Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
ALEKSANDR
Volkovitch Manor
“Did you ever imagine we would live this long? That we’d actually get to see your girl come into her birthright?”
Cameron’s question startled me from where I was playing video games.
Mishka was sitting on the floor in front of me but scrambled up in the slightly clumsy way two-year-olds do at their favourite person’s voice.
He had always been prone to moods, often alternating between calm and slightly depressed, a result of the five years The Guilda made him sit in solitary confinement, a punishment for merely being born.
His eyes still held a sheen, worried for a girl whom he had come to call a sister in every way but blood. “Did you think when all this began fifteen years ago…when the Ellsworth plane was shot out of the sky, and the Yateses nabbed their prize, that it would be the four of us and her?”
He idly twirled his phone, long tattooed fingers quickly catching and releasing it as it spun through the air. His pale green eyes were sombre as he awaited my reply, crouching down to entertain Mikhail.
“I suspected from the first day we met…there was always something about her. And dear fuck, did I pray every night for weeks that it was not her on that plane. Hoping fate would not damn me to live a life without her.”
He nodded as if he expected my answer, however morbid it might be.
The years had not been easy to Cameron or me.
The Guilda demanded sacrifices that were near impossible to make.
The weight grew heavier on our souls as our hands became stained with red.
Funny how everything within The Guilda always came back to blood.
“I knew she was special, brother. That fierce violet-eyed girl who refused to cower away in fear from the beasts that hunted the woods surrounding the cliffs. It’s always confused me though, why the Yateses left her life in the hands of three young boys in the woods.
” His lips twisted in a sneer. That shadow of darkness that I rarely saw within him, turning his eyes a murky green.
“It’s funny, how her mind has yet to recall or piece together the identity of the boys she met that night, again…or the fact that there were four—not three—and that we were the same ones who always followed her around the Ellsworth estate before tragedy struck…”
I faltered at that, remembering the words she had been mumbling as I carried her out of the Labyrinth, after she had finished Game One.
‘Your number has been called. Step forward to receive your fate.’
I’d recognised those words, so had Kellan.
Cameron, Rowan, and the Vesper Princess, whose rumoured return was causing havoc in The Cove, no doubt would recognise those words as well.
Words that symbolised when a child of a founding five had their number called…
the words one heard when they received The Guilda’s brand for them. They still haunted me.
“The way she shut down after the labyrinth…her mind’s remembering what it hid away.”
Cameron’s sharp inhale was the only obvious tell that he heard my quiet words.
I thought back to how Lenochka had been tested time and time again.
Rowan had practically demanded she break to accept her seat among The Guilda heads, even while he knew that the brand on her palm secured her place among us.
He wanted her to prove her worth…maybe not to him or us, but to the other heads across the chapters who would come out in droves to see the last Ellsworth heir the minute her initiation was complete, her name signed in blood in the ledger’s tome.
“Cameron, do you think our roles within The Guilda will be what causes her to finally break…”
“No. No, I think she already knows or at least strongly suspects what the three of us do after Lilah all but confirmed Kellan was The Rose. She was rather angry after Lex’s trial as well…I wouldn’t even be shocked if she’s figured out who Rowan truly is.”
Nodding, I turned back to the game, thinking of how far we had come since The Guilda foisted him on me right after his fifth year. Lanky, pale, and riddled with scars, but filled with this inner light that drew me in like a moth to a flame.
Cameron had always managed to keep a lightness to him, even after all the years he had to survive alone.
His light was what drew Lenochka to him when she showed up in The Cove at the young age of six, drawing her to him in ways that I was jealous of at first, until I saw how they each needed one another to balance the weights their roles placed on them so young.
Lenochka hinted that she had seen Cameron prior to that first night in the Cove.
I always brushed it off as trauma, false memories of a child who wasn’t able to process what she saw and endured, until three years ago, when Cameron had practically gone comatose at her being sent away.
He finally admitted that she had been the girl he had met while he was imprisoned in the Ellsworth dungeons, stone-walled cells where Lenochka’s father had taught me the art of torturing and interrogating a man.
The bond I shared with Cameron had been put through the wringer. While The Guilda prided itself on how it destroyed young minds to rebuild them into what it wanted, the two of us became inseparable.
Forged into weapons not even our predecessors could tame.
Weapons that The Guilda had never seen the might of before, ones forged in fire and blood.
Loyalty and honour proven time and time again.
A family formed in the trenches of interwoven pasts and truths that were proven so dangerous that very few could harbour them—let alone survive the burden they weighed.
Along with Cameron came Kellan and Rowan. Atlas Vesper had been our fifth, before The Guilda placed a black mark on his family, executing them as traitors, without judge or jury, to the society that had taken our blood in promise to never defect…never deceive.
The four of us made up the heirs of The Guilda. Lenochka would be the sixth, the final chair, since any surviving Ravens had gone into hiding, trying to protect their precious daughter, Calliope. A potential ally we might have now that it had been confirmed she was indeed back in Alabastor Cove.
“Did you plan this, Aleks?” Cameron’s voice startled me, bringing me back to the present as memories of much simpler times dissolved into smoke.
He was now sprawled against the couch, teaching Mikhail how to play with a game controller fruitlessly, since the boy was content to bash it against any available surface instead.
“Please tell me it was just a coincidence, that you didn’t plan to damn our Little Queen.”
He was right to question this of me. My obsession with her had always been obvious. Not like you tried to hide it, King. My love was hidden under shades of green and rivers of red when other boys strayed too close. Especially when I had to end her unknown enemies.
“I suspected…but no. No, I didn’t want this for her…not now.”
I closed my eyes, shaking my head, imagining how she would look in the months to come, that newly minted crown seated on her head. Untouchable. Gorgeous.
Mine.
“Not yet. At least…not like this. But yes, someday I hoped we could have this again. So, I won’t say I’m sorry it happened, just that I’m afraid of what will happen now that it has.”
He dropped his head, but not before I caught the look of defeat in his eyes.
They expected me to run from my mistakes, even while they knew I had never seen my life without her at my side.
Now I would be able to protect her fully, not having to fear a ghost or coward who would succumb to the greed of a quick rise to infamy.
I’d be able to take her out, hold her hand, stop pretending like the last two years and change had not tested me. I would never have to encounter her sobbing at the choice we made, her walking away, the way I felt like my heart was straying farther and farther from that dream I’d had of us.
That vibrant and cunning ice-violet-eyed girl who ran through the woods of her London estate turned into the fiercely smart young woman who would always believe she had outplayed me at Prep—and University—at every turn.
A win I gave her easily. Lenochka would have never strayed too far from me once our paths crossed again.
Paths fated in the stars and sealed in promises of blood.
She was always meant to be mine, something even her father saw in the filthy cells under his own estate: starved, dirty, and furious when we had found her locked inside the Ellsworth dungeon. That night, the last bit of innocence left her eyes.
“I will do what I must. And so will she, Cam. It’s time you finally put your faith in us—in me. I’d never do something that would prevent her being whoever she wanted to be.”
“I know. I just worry. She’s like family. Hot, sexy family I wouldn’t mind boning again, but family, ya know? Maybe more like the hot in-law you wanna bang during the holidays…but family nonetheless.”
He stopped his spiral at my warning growl. Mikhail continued to destroy the den, oblivious to the way his idol had paused playing with him. “Never again. Goddamn it, I’ll never share her again.”
“Get her through the trial coming, and no man would dare even whisper the desires to put their cocks in her. Not now that she’ll have your ring.”
“Don’t forget she will soon accept the throne of her Russian roots. Fitting that the Antonovs will have a proper pakhana again, sitting at the table of the Iron Crown in an honoured position no less.”
“And what an honour it will be to see that little girl we swore to protect become everything she used to dream of being.”
Cameron’s words struck a home. I knew we had trials coming that would test the two of us, but she would always come first, if not a close second to him—luchik, the little boy we protected, the one currently destroying my home.
I found myself in Mikhail’s room later that night. Watching him, Mishka, sleep had always calmed me. Although tonight, fear weighed down on me. Fear that I had failed this boy whose innocence depended on being kept hidden.
Fear that I wouldn’t be able to save his mother when she was finally allowed to show her face and accept him formally. Fear that The Guilda and the upcoming months would push me over the edge…fear that my world would rather see him hanged than continue to breathe.
Born into a death sentence, a bounty was over his head. All because of whose son he was. And the names he would come to bear when he was of age.
“Da, pleeeeeseee,” his tiny voice whined. “Cam-Cam. Tattas for me too?” Dreamland kept him under as I stood at the door of his room laughing quietly as I listened to his musings, wondering what he dreamed of and how many tattoos Cameron would be suckered into giving him as he grew.
I was reluctant to walk in until his mother could once again hold him, hating how unfair his life had been, choosing to watch him instead, as he kicked his feet in the air, his arm latched onto the stuffed Cerberus toy bigger than him.
He was not a calm sleeper and, over the last few years, had kept both Cameron and me on our toes.
Even Kellan and Rowan were immediately won over by his inquisitive eyes, a dead giveaway to his family line, the way he seemed to stare into your soul when he deigned to look you in the eye. Born a fighter, just like his mother.
Yes. All the sacrifices were worth it if I could unite luchik with her. He had family willing to die to protect him, and I feared that in these next few months, death might call a few of them back home.
Little sun.
A ghost hidden in plain sight.
Protected.
Shadowed.
Hidden at all costs.
I would do anything. For him. For her.
For us.
I backed away, passing a sombre Cameron as I went. Kellan stood stoically at his side. Both knew how hard this was for me…having to always walk away. I nodded to them as they walked into his room, Kellan squeezing my shoulder as he passed me. Quiet understanding of the stakes that were just raised.
‘I will do what I must.
For him.
For her.
For us.’
A promise to a late father, one I would die for, an oath I would gladly swear on my blood. The wish that all of us made it out of this alive and intact, if not fully whole.
Entering my room, I headed for the window that looked out to the cliffs. The realisation that life was about to become a lot worse before I could finally breathe again crashed down upon me as I fell to my knees, praying and begging to any god who would listen to not take these souls away from me.
“Dear god, I beg of you…please let them be safe, from death and betrayals. From this world that refuses to stop taking my heart from me.”