Chapter 5
CHAPTER FIVE
M ireille gently stirred the pot above the burner, trying not to agitate the veiling potion she’d spent the past hour brewing.
She’d used the last of her supply during her assignment with the Deathstalker this past weekend, and she wanted at least one vial on hand before she headed to Otto’s estate.
If she went to the estate. It was seeming less and less likely with each passing day.
Ronin hadn’t shown up here at IA HQ for the past three days, and, to no one’s shock, least of all Mireille’s, she’d been forced to begin doing the research into Otto on her own.
Ronin was rapidly running out of time to make his decision. And if he didn’t agree to play along, mission incomplete.
Even if, by some miracle, Ronin showed up today and agreed to participate, there was still the pesky task of getting an invite to the event in the first place.
She snorted a bitter laugh at the thought that all the males she was currently required to depend on were letting her down.
Well, they could fucking get in line. Males had been letting her down her entire life.
From the side of the lab table, that thick, creamy card beckoned with enticing promise.
We have learned the identity of your father.
She’d been trying to do the same ever since she’d come to Kheimos. But with so little information to go on, even the IA’s vast data archives had revealed nothing. Each fruitless effort had dampened that hope in her heart, until it was no more than a faintly smoldering ember.
The Emperor’s offer had brought it blazing back to life.
She tried to ignore it, breathed in the bitter-scented steam of the bubbling potion, the result of crushed leaves of dienswort.
The plant was named after Dienses the Jester, God of Merriment. Also a God of trickery, whose mythology was full of stories of altered appearances causing mischief among humans and Fae.
Dienses was one of the many, many Gods in Ethyrios’s long history of deities. The Jester dated back tens of thousands of years, a Lesser God of the ancient humans and one who ruled before the two species had discovered each other and the reign of the Fallen Goddess, Adelphinae, had supplanted them.
Dienses had, as always, gotten the last laugh when the Empire had suppressed the Fallen Goddess’s influence and re-instated the Fae High Gods and human Lesser Gods to worship.
High Gods, Lesser Gods, Fallen Goddesses. While Mireille grasped the concept of divinity, she wasn’t sure she believed any of them actually existed.
There’d certainly been no talk of Gods in anything more than an intellectual capacity during her ascetic childhood in the Oread Woods, a vast sprawl of evergreens and birches that lined the border between Cernodas and the Northern Territories.
The only Gods who’d been worshiped in the tiny cabin that Mireille shared with her mother Vivienne were practicality, industriousness, and ruthless efficiency.
She could almost hear her mother’s voice as she stirred the potion.
Gently, Mireille. You mustn’t get excited and ruin it. And do not overmix it. Be deliberate in your motions.
Her mother had taught her how to make many potions, poultices, tinctures, and extracts from the veritable bounty of nature that had grown around their cabin.
Mireille had learned at a very young age that the best way to win her mother’s affections—so infrequently given—was to complete her chores and tasks on time and without error. Any mistakes were met with swift reprisals and often meant being sent to bed without dinner.
And though her childhood had been calm, it was entirely devoid of emotion. No laughter. Certainly no crying. Mireille had a vivid memory of falling in their small kitchen as a toddler and banging her knee against a chair. She’d burst into tears and something else had awakened within her, her wolf attempting to come out. Her mother had smacked her so hard that her tears instantly dried and her wolf retreated with a frightened whine.
Vivienne had an irrational fear about Mireille shifting. As if she wasn’t sure what such an act would reveal. She hadn’t even taught her daughter how to do it; Mireille had learned on her own. Though Vivienne herself did go out in wolf-form to hunt every few weeks.
Mireille had spent the majority of her childhood learning to master her feelings, lest she suffer her mother’s harsh punishments.
There were only two instances when her mother had ever strayed from her own principles. When reason and practicality had abandoned Vivienne Valois and the choices she’d made were entirely based on emotions.
The first was anger.
One night, when Mireille was five, a visitor had arrived at the cabin. Vivienne had taken one look out the window and her face had drained of color. She’d hustled Mireille into her bedroom and locked the door.
Ear pressed against the wood, Mireille had heard her mother shouting at the stranger.
Mireille had never met another Fae, so the sound of the male’s voice, raised to meet her mother’s, shocked and excited her. She wanted to meet him too, didn’t understand why her mother wouldn’t let her.
Mireille had barely been able to make out what they were saying, though a few choice snippets stuck with her, even after all these years.
… needs to understand who she is…
…no idea how hard this had been for us…
…I’m sorry, Vivi. Truly I am…
After the voices had faded, Vivienne, eyes red and swollen, came to let Mireille out of her bedroom. Mireille had never seen her mother look like that before, and she was frightened.
“Who was that?”
“No one important.” Vivienne’s cool countenance returned. “Just an old friend. Someone I knew from Before.”
Before. To Mireille’s five-year-old mind, the word held the weight of a physical place. The name of a town, perhaps? The one where Vivienne had lived with her pack before she’d fled, pregnant and alone?
“You are never to ask me about him again. It’s for your own protection, Mireille,” Vivienne had pronounced before fleeing to her own bedroom.
The next day, Mireille had gone out to forage behind their cabin and noticed something gleaming through the needles at the base of a pine tree.
A small wooden box.
She’d snuck it back into her room and when she’d opened the lid, a tinkling melody began to play. A small figurine wearing a pretty pink skirt sprang up, spinning along with the music.
There was a note in the box as well.
For my little pup. I’ll see you soon.
And even though she was young and certainly not privy to the ways of the world, Mireille knew that the male who’d visited the cabin the previous night was her father. And he’d left her a gift.
She’d hidden the note beneath her mattress, the box beneath her bed, and for weeks, months, years, expected him to return like he’d promised.
At night, alone in her bedroom, Mireille would open the box and mimic the small ballerina. Irina, she’d named her, after Irina Amiel, the legendary prima ballerina of the Imperial Ballet in Delos. A fact Mireille had learned from the books her mother insisted she study as her sole means of education.
Mireille would twirl around her room, pretending to be Irina, imagining that if she could maintain the spin for as long as the music played, somehow her father would know. He’d realize she was perfect and he would come back to rescue her from her mother’s suffocating clutches.
But he never did.
So Mireille bore it. Did everything Vivienne ever asked of her. Suppressed her feelings and dreams and lived a life of colorless drudgery, with her untrained dancing as her only outlet. Imagined the life she might have one day if her mother ever let her go.
Her wish came sooner, and with far more violence, than Mireille could’ve anticipated.
The day after Mireille turned twenty-one, two males had arrived at the cabin.
The instant Vivienne scented them prowling through the pines, she’d snarled at Mireille to stay inside, then burst through the door and shifted into her wolf.
Watching through the window, Mireille saw her mother—that proud, copper she-wolf so similar to her own—stare down the two enormous males, one gray and one black.
“Did you think you could hide from the pack forever?” the black wolf growled. “Give the child over, and we’ll leave.”
“ Never, ” Vivianne barked, launching for the gray wolf.
Despite her confused feelings about the woman who controlled her entire existence, Mireille couldn’t stand by and watch her mother get eaten alive. So she rushed from the cabin and called upon her own wolf.
The fight was vicious.
It was the most alive Mireille had felt in years. Maybe ever.
Blood and fur flew as yips and snarls and howls rent the night, Vivienne fighting with a ferocity that Mireille had never witnessed. Mother and daughter pushed the two wolves further into the woods and finally chased them off.
“Psycho bitches,” the black wolf had growled over a torn shoulder as he and his companion fled. “You’re not worth the effort.”
Mireille and Vivienne limped back to the cabin, but before they even made it to the steps, Vivienne collapsed in the grass, shifting back into her humanoid form.
And revealing a sight Mireille would never forget for as long as she lived.
Her mother’s terrified silver eyes swirling madly, her mouth opening and closing. And where her neck should have been, nothing but a gaping, meaty wound. Mireille was amazed her mother had made it through the fight, let alone back to the cabin. Streams of blood pulsated from the torn skin and muscle as Vivienne emitted watery gasps, trying to catch breaths that would never again fill her lungs.
Mireille shifted as well, wincing at the deep gash on her right forearm. She dimly recalled the gray wolf’s jaws sinking into her own wolf’s leg and tearing out a chunk of flesh.
She crashed to her knees, grasping her mother’s hand. It was all she could do. The wound was far too aggressive for even a Fae’s healing abilities to fix.
Vivienne gripped Mireille’s hand, pulling her closer with the last bit of strength in her failing body, and wheezed, “Your…father…”
She never finished her confession. Life drained from her eyes, her limbs slackening, and Mireille knew she was gone.
Vivienne would have been proud of the stoic calm that overtook Mireille as she sat there, bathed in moonlight, not shedding a single tear despite the complicated grief that froze her in place for hours. Her mother had died protecting her, a final act of love and sacrifice. But she’d also died protecting her own secrets. Mireille was simultaneously furious and heartbroken. Vivienne may not have been kind, but she was the only companionship Mireille had ever known.
She buried her mother at sunrise in the field behind their cabin.
And by the time the sun rose to its peak in the noonday sky, Mireille had buried her sorrow as well.
She fled to Kheimos, made a new life for herself there. Took a job with Imperial Affairs that allowed her to use the skills her mother had taught her—the intellect she’d gleaned from the books, her ability to remain unflappably emotionless no matter the circumstances, her talent with potions brewing. She was so good at her job that Skanisse hadn’t objected when she’d requested to pursue her dancing as well. And she’d climbed to the very top of that field with the same single-minded focus and ruthless efficiency she’d gleaned from Vivienne.
She’d changed her last name from Valois to Valette, keeping a hint of her mother’s original surname. Though it was a risk, especially with her mother’s pack members still at large, she couldn’t bear to change it completely.
What if her father ever came looking for her?
She pulled the ballerina figurine from her pocket, holding it in her right hand as she caressed the long, silver scar on her forearm with her left. Two reminders of everything she’d lost.
“Whatcha working on?” a low voice drawled, breaking her from her reverie. She turned toward the open door of the laboratory.
High Gods, Ronin looked like shit.
His clothes were especially disheveled today. And was he wearing his shirt inside out? Purple crescents lurked beneath his eyes, and his white hair was limp and greasy—unwashed for days.
Mireille glanced at the clock on the wall. “Only three days and twenty-seven minutes late. You must’ve been anxious to see me.”
He shrugged, leaning against the door frame. “Needed some time to think.”
“And?” Mireille asked, her heart in her throat, her eyes glued to her potion. Though the fact that he’d come at all was promising, she couldn’t bear to look at him. Maybe he’d only come to let her down.
She distracted herself by decanting the clear liquid into a small vial, then screwed on a silver lid and placed it in her bag.
“I’m fucking here, aren’t I?” he mumbled.
Relief poured through Mireille’s veins as she stood from her seat, then gathered her bag and flicked off the lights.
“Follow me,” she said. “You’ve got a lot to catch up on.”