Chapter 42
BILLY
Ithought I knew what fear was.
I thought I had tasted it enough times, in blood, in the crack of a belt, in the moments when Father’s eyes sharpened with disappointment, that nothing could surprise me anymore.
But tonight, my hands are sweating, my pulse is a hammer. My ribs feel too tight, as though my own body is trying to cage my heart before it can beat its way out.
I stand in the doorway of my mother’s greenhouse, watching the two women who built me meet for the first time. The one that raised me, taught me how to be a man, and the one who taught me softness and love.
The night presses against the glass walls, outside, everything is shadow, inside, everything is green and silver and glimmering with moonlight.
My mother tends her plants like she’s tending secrets, her fingers trail along the leaves with instinct and reverence, as though each stem listens, as though each blossom understands what it means to survive in soil that was never meant for softness.
And she looks up as I guide my Pair forward.
My love.
My feral-heart, my tragedy-made-flesh, my salvation and my undoing.
Nellie moves carefully, hesitantly, as though afraid to disturb the quiet.
Afraid to disturb my mother.
Her mother.
Her hand is cold in mine, and I squeeze it once before letting go.
“Mother,” I manage, though my throat hurts, rejecting the use of her name, calling her Helena feels wrong somehow, because despite the fact we’re not related by DNA, she is still, for all intents and purposes, my mother.
I swallow, razorblades cutting my throat, because this is important, this moment is something that can’t ever be taken back, “This is her.”
Just her.
The only name that matters.
The only future that matters.
My mother’s face softens. Not with warmth, she has not been afforded warmth for decades. But with recognition. As though she has seen this moment in her dreams. As though she has been waiting for it longer than either of us have been alive.
She reaches for Penelope first.
Her hand rises slowly, trembling, and brushes her long lost daughter’s cheek.
And my Nellie, my brave, scarred, cautious girl, she leans into that touch as though she has been starved for it.
Mother’s eyes glisten, “Oh,” she whispers, voice breaking like something fragile hit with a hammer. “You’re even lovelier than Billy described.”
I want to laugh.
Or cry.
Or fall to my knees and thank every god I’ve spent my life refusing to believe in.
Instead, I step back.
Because this moment isn’t mine.
It’s theirs.
I place myself near the wall of glass, letting the cold air leak through the cracks and hit the back of my neck. Letting the darkness seep into my bones. Letting the fear settle.
I watch them talk, and I force myself to stay silent.
My mother asks if she is well. If the baby is well. If I have treated her gently.
The last question makes my stomach twist, ugly and sharp. Not because I haven't, but because once upon a time, I did.
Before Nellie changed me.
Before she took every sharp edge I carried and made me want to be something better, something worthy.
My mother looks at her like she is a miracle.
Penelope looks at her like she is a puzzle.
And I stand here behind them, unseen and aching, knowing that everything I am, every good thing, every tender thing, was carved into me by the woman bending over a pot of lilies across the room.
Helena raised me with gentleness in a place that punished it. She raised me with softness in a house built on cruelty. She taught me how to love in whispers, in shadows, in stolen moments of safety. And now that same softness is what allows me to love the woman standing inches from her.
The room breathes around us, the scent of damp earth, sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. The cold metallic bite of winter pushing against the glass.
My heartbeat throbs in my palm, in my throat, in my teeth. I don’t know which of them I’m more afraid for. Mother, who has suffered too much already. Or my Pair, who carries my heart and my soul, and carried my son’s life inside her fragile, mortal body.
If the cult ever touched either of them, my vision darkens. My hands twitch. I would raze everything. Tear down walls. Burn fields. Bleed men who have never bled before. I would destroy an entire legacy with my bare hands if it meant keeping them safe.
Violence hums in my blood, focused, purposeful, like a blade sharpened under moonlight.
My Nellie glances at me then.
Just a flicker of those heavy dark eyes, just a half-second of connection, but it hits like a blow.
Because the look in her eyes says she knows. She knows what I would do for her. She knows what lives inside my chest. She knows what darkness I keep leashed inside of me.
And she loves me anyway.
I cross my arms, leaning back into the glass, the cold biting into my spine. But I don’t move.
They speak softly, these two strong women, the one who made me, and the one I would die for.
My mother brushes a curl behind my Pair’s ear.
Penelope whispers something I can’t hear.
They both smile. Small, uncertain, cracked at the edges, but real.
And suddenly my throat feels too tight. Because I have never seen my mother look at another woman like that.
Not the ones she raised in this place, or the ones she pitied.
She is looking at Penelope like a daughter.
And Nellie is looking at her like she has never had a woman in her life worth trusting, until now.
I think back to my son’s birth, the story I told Nellie.
About Helena being her mother, how she was told Nellie had died at birth and was sent away.
About Clara being Helena’s sister, groomed by Milus to keep an eye on Nellie whilst she grew up in care, but really was sending her to different houses of horror for whoever paid the highest price.
About how I was unknowingly sent to the same home, in the hopes that we would form a bond. Something that was meant to bring her here much earlier than now, so she could be here to torment my mother.
I swallow hard, my pulse stutters. This, them meeting without Milus having any idea I’ve told Penelope all of this, this is dangerous. This is precious. It’s everything I have ever wanted and everything I fear losing.
I press my fist against my thigh to stop it from shaking. Thinking of Tolly and Rune guarding August, Gore distracting our father, and Bram keeping watch of us out here in the shadows, just so we could sneak out here for this.
I told them everything too. What Mother had asked of me all those many months ago, how the pieces started coming together.
I shake it off.
The darkness inside me is quiet tonight, watchful, on its knees, reverent, because the two halves of my heart finally exist in the same room.
And they are touching hands. And smiling.
The moon catches on the glass overhead, spilling pale light over them both and illuminating them like an omen.
Good or bad, I can’t tell.
Mother turns then, meeting my eyes.
“I’m so very proud of you, son, thank you,” she says softly.
My chest heaves. No one has ever said that to me before. Not like this. Not with truth behind it.
Nellie steps toward me, sliding her fingers into mine. Her hand fits there perfectly, warm, soft, alive.
My mother watches the gesture with aching pride. And I understand, with a violent, overwhelming rush, that I will forever protect the two women before me.
If I am anything good at all, if anything pure survived the blood that raised me, it is because of her, my mother.
And if I am anything worth loving, worth saving, worth forgiving, it is because of the woman now holding my hand, my Little Lamb.
The greenhouse creaks in the cold, the glass fogging with breath, the flowers bowing under the weight of night. And my two worlds stand together, finally, impossibly, and I realise I am whole in a way I have never been before.
And for the first time in my life, the darkness inside me settles, the monster curls in on itself, and I finally feel it, an overwhelming wash of cool heat, it feels calming, it feels good, it feels something like peace.