Chapter 47 #3
The chamber inside my head seemed to tilt. Nes. The little girl reached for my mother, those violet-rimmed eyes filling with fresh tears. It was not Neseryn. It could not be.
Shadow struck through Aurenya’s shoulder and ripped her backward.
She screamed. So did I. Light erupted from her body, burning through the darkness, but more Shadow came.
Men entered through the smoke. Behind them walked Kaelros.
He was younger here. He wore no crown. Blood streaked one side of his face.
Aurenya dragged herself toward the child beneath the table.
Kaelros watched. “Where is the other child?”
Aurenya spat blood onto the floor.
He crouched beside her and closed one hand in her hair. “Where?”
“Rot in hell.”
Shadow wound around her throat. The little girl screamed for her mother. Aurenya fought the darkness and unleashed Light hard enough to burn the left side of Kaelros’s face. He staggered, but she didn’t run. She crawled, one hand and then the other, toward the child.
“Neseryn.”
There was the whole name. No room left to deny it. Neseryn reached out from beneath the table. Their fingers almost touched before Kaelros’s Shadow snapped around the toddler’s waist and dragged her backward. Aurenya screamed, not because of the wound but because her child was being taken.
“No! Take me! Take me!”
Neseryn kicked and sobbed as Shadow hauled her away. “Mama!”
“LET HER GO!”
Aurenya’s Light tore through the chamber.
Kaelros drove Shadow through her chest. Bone cracked beneath the strike.
The sound was thick and wet, tangled with her dying breath.
Her Light vanished, and blood ran from her mouth while Neseryn screamed until there was almost no voice left in it.
My mother tried to move. Her fingers scraped over stone.
“Nes.”
Kaelros lifted Neseryn into his arms and turned her toward Aurenya before carrying her away, forcing the child to watch. Aurenya’s eyes remained fixed on the doorway after it closed. Her breathing slowed. Blood filled her mouth and she died staring at the place where her daughter had disappeared.
The chamber slammed back around me. I vomited.
There was nowhere for it to go except down the front of my dress and onto the floor.
My legs failed, dropping my weight into the chains, but the pain in my shoulders barely reached me through the sobs tearing my chest apart. Kaelros stood in front of me.
“You…” I couldn’t make the word finish. “You fucking…”
“Your father lasted considerably longer.”
I looked up. “No.”
“Would you like to see?”
“No.”
His Shadow moved.
“NO!”
The memory took me again. A man was on his knees.
His face had been beaten badly enough that recognition would have been difficult even if I had possessed anything to recognize.
One eye was swollen almost completely shut.
His lip had split deep enough to expose his teeth.
Dark hair stuck to his forehead with sweat and blood, and several fingers bent at angles fingers were never meant to take.
Then he lifted his head. The eye not swollen shut was violet.
Deep violet, vivid even through the blood streaking his face.
My breath caught. The Codex had denied me his face just as completely as it had denied me Aurenya’s, but the instant I saw that eye, the resemblance struck.
Neseryn’s weren’t identical—hers were more violet-rimmed—but there was no mistaking the blood between them now. My father.
Maerox Veylan raised his head toward Kaelros. “We trusted you,” he rasped.
“A mistake you will carry to your grave.”
“You know about the prophecy. You know what will come of it.”
“No, you think you know.”
Maerox laughed, blood running over his teeth. “I know you know you have already lost.”
Kaelros struck him with Shadow. It entered beneath his ribs.
Suddenly I wasn’t watching. I was inside him.
Pain exploded through my abdomen. I screamed, and Maerox screamed with me until our voices became one.
I felt the Shadow moving through his body, not cutting cleanly but searching, pressing, sliding around organs before tightening until flesh tore.
“Where is the child?”
Maerox coughed blood. The Shadow twisted. Deep inside him, flesh tore, and I screamed until I tasted iron.
“Where did Aurenya send her?”
Maerox lifted his head and smiled. “You don’t know.”
Kaelros went still. Maerox saw it.
“You took Neseryn because you thought she might be the one.” Blood spilled down his chin. “But you don’t know which daughter the Codex meant.”
Kaelros’s Shadow tightened. Maerox’s body convulsed.
“And now you will spend the rest of your miserable fucking life wondering whether the child you lost is the one who ends you.”
Fear flashed across Kaelros’s face. Only an instant, but it was there. Maerox laughed. Then the Shadow tore upward.
I felt everything. I came back screaming, but my throat failed halfway through. The sound disappeared and left only air forcing itself uselessly through my mouth. Blood ran from my nose and over my lips while I fought for stone again. Kaelros waited until I could focus on him.
“Your father was very brave.”
I hated him for making it sound almost respectful.
“He loved you very much.”
“Stop it.”
“He never saw you again after the palace fell. He died believing Vare had gotten you away.”
The name meant nothing for half a heartbeat. Then the man with Vareena’s face came back.
“What did you say?”
“Vare Kamari.”
My stomach dropped. The same brows. The same stubborn mouth. Her father. The man who had carried me out of the palace.
“He saved me.”
“Yes.”
“And you killed his daughter.”
Kaelros said nothing. The last of my restraint gave way. Strangely, it felt almost like relief.
“You killed the daughter of the man who saved me.”
“I did not personally put the Shadowkin through her ribs.”
“Don’t.”
“He made a choice twenty years ago.”
“DO NOT.”
“And his daughter paid for a war she did not begin.”
I pulled against the chains until fresh blood ran from both wrists. “You don’t get to say that like it means nothing.”
“To me, it does.”
That was when rage finally drowned the grief.
Vareena was dead because Kaelros wanted me back.
Her father had carried me out of a burning palace twenty years ago, and now his daughter had bled to death in my hands because the same man who murdered my parents had decided I belonged to him.
I wanted to kill him so badly my teeth hurt.
“You’re going to regret bringing me here.”
Kaelros looked almost amused. “You are hanging from my ceiling. I don’t think there is much for me to regret.”
“For now.”
His eyes sharpened. I wanted him to understand that fear had not erased rage.
He walked closer. “You survived because your mother had one child already in her arms and one still trapped inside the palace.”
My eyes burned. “Neseryn.”
“Your sister.”
The words should not have surprised me after the memory. They still did. Some part of me had been trying to create another explanation for the violet-rimmed eyes, the name, the resemblance. Kaelros gave me none.
“Neseryn Vexoria was never her name.”
I stared at him.
“The surname was useful. Nothing more. Nothing less. A child carrying Aurenya’s name would have invited questions.
A child carrying Maerox’s would have done the same.
And I had no intention of placing Nyxara on her shoulders and announcing to Alareth that she belonged to my household.
” His mouth thinned, almost imperceptibly.
“Vexoria made her no one. An orphan taken under my protection. A girl with no history anyone needed to examine.”
My stomach turned. “You erased her.”
“I gave her a life that could survive.”
“You stole the first one.”
“She remembers very little of it.”
“Because you made sure of that.”
Kaelros did not deny it.
“Neseryn,” he continued, “firstborn daughter of Queen Aurenya Evanora and Maerox Veylan.” My stomach rolled. “Your older sister.”
The Crucible flashed through me. Neseryn older now, violet-rimmed eyes hard with contempt. The same mouth I had watched tremble while a three-year-old begged our mother to reach her.
“Did she know?”
“Not at first.”
Relief slipped through me before I could stop it. Kaelros walked slowly around me.
“There was no reason. I had a frightened child who remembered fire, screaming, and a mother who failed to leave with her. Children are easy to shape when you give their pain somewhere to go.”
“You made her hate Aurenya.”
“I let her understand abandonment in a way that served her.”
“You lied to her.”
“I raised her.”
“You stole her.”
“I gave her another life.”
“After you murdered her mother.”
Kaelros stopped. “Those truths can coexist.”
I wanted Shadow back. Not Light. Shadow. I wanted to put it inside him exactly the way he had put his inside my father.
“When did she find out?”
“Recently.”
“How?”
“She noticed inconsistencies. Your age. Your appearance. Your magic. The way Kieran behaved around you.” His mouth tightened slightly at his son’s name. “She knew enough about her own history to begin asking questions she had been trained not to ask.”
“And you told her?”
“When she came to me with the answer already in her mouth.”
My chest tightened. “What did she do?”
Kaelros watched me for a long time. “I asked whether knowing you were her sister changed anything.”
I did not want the next sentence. He gave it to me anyway.
“She said no.”
The pain arrived quietly. No scream. No flash of memory. Only a sharp ache settling behind my ribs.
“She stayed loyal to you.”
“To the man who raised her.”
The Crucible came back. Neseryn’s hesitation. The way her magic had reacted to mine. The way she had looked at me when Light and Shadow erupted in the Solstice Hall. Recognition. She had known by then.
“Does she truly hate me?”
“No.”
Kaelros let that sit between us.
“She wishes she did.”
I stared at him.