Chapter 52 #3
“My father and I were never close,” Ophiucae said.
“I was different from my siblings. People whispered that my mother must have grown bored with my father and had an affair. When our parents began the spell to leave our home world, I didn’t want to go, so I waited until my mother and my siblings laid their hands on the heartstone, and when my turn came, I ran.
I knew they couldn’t chase me without breaking the spell.
The only person who could was my father, and I was sure he’d let me go.
He would never risk his real family for me. ”
I rolled my head to the side to look at him. “Yet here you are.”
Ophiucae’s features were drawn, caught somewhere between the cold rage that never fully left him and a budding warmth that I still wasn’t sure I could believe.
“What was he like?” I asked.
“Foolish. Virtuous, in the worst kind of way. Always doing the noble thing, even when it tore our world apart.” One side of his mouth slid up. “He would have liked you.”
I shifted uncomfortably. I was still getting used to the idea of Ophiucae as my father. Seeing the Kindred and their parents as family was unimaginably foreign. They were the gods who watched our misfortune with heartless indifference, not kindly relatives I unknowingly took after.
“My people were immortal,” he went on. “Now I am the last one alive.” His head turned, and he met my gaze. “Your father taught you to survive. So did mine.”
The faint taste of a warning spiced his words, but it no longer shook me. I saw his threats more clearly now: the pain-crafted defenses of a man who’d been abandoned by everyone he’d ever loved.
“Do you ever wonder if they’re watching us?” I asked. “The men who raised us . . . do you think they’d be proud of what we’ve done?”
His gaze unfocused, and for a moment, he was still.
Then . . . he shuttered. His jaw set, the light in his glacial eyes going a stormy dark. He sat upright and jerked the book on the heartstone into his lap. “Storytime is over. Return to your cell.”
“Wait, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean—”
“Xipherus, take her back.”
His gryvern speared downward and slammed down beside us. Its fiery breath singed the hairs on my arms as it screeched at me to obey.
“I want to know more about you,” I pleaded. I tried to reach for Ophiucae, but a swipe of his gryvern’s talon sent me scrambling back. “You didn’t bring me all this way to sit in a cage. Twenty years together were stolen from us. This is the chance we never had.”
“Return to your cell,” he barked. “If you will not join me, you can’t be trusted.” He wouldn’t even look at me, his voice growing more detached with every word. He was receding into the safety of his rage, where no one could get close enough to hurt him.
“I can’t join you if I don’t know you,” I begged. “And how can you accept me until you know me?”
“I know enough.”
“Ophiucae, please, it’s not that simple.”
“You would put me right back on that island to waste away.”
I recoiled. “I would never—”
“You’re plotting to use that sword against me.”
“I’m not!”
Silvery light ignited in his eyes—my secret revealed.
“You lie!”
The book tumbled from his lap as he jumped to his feet. He gripped Sorrow’s Edge in his shaking fist and angled its blade at me. Shadows spilled from his open palm, his angry energy crackling in the air.
I scrambled back as he stalked forward, towering over me. “N-no,” I stammered. “I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want you to die. Listen to your magic, you’ll see I’m being honest.”
His fury wavered, caught between my lie and my truth.
I glanced down at the razor-sharp blade pointed at my throat. “The sword. Yes, I confess—I tried to steal it back.”
His eyes narrowed. “To use it against me.”
Yes.
And no.
I swallowed. “The heartstone in its blade—I’m afraid of what you’ll use it to do. And because . . . I’m afraid of what it will do to you.”
His chest rose and fell in a dance of ragged breath and stirring wrath. His eyes were wild, his muscles coiled, but pain was etched across his face. I’d never seen him so conflicted. So ready to kill me, yet so desperate to take me at my word.
Ophiucae lowered the tip of Sorrow’s Edge to my heart.
I closed my eyes. Held my breath. Awaited my end.
And I thought of Luther, and all the time I wished we’d had.
“Go back to your cell.”
I looked up to see Ophiucae walking away.
Xipherus snapped his fangs in my face to push me back, then again, then again, forcing me toward the city.
My heart sank as I gave up and turned away.
I might not have died, but I’d had a chance to open his heart and I’d failed, and that was the greater loss.
With Xipherus snarling at my back, I shuffled to my cell. A glassy-eyed mortal was waiting there with keys in hand. With the stiffness of compulsion, he unlocked the door and held it open.
I wouldn’t have killed you.
The voice in my head stopped me mid-step.
On the island. I needed your blood, not your life, to get my freedom. And you were innocent. Just a child. My child.
I looked over my shoulder at his glowing form in the distance, his back still to me.
That was your mother’s true betrayal. Not putting a sword through my chest. Believing I would put one through yours.
Xipherus jabbed his muzzle into my shoulder, shoving me into the cell as the mortal slammed it closed behind me.
I ran forward and gripped the bars of the door. “Father,” I screamed, praying he could hear me. “If you love me at all, don’t use the heartstone. If you do . . . it will destroy us both.”