Chapter 32
BILLY
All of the pieces started clicking into place at one-am.
And now, at three, my entire body running a cold sweat like I'm sick and infectious, I stand at the edge of the bed, watching my Pair’s breathing.
Slow.
Even.
Seven months pregnant now, the time going far too quickly and also far too slow. Desperation to meet our child, but to also hold onto Penelope just a little bit longer, as just my own, is a constant warring battle inside my head.
Her hand rests over her stomach without her knowing it, protective even in unconsciousness. I run my thumb along her knuckles, her veins a stark blue beneath her pale skin, ridged in the back of her hands as they dance up the length of her fingers.
“I’ll be back before you wake,” I whisper.
A promise I pray I can keep.
A promise I’m terrified to break.
Because if anything happened to her while I was gone, if anything happened to our child.
I’d burn the entire manor down to its bones.
No hesitation.
No mercy.
But this is important, and I wouldn’t leave her unless I absolutely had to.
I tuck the sheets around her one more time, memorising the sight of her in the moonlight, the moon painting her in a silvered rainbow through the stained glass, the shadows of the room brushing her cheeks like soft fingers. Then I turn and slip silently from the room.
I head straight to the library corner where Nellie spends most of her time, going to the fourth shelf along, two up from the bottom, my fingers curling over the lid of her small jewellery chest. This is the only thing she’s had for her whole life, everything in it is significant to her, even if it’s nothing special.
A smooth red-brown pebble, a tiny cone-shaped seashell with a hole cracked through it, a broken pin badge of a poppy. And at the very bottom of it all, is the small square of yellow-aged white fabric, torn on one edge, only half a symbol on it.
A moon over a burning torch.
The hallways are different at night. Still. Breathing in an unnatural way, as if the walls listen, as if the air waits for secrets to pass through.
The screwed up parchment burns a hole in my pocket. Opened and closed, opened and closed, so many times since it was sent to me all those many, many months ago, it’s a wonder how I can still read the words. But I’d remember them even if they were worn.
The message is short.
Come to the greenhouse.
- Mother
My footsteps echo as I cross the courtyard. The greenhouse is a silhouette of dark glass and iron ribs, glimmering faintly with trapped moonlight. The door is cracked open.
Warmth hits me instantly as I slip inside, thick, humid, fragrant with overgrown moss and night-blooming flowers. The glow-lamps are dimmed, leaving the vast space lit only by patches of moon leaking through fogged glass panels.
She sits on a stone bench near the centre, illuminated like an apparition.
Mother.
Not biological to any of us, but in every way that matters.
Gore was already fifteen when Helena was brought into our lives.
I, five, Bram, four, Tolly was two, she was far too young to be Gore’s mother, only twenty-five herself, she was introduced to us only as Mother, and though we’d had nannies and caretakers since birth, none of us really knew what that meant.
Helena taught us.
She gave us the strength we needed to be brothers not enemies. To have softness, no matter how deep down we hid it. She taught us how to be men.
Her posture is rigid, her hands folded tightly in her lap. Her long wavy dark brown hair, now threaded with a few silver strands, is pulled around her face, curtaining her from the world. When she looks up at me, I see it, the confusion, the fear.
“Mother,” I greet quietly, stepping forward. “You shouldn’t be out here alone.”
A brittle smile touches her ruby lips. “You sound like your father.”
I stiffen. “I am nothing like him.”
“Good,” she whispers.
She motions for me to sit beside her, my feet taking me to do just that. She reaches for my hand, her grip cold, colder than the glass around us, than the stone beneath our feet.
“You left your Pair alone to come here.” It isn’t a question.
I nod once. “She’s sleeping. She needs rest.”
“And you…” My mother studies me with a stare that feels older than she is. “You’re worried.”
“Of course I am,” I say, sharper than I intend. “She’s pregnant. And this place-” My jaw clenches. “If anything happened-”
“I know,” she says softly, squeezing my fingers. “Why do you come?”
Her deep brown eyes, usually gentle, hold an odd shine, haunted, broken, hopeful. And they look so much like my Nellie’s that I feel my breath get stuck in my chest.
“Billy?”
I clear my throat, shaking my head, my brain working on overdrive, I swallow. “I think I might’ve found something.”
Mother never summons me.
Not openly.
Not secretly.
Not at all.
Not since the day my father locked her behind polite walls and declared that her purpose was to remain ‘protected’. A word that meant nothing except hidden. And he hid her so well that some of the newer acolytes don’t even know she exists.
A ghost woman in a golden cage.
But she sent me a message, arriving just after midnight.
A soft knock at the door, barely more than a breath against the wood. The servant girl’s eyes were wide when she slipped the folded scrap of parchment into my hand. Wide with fear, urgency, and the knowledge that giving me this message could cost her everything.
“She said… you’d come alone,” the girl whispered before scurrying back into the dark.
That was enough.
Now, Mother looks past me, toward the fogged glass, toward the moon’s reflection glimmering in the dark panes of the greenhouse. A place she only comes in the dead of night, summer or winter, the green glass shaded lamps are always lit, her bum always parked firmly on the stone bench at its centre.
“I need to tell you a story. One I should have told you years ago.”
I stay silent, waiting.
She exhales, and it sounds like she’s pushing out a lifetime of suppressed breath.
“When I was young,” she begins, “I thought your father was the brightest star I’d ever seen.
Charismatic. Powerful. Beautiful in a way that frightened me.
He said he saw something in me. A spark no one else had ever noticed.
” Her mouth lifts into a sad, fragile smile.
“He wooed me like a poet. Flowers delivered every day. Secrets whispered against my throat. Nights spent talking about destiny, and blood, and rebirth. I was na?ve enough to believe he meant love.”
I frown. “I didn’t think you ever loved him.”
“Oh, I did,” she whispers with a low laugh. “And I think… in his own way, he loved me too. But his love was the kind that consumes. The kind that leaves no room to breathe.”
Her fingers fall from mine. She clasps her hands together in her lap, as if bracing herself.
“We planned to marry. Quietly. Before The Obsidian was quite what it is now. Before power hardened him. But another man, at the church I worshipped in...” Her lips tremble. “He became jealous. Possessive. Obsessed with me. He-”
A chill sweeps through me.
“He forced himself on you,” I say quietly.
Tears gather in her eyes. “Yes.”
My stomach twists violently. Rage prowls through my bones like an animal.
“And I became pregnant,” she whispers.
I stare at her.
“Pregnant,” I repeat. “But I thought you couldn’t.”
She nods, a barely-there motion that carries the weight of a ghost.
“I can’t now.” She smiles sadly. “Anyway, when your father found out, he went mad.” Her voice cracks.
“Truly mad. He hunted the man down. Hurt him in ways I could never describe. And then he came back to me… changed. Too changed.” Her hands shake.
“He insisted the child could still be ours. That no one would ever know. That we could marry as planned, and when the baby came, he would claim it.”
“Mother…” My throat is tight. “Why have you never told me this?”
“Because I thought the child died.” She chokes on the words. “Your father told me so.”
Something inside me freezes.
“Told you?”
“I almost died giving birth.” She presses a trembling hand to her abdomen, as though feeling phantom pain, I know she had a hysterectomy, but I never knew why.
“I remember the screaming. The blood. The way the room spun. And then… waking to him sitting beside me, his hands stained red, saying-” She swallows. “Saying the baby was gone.”
“Him.”
Not a medic.
Not a midwife.
Not a doctor.
Him.
“Mother.” My voice is barely a sound. “Do you believe him?”
She lifts her eyes to mine.
“I did.” She smiles sadly. “But not anymore.” The air leaves my lungs. “I believe he lied,” she whispers. “I believe he took my baby. Hid the child. Gave it away or sent it somewhere I could never find. Because he couldn’t bear the thought of another man’s blood mixing with his legacy.”
I stand abruptly. I can’t stay seated with the storm breaking inside me. I pace, the moss between the cobble stone muffling my booted steps.
“So you think…” I rake a hand through my hair, pulling on the ends in an upwards motion. “You think you have a child somewhere?”
“Yes.”
My pulse thrums like a drumbeat against my skull. “And you want me to find them.”
She stands now too, reaching out to touch my arm. “You’re the only one strong enough. The only one he trusts enough not to watch too closely. The only one with the will to do what I cannot.”
I stare at her. At the desperation in her dark eyes. At the mother I’ve spent my life trying to protect, one who has never asked me for anything ever before no matter how hard things get.
She wants me to find a ghost.
Someone taken.
Hidden.
Stolen.
“Why now?” I whisper. “Why tell me this after all these years?”
Mother closes her eyes, and when she speaks, her voice fractures.
“Because by the end of the year, you will Pair, Billy,” she cups my cheek in her icy hand, and I think of how far away that feels, there’s only one girl for me, and she’s somewhere far from here.
“And once your Pair is pregnant.” Her breath shudders.
“The thought of him, of that man, touching your child, manipulating its fate, lying to you, to her, the way he lied to me.” She covers her mouth with her hand, tears slipping down her face.
“I couldn’t bear it. Not again. Not after Dolly. ”
My chest pulls tight, painful.
“And if I can stop the past from repeating,” she says, stepping closer, “I will. Even if it means betraying him. Even if it means risking my life. Or yours.”
I take a slow breath, steadying myself. “Do you have anything?” I ask. “Any clue? Any trace?”
She hesitates, then nods, reaching into the folds of her silk dressing gown, and pulling out a faded piece of cloth, a torn scrap no larger than my palm. Soft, worn, once white but now yellowed with age. Embroidered with a small sigil, broken up by the tear in fabric, half of it missing.
A moon over a burning torch.
The old symbol.
The Obsidian’s early mark, long before it was reshaped into the modern emblem.
“This was wrapped around the baby,” she whispers. “The midwife pressed it into my hand before your father made her leave. I don’t know what happened after that.”
I take the cloth gently. The fabric feels fragile, breakable, like a remnant of a life that was never allowed to begin.
“I need you to find them,” she says, voice trembling. “Before he does something irreversible. Before he realises, I’ve begun to question him.”
I look at her, really look, and see all the pieces of her I’ve never understood.
Her quiet sorrow.
Her distance.
Her fear.
Her fierce, hidden love.
I see my mother not as the silent shadow at my father’s side, but as a woman whose heart has been caged for decades, still beating, still fighting.
And I know my answer.
“I’ll find them,” I promise.
Tears spill down her cheeks. She pulls me into a tight embrace, as though she’s afraid I’ll disappear before she can let go.
“My brave boy,” she whispers into my shoulder. “My only hope.”
I close my eyes and hold her tighter.
But even in this moment of fragile connection, a cold thought creeps into the back of my mind.
What will he do if he discovers that I’m no longer loyal?
That I’m planning to take something back from him?
That tonight, a rebellion began beneath the moonlit glass, quiet, powerful, and completely and utterly unstoppable.