Chapter 3
Veil
THE REQUIEM | Present
Aghost-finger tracing a path down my spine.
My Mother moves with a grace that defies everything I believe in.
I don’t have a clear memory of her death. It’s just that whenever I think of her, all I see is blood and death.
“You’re cold,” she murmurs, reaching out. And I am cold. I just don’t know what to feel anymore.
When her fingers touch my cheek, I do not find the chill of a corpse.
I find warmth. Pulse. Reality. I let out a sound that isn’t a sob or a scream, but a jagged tear in my own throat.
I lunge forward, falling from the bed into her lap, my fingers clutching at her waist as if I can anchor her to the earth before she evaporates again.
“You died,” I choke out, my face presses into the familiar scent of her… lavender, like I remember.
I recall the blood. I recall the fire. I buried her in the grave once, and in my mind every single night.
“Oh, my sweet, foolish girl.” Her hands smooth over my hair, yet there is a tightness in her hold that feels suffocating. “I never left you. I was kept from you.”
I pull back, my vision swimming, the hammer in my skull striking a fresh blow. “Kept? By who? Corvin said—”
“Corvin is the only reason you are safe now.” Her eyes search mine as she reaches for the small glass on the tray. “But your head is screaming, isn’t it? The fog is coming back. You need to take this, Stina. For your sake.”
The sight of the glass triggers a flicker of déjà vu. My hand trembles as I take it, the instinct to obey her overriding the spike of dread in my gut. I swallow the medicine, and almost instantly, the world softens at the edges.
“Why did you leave me?” I whisper, the medicine already making my tongue feel thick. “Why watch me suffer? He killed Adrian, Mama, he killed the man I loved.”
My Mother’s face shifts as I cry. The warmth doesn’t leave her eyes, but a shadow crosses them.
“Adrian?” She echoes the name. “Stina, Adrian was a tragedy.”
“He was my fiancé,” I argue weakly, the memory of Adrian like a faded photograph I’ve been told to cherish. “Zagreus… he killed him. He took me. He forced the ring on my finger.”
“Zagreus Vitale,” my Mother says, and the way she spits the name makes the room feel ten degrees colder.
“That man is a plague. He didn’t just force a marriage, child.
He planned the separation of a Mother and her child.
He used his power and his blood to ensure I could never reach you.
He wanted you isolated. He wanted you broken so he could be the only thing you had to lean on. ”
“No,” I breathe. The memory of Zagreus’s hand on my lower back. The way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching. “He’s brutal, yes. He’s a monster. But he… he told me you were alive. I didn’t believe him. But he never lied to me.”
“He put you in the dark, Stina,” she counters, her voice rising.
“He kills for sport, and he claims for power. He murdered the man you were supposed to love so he could own the woman he obsessed over. He is a dangerous man, and if Corvin hadn’t risked everything to bring you here, Zagreus would have eventually snuffed out the last of your light. ”
I look down at my hands. The ring is gone, but the ghost of its weight remains.
The air in the room is thick, soaked with the scent of lavender. Every time she speaks his name, it is like a needle sliding under my skin, draining the warmth I once felt when I thought of him.
“How do you know all this?” I whisper. “He told me he loved me. He told me things I had no memory of. I feel… he knows me better than I know myself. I just… don’t know if he’s lying or not.”
My Mother takes my hand and squeezes.
“He told you what he needed to so you would stay,” she murmurs, her thumb tracing the hollow where my ring used to sit.
“He took you and dismantled your life piece by piece. He burned the letters I sent you. He threatened the servants who tried to help me reach you. He wanted you to believe the world was empty so he could fill it with his own darkness.”
“But the way he looked at me…” I start, but she cuts me off with a sharp, brittle laugh.
“Obsession often looks like devotion to the person being hunted,” she says, leaning closer until I can see the flecks of gold in her eyes…
eyes that look like mine, yet feel so foreign.
“You don’t recall, dear. You don’t remember the nights you cried for home.
You don’t remember the bruises he gave you, or how he kept you locked up. ”
I shake my head. “I don’t… I don’t remember any of that.”
“Of course you don’t,” she scoffs. “The trauma, the things he forced you to witness… your mind broke to protect you. He used that against you. He fed you lies while your memory was a sieve, making himself the hero of a story he started with a bloodbath.”
She reaches up, her fingers brushing the hair away from my forehead with a tenderness that feels like a trap.
“He destroyed everything you were, Stina. Your art, your spirit, your capacity to love anyone but him. He ruined everything.”
A cold hollow opens in my chest. I want to argue, to bring up the memory of him telling me sweet lies, but the fog from the medicine is rising, blurring the lines between what I know and what she is telling me.
“You’re safe now,” she whispers, pulling me back into the suffocating embrace. “Corvin and I… we’ve spent years planning this. We won’t let him near you again.”
I close my eyes, and for a terrifying second, I can’t remember the colour of Zagreus’s eyes.
My Mother pulls me back into her arms.
I want to believe her. I want to sink into the lavender and darkness and never wake up. But beneath the fog of everything, a single image remains clear…
If he were the villain, why does the memory of his touch feel more like home than my Mother’s embrace?