Gant
A breeze drifts in from the open balcony, rustling the papers on the coffee table and blowing one against Aria’s leg. She plucks it off and begins to read, and I let her.
I thought I’d share the news of my new sibling with Dove first, but time, along with my sanity, is slipping through my fingers.
“Your mother’s letters are sweet,” she says finally when she’s read through at least three more.
“What does my name sound like to you?” I ask quietly.
“? Strong. Dark. Pointed. Just like you.”
“But it doesn’t sound royal, does it? Princely ?”
“I know that isn’t a genuine question. So why are you asking me to confirm what you already know?” She shuffles the letters in her lap. “Maybe she changed her mind. Maybe Wilhelm, Henry, or Louie the IV weren’t the vibe when she finally laid eyes on you.”
“She said she fell into them. My pools of spring.”
“That’s sweet.”
“Sweet?” I grit. That dark energy is back, reinvigorating me all over again. “ Look at me, ” I bark, ripping the lamp off the end table and shining it into my face.
She finally spares me a glance, her big blue-green eyes identical to her step-brother’s, still too shiny from tears hours before.
She said Etienne’s gone. Where?
“Do my eyes look like springs to you? Like baths?”
Aria sits up straighter, finally drawing the dots. “If they were filled with ink, maybe.”
I grab her hand and place it in my hair.
“She said my hair was auric. Does it look like I was ever blond to you?”
“Most kids don’t stay blond,” she says, her eyebrows knitting with worry. With the impossibility of it all. “But to go from blonde to jet black… Not chestnut or some other shade of brown…” Her fingers tumble from my hair to my cheek.
“My hair’s always been black. Just like my eyes. Just like my father’s. It was never wheat, or auric, or the same colour of the sand on that fucking beach we dipped our toes into. I never reminded her of a beach. How could I when I look just like my father she despises?”
Aria’s lips part. “…”
“None of these letters are about me. Not. A. Single. Fucking. One .”
I pull away from the slight warmth of her fingers. I want to stay cold and get back to a state of pure numbness.
“I swore that Jaime was a worthless cunt. I swore that my mother was different.”
“Your mother was different. You told me Jaime hasn’t even visited Elle at the hospital.”
“Not that she’ll get the chance now. Elle’s gone, but you already know that. You were on the visitor list with Stassi.”
“I left before them. I guess they’re together.”
“They’re obviously together.”
“So call Zedd.”
Zedd’s Stassi’s twin. It’s a good bet he’d know where she was given his overprotective brother trait, but Stassi’s been hiding secrets from him, namely where she was last summer. If she won't share her holiday plans and weight loss methods, she’ll undoubtedly hide Elle from him and, by extension, me.
No, I’ll have to hunt Elle down myself.
The only thing appeasing me, for now, is knowing that if she’s with Stassi, then she’s safe. Resting comfortably against hundreds of pink satin pillows, her feet elevated, with a butler bringing her all her heart’s desires.
She wouldn’t accept anything from me, even before the rigged ballet slippers. Maybe from Stassi, she could accept what she’s always deserved, and that gives me the tiniest shred of relief.
“I’d rather call Etienne.”
“I told you he’s gone.”
Precisely. “Where?”
“To his mother’s.”
“Etienne never visits his mother,” I say matter-of-factly. “He can’t sleep without you.”
“We’re not kids any more. He can take a trip without me.”
“Can he?”
“Don’t change the subject. Your mother isn’t like Jaime. You always defended the way she treated you. These letters… . She had another little prince?”
“Just one. And he isn’t me. I told you, she didn’t write me letters. Or leave me her precious jewels.” They shimmer in front of the fireplace, tossed on the tile like they’re worthless. Only one held any sort of meaning once I found out they were never mine, and that’s because it sat on Elle’s finger. Until she sold it.
Aria swallows the information and touches the parchment gingerly. “But…still. These letters about some secret son don’t change her affection for you. You can love two people at once.”
“I don’t have memories of my mother before I was eight,” I say, suddenly hoarse. “Do you know that’s not normal?”
Aria just watches me. Waiting for me to go on.
“I had the best childhood here with her. But childhoods don’t start at age eight. I don’t know why she decided to choose me then. Maybe my father was getting more involved at that point, and she woke up to what I’d become if I was under his wing instead of hers. Something had shifted. I don’t know what. I don’t remember a before, just an after.” I look at the letters. “She was his mother from the start.”
“But…if you don’t know about him…she couldn’t have been his mother for long, could she? Not when she was with you full-time.”
“It doesn’t matter. Even if she wasn’t there physically, she was always his mother. From the moment she laid eyes on him. She didn’t choose to be mine until she had no choice. She was forced to become my mother like she was forced to marry Bart. And maybe…maybe when I looked like him, instead of this angelic being with eyes like spring and hair like molten gold, she disassociated from me the way she did with my father. She didn’t love him. She didn’t love me at first sight.”
“But she did love you.”
“After.”
“And that changes everything for you?”
“ Everything. ”
Silence, heavy and suffocating, fills the room for a long beat.
“You’re trying to find this brother, aren’t you?” she asks finally. “ Is that why Bart came to the play? To tell you about him?”
Aria was in the nurse’s wing by the time Bart showed up, but I’m not surprised that she learned of his little visit. What doesn’t Aria know? Besides, why Etienne’s wasting time with Rin…
“He opened my vault. The one my mother left to me.”
“The one with all these mementoes,” she says, filling in the blank. “So he just found out about this child too.”
“He’s not a child any more. He’s a man exactly one year older than I am.”
“Bart’s the most powerful man in the city. Why would he need your help to track this child down?”
“There are no records. My mother was meticulous when she had the baby in a foreign country. Any document that’s out there must be lost or sealed. Everything wasn’t electronic back then, especially if she travelled by land. We don’t even know where to start. Just a place with a lot of springs or baths and a beach, apparently.”
Aria shakes her head. “How does he think you can help if his men can’t? It doesn’t make any sense.”
“I have something he doesn’t. Someone that can retrieve information not hidden on lost ledgers nearly two decades ago, but trapped inside someone’s brain.”
She arches her brow, but then suddenly, a noise that’s been playing in the background comes to the forefront. We both look at the opened tank. At a pale wet face, gaping like a fish that disappears beneath the surface a second later.
Without a word, Aria leaps from the couch that’s blocking out the tank’s entrance completely and gapes at it with an incredulous gasp. I can hear the question swirling in her mind, ‘How hadn’t I heard it? The splashes, the gasps?’ Simple. When her focus is on Etienne, the whole world could burn, and she wouldn’t notice.
Her eyes, those calculating eyes, take in the surface, and immediately, she knows the pool must be buried. Whipping around the couch, she sprints down the theatre’s ramp, throwing the doors open.
By the time I follow her, she’s already discovered how to stop my brew with the push of a button. She’s crumpled on her ass, heaving just like Jarett as the central tank drains.
She shakes her head slowly, gazing up at me as I come to stand beside her. “Bart thinks Jarett is the father, doesn’t he? He thinks Madame rekindled an affair with him after all these years because he’s her baby’s father?”
“Why else would she choose him, of all men? A history makes sense.”
Aria swallows. “He couldn’t get anything out of Jarett, but he thinks Elle, Jarett’s daughter, can. Elle…you’re going to use her to get the information…but you don’t even have her.”
“She’s mine. That doesn’t change just because she wants nothing to do with me.”
“ — ”
“ Mine . She can’t leave me, too. Everyone else can rot, but Elle? She’s my angel. My dove.”
“And what are you to her?”
“I can be her angel too.”
“Of darkness,” Aria says, shaking her head again, her petrified eyes travelling back to the tank where Jarett’s still sputtering.
“We balance each other out perfectly, merging into an umbra.”