive before me, a fist holding the edges of her robe together.
But I’m distracted by something over her shoulder.
I catch a glimpse of myself in the gilded mirror on the opposite wall. Suddenly, I don’t know the man who stares back at me. Perhaps I never knew him. Unbidden, my hand reaches up to touch the skin under my right eye. The fine scars made by my father’s claws. The old ache pulses within my sockets. Sometimes I still get phantom pains, but most days I don’t notice them.
“He should have ended it that day, you know,” I say faintly. “No one would have stopped it. But it wasn’t enough for him. The pain he inflicts is always calculated. And he thought it would be a slow, agonising death that lasted years. That was his…hope.”
Then Scythe and Savage had found me lying hopelessly in the rain. And they changed everything. Scythe introduced me to Eko, and the Greenland shark had taught me how to see. I’d been a useless student at first, but eventually, under the patience of both sharks, I’d learned.
I never knew beasts could be patient like that. That males could be gentle and understanding of the nuances of a teenager in pain.
Then years later I find out that he is mate to Aurelia’s mother. That knowledge had shaken me, that night on the beach when Athena Boneweaver had died in Eko’s arms.
My mentor, the beast who had given me the greatest gift also had a regina. And he’d grieved for her loss like he loved her.
“He did what he thought was right at the time,” Francesca says through gritted teeth. “It was his right as a father.”
I’d almost forgotten she’s still standing there. So she’d heard the story of my eyes being taken, likely from gossip, because none of the servants had reported her asking the question in her detailed interrogation of them.
“It’s also the responsibility of a father to protect his offspring,” I say in that dead voice.
“Do not speak ill of him when he took you back in,” she says, lip curling in contempt. “He didn’t have to take you back.”
And the price he’d asked was for me to curse myself. My dragon unfurls his wings, snorting in distaste. With my power back, he glares at me, and those fragments of memories from times long past flicker through my mind once again.
Torment. That’s all it wants from me. Except a dead man feels nothing.
I turn away and head to the entrance of the suite.
“Where are you going?” she demands.
“I’m going to patrol our lands,” I say. “I’ll be ready to leave at dawn, as you asked.”