41. Chapter Forty-One - Leigh
A communal submarine transports Isolde and me from Poseidon’s Wharf to Kratos Prison.
It jolts as it arrives at the underwater unloading dock deep beneath the waves of the Starless Sea.
An eerie silence follows the engine’s shutdown.
A metallic taste coats my tongue as reality settles in.
In a few minutes, I’ll be face-to-face with my uncle.
I’m done with him trying to control me.
Besides Isolde and me, the five other passengers unbuckle their seatbelts in resounding clicks.
The captain’s voice crackles through the intercom, announcing our arrival in a tone as cold and detached as our metal surroundings.
Isolde adjusts her hat, which hides her cobalt hair.
As I study her, she brushes her fingers against the brim of her hat.
Though I was annoyed with Wilder for assigning his gorgeous ex to guard me, I admire her take-no-shit attitude.
She’s fiercely independent.
I once thought she was selfish for cheating on Wilder, but spending time with her has shown me otherwise.
She’s been there for me this past week in ways no one else has, and I am grateful for her help and discretion.
“You ready?” she asks me.
I nod.
“Let’s get this over with.”
We both appear as civilians as we enter the prison.
I’m disguised in a red wig, an artfully styled headscarf, sunglasses, and heels.
We sign fake aliases on the visitors’ log.
A guard eyes me, and I quickly look away.
My disguise feels like a flimsy shield against the press, but I refuse to risk ending up as front-page news two days in a row.
“Visiting center is this way,” another guard calls.
The group shuffles toward him.
“But before we go, may I remind each of you that the people you are about to see may be your family and friends, but they are also convicted felons. Make smart choices.”
After a murmur of agreement, we walk through the alloy lobby toward the visitors’ center.
Bubbles form outside the thick windows.
When the visitors make a left, following the guards, Isolde and I turn right, aiming toward Warden Grey’s office.
He’s granted me fifteen minutes of unchaperoned time with my uncle.
I plan to get Don to admit that he’s been supplying Stellan with information about the Council and me.
Then I will go to the capitol with the name of his accomplice so I can end Stellan’s crusade and obtain the Council’s support in presenting Alden with a peace treaty instead of a marriage.
But as we draw nearer to the warden’s office, doubt creeps in like an oceanic fog.
Can I trust Don to tell the truth?
Can I trust the Council to listen?
“This is it,” Isolde announces.
She flashes her badge to the men stationed outside Warden Grey’s door, and they let us inside.
Warden Grey’s office is enormous, with floor-to-ceiling windows peering into the inky blackness beyond the sea floor.
Occasionally, a fish or two swims by, their bioluminescent bodies creating neon, fleeting patterns in the darkness.
The room has polished surfaces and sharp angles, as cold and unforgiving as the warden.
I’m curious what Bennett’s grandfather must have been like before his son and daughter-in-law died.
He’d been kind to me over the years, but after my last visit here to meet Moran Dunn, any warmth between us got snuffed out like sunlight trying to penetrate the miles between the ocean floor and the surface.
I can’t say I miss it.
“This place gives me the creeps,” Isolde says, her face practically pressed against the thick glass.
“It’s unnatural not to see the sun.”
I nod.
The lack of natural light must cause a Solar Witch discomfort.
She adjusts her borrowed blazer with both hands, which does a poor job hiding her weapons.
“Is there a reason you are studying me like a book?” she asks without turning around.
I laugh.
The girl has eyes on the back of her head.
“How many times have you been here?” I ask.
When she faces me, Isolde’s lips spread into a thoughtful, straight line.
“Maybe twice? Most of the guards are Sea Witches, not Blades. The Blades who work here do so voluntarily. What about you? You handled the submarine ride like a champ.”
I settle into Warden Grey’s leather seat.
It dwarfs me, and the hinges groan as I lean back.
“Once with Wilder,” I answer.
Isolde’s attention fixes on me.
“To see Moran?”
I nod.
“How long did you and Wilder date? And no, this isn’t his new girlfriend sizing up his old one. I am genuinely curious. I know you could break me like a toothpick.”
Isolde is beautiful, and it sounds like Wilder genuinely loved her.
Did she not feel the same way?
As someone struggling to admit my feelings, I want to understand hers.
Isolde laughs.
It’s a rare sound.
“Nine months. In the last year of Blade training.”
I raise a brow.
Who was Wilder when he was with her?
They seem better matched than we are.
“What happened?”
“I am a female Nebula Blade. I had a lot to prove,” Isolde replies.
“The Nebula Solar Witches in my family aren’t fighters. They don’t strive for much at all. Still, I wanted to make something of myself after my Emergence, so I enrolled at the Blade Academy and got good scores, but I worried it wasn’t enough. I worried that I wasn’t enough. What would happen to me after graduation if I didn’t get any job offers? I loved Wilder, but Soter had connections, and I thought I could use them to my advantage.
“At first, I only intended to befriend him, but Soter can be charming when he wants to be, and Wilder drifted away the closer we got to graduation.
He had been worried about having to work for his dad.
I knew my behavior was wrong and should have been there for him.
I’ve been trying to atone for it since.
”
She hangs her head, and I say, “What you did was wrong, but it doesn’t define you.”
The door opens with a hydraulic hiss, yanking my attention.
Don enters the room with two armed guards.
A gasp lodges in my throat.
He looks the same, but different.
The suave man I loved and looked up to all my life was gone, and in his place is a man as harsh as his true nature.
They’ve shaved his hair close to his scalp, and thick facial hair covers his cheeks and jaw.
But his eyes are the same.
Sapphire, same as Fynn.
My eyes sting, but I refuse to cry.
He doesn’t deserve my tears.
Don stumbles to a halt.
My heart threatens to break out of my chest.
“Leigh?” he asks, his voice rising.
Heat courses through my veins, causing my hands and arms to flex.
This isn’t the man who would take me out for ice cream when my parents fussed over Fynn.
That man is a myth.
This man is a criminal, through and through.
I gesture to one of the empty chairs across from me.
“Take a seat, Don.”
He doesn’t move, still gaping at me.
One of the guards forces him into a chair.
“I am so glad you finally came,” Don says as his guards leave.
Isolde shifts behind me.
She’s the only guard allowed to witness this exchange.
I’m not stupid enough to be alone with the Magician.
There are still tricks up his sleeve.
“This isn’t a friendly visit,” I tell him before his attention traces my face to take in my disguise.
I can see the wheels turning in his mind, trying to decipher my intentions.
“Still, you’re here. I have so many things I want to say to you, starting with ‘I’m sorry.’”
The pretty words hang between us, piercing like a lightning bolt.
Too bad my father and brother are still dead.
My hands clench into fists.
An apology won’t undo his crimes as Eos’s Magician, and it doesn’t overwrite the lengths to which he went to subjugate the Nebula by keeping the War Letters a secret.
It can’t make up for the lies he told me to try and get me to give him my throne.
The Epsilon started the First War, and he manipulated and killed his own family to keep it a secret.
“Am I supposed to forgive you?” I ask, my tone laced with venom.
He swallows.
“Please. I’ve changed.”
My edged laughter causes a wince from him.
“I trusted you. No, more than that. I loved you.” A sob thickens my throat, but I refuse to release it.
I loved him.
It’s the truth, and he spoiled his love for me entirely.
Now, I cannot even say the words to the man who matters most to me.
Wilder deserves it, but I am broken.
This man broke me.
Don hangs his head, but I refuse to feel sorry for him.
He’s still the architect of our family’s destruction, even now.
I need to remember that.
“I am sorry, Leigh. Please, believe me,” he says.
“I swear I never meant for Thayer to harm you. He was meant to take the letters and bring them to me, but that’s it. Your father was working with Chiron. I was scared Nyx would turn against him and use the letters to instigate war. My goal was to maintain peace, but everything got out of hand. I see that now. I’ve had so much time to think, and I miss you, Leigh. I never meant to hurt you. Please, let me make it up to you.”
“You want to make it up to me?” I ask.
He shifts, the magic-binding manacles around his wrists clinking against the desk.
“Thayer almost killed me, too. If Wilder hadn’t found me, I would have bled out beside my father and Fynn on that pavement. Yet you want to make it up to me ?”
“I am so sorry. I had no idea you’d have your Emergence and Thayer would feel threatened.”
“So, it is my fault my father and brother are dead?” I sneer.
“No!”
“Their blood is on your hands. Not mine.”
I can feel my father and Aradia’s ghostly caresses, but they don’t speak.
This is my fight.
Not theirs.
Don sniffles.
It is a pathetic sound.
“I am repenting for my sins.”
“Don’t lie to me,” I snap.
“I know you’re still pulling strings from down here. I know you’re still trying to take my throne.” The first tear falls.
It trails down my cheek before landing on my lap.
Fuck.
I told myself I wouldn’t cry.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Don says.
“I can’t do anything from in here.”
I laugh.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know; you’re the one who told Stellan about Fynn. Now you’ve put my mother in a corner, again .”
Don blinks.
“Wait, what?”
“She told me everything after Stellan published his article with the information you fed him.”
Don blinks again.
“Leigh, I am at a loss here. Who is Stellan? The writer?”
I slap my hands on the table, causing Don to jump.
“Stop lying! You know who he is, and you’ve been selling him information about Council members and our family to sow distrust. Thanks to you, people are questioning my rule. They’ve lost faith in their queen. Which I’m sure is exactly what you want.” I’m seething, heaving with breath, but Don’s face remains blank.
Fury roils inside me like a volcano ready to erupt.
“What did you expect to happen? That you’d tell Stellan the truth, make people doubt me, and put yourself on the throne as some savior of the people? News flash, uncle, you are in fucking prison!”
Don still doesn’t answer me.
I groan, burying my face in my hands.
“Leigh, this is absurd,” he finally mutters.
“You’re right. I am in prison. How could I?—”
“You threatened me. You said that my ruling would bring instability.”
“I did say that, but?—”
“You are still trying to weasel your way onto the throne!”
“No.”
“Yes!”
“No,” Don protests.
His eyes blaze with an intensity that catches me off guard.
“That’s not true, not to mention impossible. I’ve been imprisoned here for months. I cannot speak to anyone outside the family, nor are you talking to me. I made many mistakes by lying to you, but I promise I’ve changed. I go to the confessional every day, and I have written amends. Didn’t you read my letters?”
I read them, but I didn’t believe them.
Men like him don’t change.
“You are the Magician. You have led Eos for years, which means you are good at cheating the system,” I spit.
The frustration rolling off Don in droves is almost tangible.
“Tell me how you are sending information to Stellan.”
“As much as you refuse to believe me, I am not sending this Stellan information,” Don replies evenly.
The sincerity in his voice gives me pause, but I quickly push the doubt aside.
“Who on the Council is working for you?” Don shakes his head, and I take a deep breath to keep going.
“Are you also going to deny that you didn’t know Fynn was your son?”
Don stills.
What little color he has left leaves his cheeks.
But I’ve been fooled by him before, and I won’t let it happen again.
“Fynn isn’t mine.”
I roll my eyes.
Liar!
“My mother told me you got her pregnant. How did you find out Fynn was yours?”
Don opens his mouth several times before whispering, “Fynn isn’t mine.”
I appraise him.
No wonder Don played cards so well.
“My mother said you announced your intention to marry Lilura di Siena the same night she learned she was pregnant with Fynn. Coincidence or were you trying to rub your relationship in her face because you knew Fynn was your child?”
Don takes a deep, shaky breath.
“I loved your mother, even after she broke things off. The night she and your father announced they were pregnant, I lost my damn mind. I told everyone I was marrying Lilura to hurt her back. Lilura later broke off the engagement because she found out I still cared for Cynthia. For good reason, I suppose. It was wrong of me to use her like that. But I swear Fynn’s not—I didn’t—” He chokes off, seemingly overwhelmed by emotion.
Could it be that Don Raelyn has a heart?
I rub my temples.
If he did, he wouldn’t keep hurting the people he continues to claim to love most.
But if Lilura broke off her engagement to him because she knew about my mother, would she have suspected the truth about Fynn’s parentage?
If she did, did she ever tell anyone?
Maybe Maria or her favorite niece, Gianna?
“I had no idea Fynn was mine,” Don repeats.
“If I had, then I wouldn’t have?—”
“Sent Thayer after us?” My question has him cowering like a small child.
“Your orders killed your brother and son. All for a crown never destined to be yours.” My voice cracks as flashes of That Night return in a flurry.
Fynn’s expression as the world shifted around us.
How he reached for me seconds before he died.
My lungs refuse to inflate.
Water spills down Don’s cheeks.
He doesn’t wipe them away.
My uncle chokes on his grief, and the display is almost too much to bear.
A part of me clings to my memories of him.
Of whom I thought he was.
But that man was never real.
“I’m s-sorry,” Don blubbers.
I wither from his remorse.
For the first time, I doubt Don is leaking information to Stellan.
He looks gutted and pitiful, wailing over the child he didn’t know he had.
The child he killed .
It’s the perfect ending for his villain story, but I don’t have it in me to gloat over his tears.
I feel sorry for him, and the realization shakes me.
“You really didn’t know, did you?” I ask.
“No.” A lifetime of regret and pain fills that single word.
I look at Isolde, signaling with my eyes she should take me home.
My uncle is not my mole.
He won’t save me or Corona.
Isolde moves to the door to alert the guards that we are finished.
Don’s face flashes with panic.
“Don’t go yet. Stellan’s article—tell me what it said.”
“Why?” I rise to my feet.
“Because I can help you.” The desperation in his voice is unmistakable.
I pause, staring down at my pitiful excuse for family.
Don doesn’t deserve my forgiveness.
And yet, a small, weak part of me wants to believe he’s sorry.
“The guards are here,” Isolde tells me.
“Should I let them in?”
“No, Leigh, please, don’t go,” Don beseeches.
More tears fall freely down his cheeks.
More of mine threaten to fall, too.
I glare at him.
“You thought peace could be secured with lies, deception, and murder, but that wasn’t your first mistake. Now, you will remain here until the end of your days, going over all your crimes, starting with my mother, and ending with me.” I watch him shiver, and then say, “Goodbye.”