Chapter 11 Secrets and Lies #2
I hug my knees, my breath coming in ragged, shallow pants.
“I want to know what I’m running from,” I whisper. “And who I’m running with. And why.”
Shade puts a hand on my shoulder, gentle and warm.
I shrug it off. If I let them touch me, I’ll crack. I’ll break. I’ll let them convince me that their lies don’t matter, and the truth is whatever they want to make it.
I’m tired of secrets and lies. I’ve been suffocating under their weight my entire life. If that’s all they have for me, I’d rather die alone. At least then, I’ll know I’ve made my own choices for once in my life.
“We told you that we knew your father in another life,” Bran says. “That was the truth, Raisa. The Queen couldn’t have children, and the King wanted an heir so badly that it ate him alive. So they filled the castle with orphans. They adopted us, seven boys with nowhere else to go.”
Onyx chimes in, his voice so gentle it almost doesn’t fit his body. “We were a family. A fucked-up one, but a family.”
I picture seven boys—feral, wild-eyed, running riot through the endless halls, their laughter echoing off gold and marble. I see my mother, a woman I know only through photos, pale and perfect, trailing behind them with a soft smile.
“She loved us,” Rune says. “Maybe more than we deserved.”
“We loved her back,” Sable adds, his voice flat. “She was the first person who ever did.”
For a second, I see her, a beautiful woman with skin like porcelain and hair the color of frost, her arms wrapped around a ring of grubby boys, her laugh the loudest in the room.
And then I gasp, realization striking right to the core of me. These men—these seven beautiful, wild men who have fucked me apart and poured themselves into every crack—are my brothers. Perhaps not blood, but my brothers, all the same.
“You’re my brothers.”
“Yes,” Grim says.
I squeeze my eyes closed, trying to process. But I don’t even know where to start, not when they feel more like the only things in the world that have ever belonged to me.
“It changes nothing,” Shade says, his voice firm.
I open my eyes, meeting his, as black as midnight, as unyielding as steel.
“It changes nothing,” he says again.
I nod, slowly. Perhaps he’s right. I have knowledge now that I didn’t have yesterday, but it doesn’t change the wild pulse of my heart or the hot rush of hunger through my veins. It doesn’t change the way they still feel like mine.
“What happened next?” I ask.
“It went wrong,” Grim says, his voice low and hard. “It always does.”
Shade stops pacing. “The queen got pregnant. Nobody knew how. Not the healers, not even her. It was…a miracle.” He spits the word like it’s poison.
“It changed everything,” Bran says. “The King went from desperate to obsessive. He locked her up, wouldn’t let anyone near her except his own guards.”
I swallow, my mouth sour. “What happened?”
For a moment, nobody wants to answer.
Then Sable laughs, a hollow, awful sound. “We happened.”
Shade’s voice is quiet, almost a whisper. “When she was a few months along, she wanted to see us, so she snuck us into her chambers for a midnight feast. We were careful, at first.”
Talon’s hands shake so badly that he clenches them in his lap. “We weren’t careful enough. We started roughhousing, and one thing led to another. Someone got shoved, someone else slipped–”
“She fell down the stairs,” Bran says, his face gray. “We heard the scream, saw her bounce down every step.”
I flinch as if I can hear it too.
Shade’s voice cracks. “We tried to stop the bleeding. We did everything we could, but it was too much. The King found us with our hands covered in blood, her barely breathing.”
I can’t look at them. I stare at my knees, my fingers digging into my skin.
“He blamed us when she died,” Onyx says. “He was right to.”
Grim looks up at me, his eyes rimmed with red. “He said he wanted the world to see us for the wicked things we were, wanted to make sure we never forgot what we stole.”
“What…” I lick my lips. “What did he do?”
“He cursed us,” Sable answers. “No peace, no rest, just wing and feather and pain. He turned us into death.”
I want to scream, but the sound sticks in my throat, horror blooming inside me. I see it playing out before me, seven innocent boys watching their mother bleed out, the King’s hate radiating like a second sun, black magic carving through flesh and memory and hope.
And then I frown. My whole life, my father told me that she died giving birth to me. But that isn’t possible, not if she died when she was just a few months along.
“If she died, how did…?” I can’t bring myself to ask how I survived when she didn’t. I’m not sure I’m ready for that answer.
Shade stares straight ahead, looking at nothing. “He kept her body alive with magic. Old, dark magic.” He swallows. “He kept feeding it into her long enough to deliver you.”
My soul quivers in horror, in terror.
I wasn’t born. I was forced into the world by magic.
My throat closes up, and the world goes dark for a moment.
“What am I?” I choke, the same question I’ve been battling with since I turned men to stone and set free the darkness in my veins.
“You’re her daughter,” Shade rasps.
I shake my head, tears scalding my cheeks. “Maybe I was supposed to be, but I wasn’t even born, Shade. She wasn’t even alive! I was incubated in a womb of his magic.”
No one says anything.
“Why did he want me so badly?” I look around the circle, my eyes wild. “Why didn’t anyone stop him?”
“He told us you were both dead, Raisa,” Bran says quietly, sorrow in his voice. “He was so angry with us, not because she was dead, but because you were.” His hands tremble faintly. “His heir.”
“His magical experiment,” I say, the words hot and bitter on my tongue. He’s never treated me like an heir. I’ve been a princess in a cage, locked away like a secret, kept from the entire world.
“We didn’t even know you existed until rumors of a little girl at the castle reached us.”
Rune wipes at his face. “We came back to the palace then, to see for ourselves. We saw you in the garden, feeding the crows. You were so perfect. You looked just like her.”
His words are a knife in the chest.
I press a hand to my mouth, the tears coming so fast I can’t see.
“You lost everything because of me,” I choke out. They were cursed, punished, tortured because of me. Because my father wanted his precious experiment more than he wanted the boys he promised to protect.
There’s a long, savage silence.
Bran moves closer, his hand hovering over my back. “No. You aren’t to blame for any of it, Raisa. You weren’t even alive then.”
I shake my head, bile rising in my throat. “Maybe I shouldn’t have been allowed to live at all. Maybe I should have died.”
I’m not even sure what I am. Not human, but something else. My mother was dead long before I was born—kept alive through dark magic just to birth me. My brothers were cursed because of me. And my father…I don’t even know what to say or think about him.
My entire life, I thought he wanted to protect me, that he cared in his own way. I’m no longer sure he cared at all. I don’t even think he’s capable of it. I was his dark secret, not his daughter, but his magical legacy, something he used, manipulated, and twisted for his own purposes.
Shade kneels beside me, grabbing my hand. His fingers are warm, shaking. “If you hadn’t been born, the King would have found another way to ruin us. It’s what he does. It’s who he is. We’re not your responsibility.”
But they are. They always will be.
I’ve seen them kill without remorse, fuck without restraint, bare their teeth at the world and at each other. I’ve felt their hunger for me, their need to claim and possess and ruin. And I know, beyond doubt, that every one of them would die for me if I asked.
That’s the thing that cracks me open, finally. The thing that lets some small light in.
I love them. I love all of them, even the broken, jagged, ugly parts they try to hide from the world.
Tears soak my sleeves, but I can’t stop them as the truth of my feelings for them settles over me. I want to run until the world falls away, certain I’m not strong enough for this love, that I don’t deserve it, but my body won’t move.
Onyx kneels and puts a hand on my shoulder, big and solid, impossible to shake off.
“We’re what we are because of his choices, not yours,” he says. “Don’t give the bastard more power over your life than he already took.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, the pain in my chest going supernova.
I sob so hard I think I might vomit.
But the brothers—my brothers, the men who claimed every piece of my heart—don’t move. They stay with me, forming a silent ring, each one radiating a different flavor of guilt and shame.
For a long time, there’s nothing but the sound of my sobs, the pulse of my blood, and the promise of seven men who refuse to let me shatter alone.
Eventually, I run out of tears, but I don’t move.
Nobody tries to fill the silence. Maybe they’re as lost as I am.
When I finally look up, the sun has moved on, leaving thick shadows across the path. The brothers are still around me, a living wall of bone and muscle and regret.
“What do you want from me?” I ask, the words barely more than a breath.
Shade is first to answer, his voice even but gentler than I’ve ever heard it. “Nothing you won’t give,” he says. “We’re not here to take, Raisa.”
The words settle over me, but they don’t tell me anything, not really. “Why are you here?”
Rune crouches beside me, pressing something soft into my palm.
I look down and see the battered, bent black feather I carried from the castle.
“Magic doesn’t obey rules,” he says. “And neither do we. It doesn’t matter what your father wants with.
What matters is what you want. You wanted freedom. We refused to leave you caged.”
I run my thumb over the feather, tracing the subtle bend and the oily sheen. “You could kill me,” I say. “You should.”
There’s a collective flinch, as if I’ve slapped them all at once.