11. Scars of Guilt #2
I didn’t bother to remind him that, despite that particular feeling taking root from the very first day, it hadn’t exactly been the right time.
Not as I watched a terrified girl drive away from me down a dirt road while the Rift tore the world open behind her.
Because something in me had refused to give chase.
Instead, I had let her flee rather than terrify her any further.
And I paid the price, because I had searched for her every day since.
Not that she knew the extent of this obsession, nor when it truly started.
That I recognized it the day I felt that familiar tug, that pull toward a girl folded into the dark of a cupboard while danger prowled close.
But time had not been on my side. Not with the wave of threats I knew was coming.
I could not risk her being caught in the crossfire.
So, I had turned my army aside, headed off the danger and drawn it away from where she hid, certain she would remain somewhere I could easily track her.
She hadn’t.
She had slipped through my fingers a second time, as she would so many times in the years that followed. Mere whispers of her presence, never quite enough to capture her.
Until of course… I did.
And there was no fucking way I was ever letting her go again.
“Yes,” I said, working my jaw side to side, trying to ease the tension building there, “Some good did come out of it all.” I let out a sigh, longer and louder than I expected. “But look at the cost.”
I turned to Aster then, because I had circled the matter long enough.
“Alexandra told me the Gorgon King had a hand in bringing the two of you to me in time. However, she told me little else.” My jaw tightened.
“So, you will tell me the rest. All of it. From the moment she forced that Rift open to the moment you walked into a war you had no business fighting in. I want every step of that road, Aster. Especially the ones she would rather I never see.”
Aster’s grin faded into focus. He sat forward; forearms braced on his knees.
“You’re not going to like most of it,” he warned.
“I haven’t liked a single part of this war,” I said. “Begin anyway.”
So, he did.
He told me about the Rift and how she had forced it open, though from what I knew of it, when I had been through it both times, it felt to me like it was never meant to bear a mortal.
He explained how it had taken so much from her that she had crossed into The?kós gray and shaking and barely able to stand, and still she had refused to stop.
He told me of the Labyrinth, that ancient, breathing horror of a maze.
How they had walked its shifting halls precisely because it was the one road that could fold the leagues my army had bled across into much less time.
The shortcut no sane creature would ever take. The one they took anyway.
He told me how they had found the herd living within it.
How he had found Stava.
He spoke of his aunt with a roughness he could not quite smother. The woman I knew he had painfully believed dead for more years than I cared to count. Found alive and leading what remained of his people in the one place the corruption feared to follow.
He told me about the Badlands.
There, his account grew smoother. Quicker.
He spoke of crossing into that cursed garden of stone and bone, of the Gorgon King’s domain.
How they had come away with the relic they needed to bridge the last of the distance.
Yet he did not say how. He did not say what it had cost, only that the Way Weaver had used the torch to tear a door in the world and spill them out into the heart of the battle.
I marked the gap in his telling the way one marks a missing star in the night sky. Because, Theron of House Chrysaor did not give.
He bargained.
He took.
A human did not walk out of the Gorgon King’s land with a treasure clutched in her hands and owe nothing for the privilege.
Aster knew that as well as I did. The omission sat there between us.
The second careful silence wrapped around the Gorgon King’s name in as many days.
First Alexandra. Now him. And I felt the question rise hot in my throat.
But then he reached the battlefield, and every other thought burned away.
“By the time we came through,” Aster said, quieter now, the humor long gone, “it was already at the brink of being lost. The line had broken. The corrupted were everywhere, and at the center of it was a thing the darkness had built out of a thousand serpents and a man’s worst dreams. The Typhon.
” He shook his head slowly, his eyes closed as if he were reliving the memory.
“I have lived a long time, Atlas. I have seen things that would unmake most men. And I tell you, when I saw what we had walked into, I thought we were already dead.”
My hands curled into fists against the desk.
“And Alexandra?”
“Alex,” he said, and something almost like reverence touched the word, “Gods, Atlas…she only went and drove a fucking dagger full of a Cyclops’s lightning into the earth.
Not into the beast. Into the ground beneath all of it.
Like she fucking knew… knew what the land needed and that wasting it killing one wouldn’t win the war.
” He met my eyes. “And then… well, she burned the darkness out of every vessel on that field at once. The corrupted. The Typhon. All of it. She ended the war with a single strike and dropped half a kingdom’s worth of evil into the dirt.
” A breath later, and he continued retelling the story with nothing short of pride in his tone, “She saved your brother. She saved you. She saved me. She has no idea how to stop saving people, that woman, even when it’s killing her to do it. ”
The silence that followed was vast.
Lazaros had gone still and pale, listening to the truth of his own salvation laid out plainly for the first time. And I sat there with my heart pounding against my ribs, torn so cleanly down the middle that I could scarcely breathe.
Pride.
Terror.
A love so enormous it frightened me.
My little warrior, my fated, had crossed worlds, walked through nightmares, and fought monsters even gods would struggle to battle, and she had done it all without me. While I had been here, certain she was safe, certain I had kept her from harm. When in reality…
I had kept her from nothing.
“And the one who began all of this?” I said at last, when I could trust my voice again. “Demetrios. He fled the throne room before my blade could find him a second time. What did the two of you learn about him out there?”
Aster and Lazaros exchanged a glance, and something in it made the hairs on my arms stand on end.
“That,” Aster said carefully, “is the part you are truly not going to like.”
“I haven’t fucking liked any part of this morning since I left my woman sleeping,” I snapped. “So, speak of it!”
Aster seemed to weigh his words, which alone was enough to set me on edge. Aster did not weigh words. He flung them.
“In the visions she was given,” he said slowly, “the ones that showed her Demetrios pulling Lazaros’s strings, she saw his face. His true face.” He paused. “And she… well…”
“Spit it out, Aster.” He took a pause, closed his eyes and released a deep breath before rocking us to our core.
“She believes he is your brother.”
The room went utterly silent.
I looked at Lazaros, and our eyes locked.
“That’s… that’s impossible,” we said, almost in the same breath.
“We have no other brother,” Lazaros added, frowning, shaking his head. “We would know. Our mother, our father, there was no…” He stopped, his jaw tightening. “It’s impossible, Aster.”
“Why?” I asked, ignoring him, fixing Aster with a stare. “Why does she believe such a thing?”
“Because of what she saw.” Aster held my gaze, steady and unflinching.
“In the vision, the man behind all of this looked like the pair of you. Not similar. Not a passing resemblance, a person might shrug away. The same jaw. The same eyes. The same blood, written into his face plainly enough that she swore to me it couldn’t be a coincidence.
” He shook his head. “She is not a woman given to flights of fancy, Atlas. If she says she saw your blood in his face, then she saw it.”
“Then she is mistaken,” Lazaros snapped, pushing off the desk, agitation rolling off him in waves.
“Because I have seen Demetrios. He has served at my side before he infected me with his darkness. I have looked at that man’s face every day for longer than I care to remember, and he looks nothing like us.
Nothing. Darker. Harder. A stranger from end to end. ”
“As have I,” I said, my own voice low. “In the throne room. When I put a blade in his shoulder, I saw him clearly enough. Lazaros is right. Whatever Alexandra saw, the man who walks this world wearing the name Demetrios bears no resemblance to either of us.”
“No,” Aster agreed quietly. “He doesn’t, and that is what I told her, knowing his face as well.” And there was something in the way he said it that made the dread coil tighter in my gut.
“Go on,” I said. “For I know you are not finished.”
“No.” He leaned forward, forearms braced on his knees once more.
“Because she has a thought on that, too. She believes the face you’ve both been looking at all this time isn’t his at all.
That he wears a glamor. A mask of magic, worn so long and so well that no one ever thought to question it.
” His gaze moved between the two of us. “She thinks he hid his true face from the both of you, from me, from everyone on purpose. So that neither of you would ever look at him and see the one thing that would have made you stop and wonder.”
The blood we share.
Neither of us said it.
We did not have to.