50
Pandora
J ericho’s body crumples to the ground in a heap, and Venus’s screams leech all the color out of the early evening sky.
The sound triggers a memory, one that fills me with grave fascination despite having the story told only once. A piece of history only shared between the residence of Broadcove Castle.
It was the eve of my eighteenth birthday, the night before I officially entered adulthood and became fully endowed with the rights of Urovian Monarch should any peril come to Broadcove. Jericho had summoned me from my rooms, and while I anticipated a party or some other celebratory surprise, I found him seated in the boardroom, eyes lost in a singular spot on the floor.
There was no build up. No games. Just the two of us and his opening statement of how, despite my years of preparation, there was still one, final story we needed to brief. Together.
He came right out with it. All of it.
Jericho spared no detail. In what felt like the span of one, eternal breath, he revealed every single movement between everyone who was there in the boardroom when Venus died. From the moment she first noticed Diana Seagrave poised to strike him down, all the way up until Venus’s body went limp in his hold, Jericho divulged every detail surrounding the worst day of his life. Even when she came back to him from the Beyond, his joy only existed in response to the unfathomable agony that her death consumed him with.
I had nearly gagged on my tears as I watched Jericho shrink in his seat from reliving the memory of it. I could not pinpoint which part of it tore into me the deepest. Aunt Calliope’s terror. Jericho’s devastation. Venus coming to terms with a painful, early death. The sight of her blood everywhere . Misery swallowed me whole no matter where I turned regarding what Jericho confessed.
Then, just before I had reached the end of myself, Jericho had taken my hands into his own and grasped them tightly. I remember the way his hands crushed the bones in my fingers as he told me, “After I lost Venus, Calliope had tried to tell me that if I fought hard enough, I could survive the pain knowing I had a piece of her to hold onto. It was the first moment I laid eyes on you, and, Saints, you were so tiny and innocent and . . . fatherless.”
The word had felt like the bullet I just lodged into Jericho’s ribs.
“And I just broke. Because here you were, this perfect, beautiful little thing that your mother never once considered turning her back on . . . and yet, I resented you. For many reasons, but most of all, for entering the world in the same window of time that Venus left. I saw it as an equal exchange, a life for a life. And if that was the case, I knew I’d do it.” He stared into my very soul, then. “Given the chance, I’d trade her life for yours in a nanosecond.”
At the time, I didn’t know the truth about the man who fathered me, and looking back on it, I suppose Jericho might have done me a service by staying quiet. It must have tortured him to live a life of limited truths and secrecy—to be forced to mask his immeasurable guilt beneath his benevolent uncle act for over twenty years.
I think that, had he come clean about it on top of everything else that night uncovered for me, it would’ve killed me. Truly, my heart would have spontaneously combusted, and he would have had to clean the splattered pieces of me off the boardroom floor like he had to do with Venus’s blood.
Because my mother loved me unconditionally. She loved me as an infant, helpless to the world and dependent on her. She loved me as a child, when I was learning my morals while actively discovering that being a kid wasn’t congruent to being Jericho’s and Venus’s princess. She loved me as an adolescent, when I would bicker with her even as the source of my anger could be traced back to someone else. She loved me as an adult, when I’d talk to her like I would my closest friend. She was my closest friend. And even when our existences were distanced, her love kept me sane. Kept me alive .
But Jericho’s next words were damn near enough to eviscerate any memory of my mother’s devotion.
“You are everything to me, Pandora,” he whispered, fire-blue eyes locked on mine. There was no hint of mercy in them. “But you’re not her , and you will never be. One day, when you love someone, you’ll understand. The decision to choose them—to follow them down paths of ultimate treachery—will be simple. Second nature. Until then, do not do me the disservice of forcing me to choose between you and her . . . because it will always be Venus.”
It destroyed me.
In that moment, so many horrible realizations came to fruition. All my efforts to please them had been in vain. Any future efforts would be a waste of time. If Jericho really loved me like a father—if I were really his daughter—he wouldn’t have said what he did. No father of mine would have told me that in my purest form, I was nothing of worth to him if Venus hadn’t been resurrected.
But most of all, it showed me the truth of how he viewed my existence.
I was never Jericho’s heir. I was merely Venus’s shield.
Firing Madden’s gun wasn’t out of anger or a rash decision. It was a message . A message that told him those words— “you’re not her, and you will never be”— would come to haunt him one day, when I was ready to prove him wrong.
And today is that day.
“YOU BITCH !” Venus howls.
Never in my entire existence has Aunt Venus ever uttered a hateful word against me. But now, with her eye cosmetics smeared in the wake of her fiery tears, Venus doesn’t even look like herself. She looks more like a mythical being who crawled out from the depths of the Damocles hellbent on plaguing the continent’s population. Sweat streaks through her dark hair, and the lines along her bronze face show her true age beneath all the powder.
“You think I wanted this to become my fate?” I shout at Venus as she stoops over Jericho’s body, a sob choking off the final word. Everywhere I look, all I can picture is either my aunt weeping, or Diana Seagrave somewhere in the Beyond, grinning like a cat. “I didn’t want this curse to come to fruition. I just wanted—”
“You petulant, little victim .” Another sob cracks out of her, drool lining her lips from her hysteria. “Talking to me like you’re the ultimate sufferer of our bloodline. You’re dead to me!”
The formal disownment slides right off me. “The feeling is mutual.”
“You think you had it all figured out,” she rages, and I see the moment she pops a blood vessel in her eye, the dark red pooling in its corner. “So convinced that we are the bad guys, honing you into a cold-hearted killing machine. Because that’s all that Jericho and I ever were, right Pandora? Senseless murderers who got off on killing innocents?”
I say nothing, but Madden stands firm. Kellan raises Hellfire in warning.
“We didn’t train you to be a weapon,” Venus croaks, her voice raw. Depleted. “We only wanted to prepare you for what we foresaw. For the prophecy.”
Prophecy .
I’m once more pulled through time, back to the moment I first heard them whispering about an unknown enemy coming to destroy their home and disparage our family from the tunnels. I was ten, and I remember feeling an otherworldly sense of dread— guilt , somehow—at the panic in Jericho’s voice as he confided in Venus.
Then, I remember the gleaming smile on Diana’s face, back in her namesake’s sanctuary, when she proclaimed the curse she laid upon me as a baby.
“All those years of living in fear and trying to instill protection over you,” Venus rasps, horror overtaking her bloodshot hazel eyes. “Only for it to be your fault. Your doing. We groomed our own destruction for decades!”
The hysterics overcome me in a sudden surge, the shock wearing off and giving way to dread as Venus clutches Jericho’s body like she can bring him back to life.
But there’s no holymen, now—at least none that can raise the dead, turn back time, or to make me feel good about any of this.
I’ve made a cataclysmic mistake.
I stumble back, and when I sink into the warm, firm body at my back—the one that helps me stay on my feet—I startle at the realization of it being Kellan. Of him quietly coaching me to take deep breaths and steady my heart rate. “I’ve got you. It’s okay—”
A blur of color finally emerges from the incinerated castle.
“Mother!” Dorian cries, fighting Eli’s hold on him.
Eli drops him in an instant, outrunning all three of his children to get to Calliope. I’m struck dumb by just how fast he gets to her, and while I can tell that he wants to throw his arms around her and assure himself that she’s here, he’s gentle. Assessing her. He nods once, then conceals her from view as she likely begins to forcefully expel the smoke from her lungs. Eli doesn’t flinch at the sight, merely crouching down to soothe her, to encourage her through the worst of it. When she finally stills, he helps her stand, allowing Calliope to lean on him for balance. She says something indistinguishable, and even from far away, I see Eli’s eyes go wide.
He cups his hands around his mouth and screams, “SHE GOT THEM OUT!”
The words hit me like a tidal wave.
She got them out.
“Thank the Saints,” a voice I wasn’t expecting says through a labored breath of relief.
Kellan’s grip on me tightens as a curse leaves his lips. Madden goes stiff, all movement stilling as he looks towards Venus, who starts to back away from Jericho, giving his body some room.
And then, Jericho does the impossible.
He rises from the ground.