Chapter 64
I didn't stay in our bedroom. Imagine the idiot I would be if I did that to myself.
I couldn't breathe in there, not with him standing by the door looking at me like I was a problem he had to manage. The walls felt too close, the air too heavy with everything that had just been said downstairs in the garden. I needed space that wasn't ours.
I wheeled myself out of the room, down the long hallway where the guards tried not to look at me too long.
My hands were shaking against the wheels.
Near the staircase, I found one of the maids folding fresh linens and I asked her, in a voice that barely sounded like mine, if she could prepare a guest room for me.
Just for tonight. She looked at me, her eyes softening with understanding, and nodded quickly.
She opened the first quiet room at the end of the east wing, a room no one really used, with pale curtains and a bed that was too neatly made.
I sat there in the middle of that unfamiliar room, in my wheelchair, surrounded by a silence that wasn't peaceful at all. It was the kind of silence that allows every terrible thought to get louder.
I thought he would give me the night. I thought he would understand that I needed to be alone.
He didn't.
The door opened a few minutes later, and Dante entered. He didn't knock. His face was tight with worry and exhaustion, his hair a mess from where he had been dragging his hands through it. He closed the door behind him firmly, and the sound echoed in the small guest room.
For several seconds after that, I couldn't move. Couldn't breathe.
"Your grandfather died while you were here."
He said it quietly, like he had been holding the sentence in his mouth for days and it had finally forced its way out. He had followed me here to tell me. That was why he came.
The room blurred. Dante was standing in front of me and he was actually crying, his shoulders shaking, but all I could hear was that one sentence on a loop, louder and louder until it was the only thing left.
My body reacted before my mind could. "No," I whispered, my hands locking around the armrests until my knuckles turned white.
Dante took a step closer. "Ferial-"
"No, you're lying. You have to be lying."
He shook his head, his face crumpling. "I wish I was."
Something sharp snapped inside my chest.
A scream tore out of me that I didn't recognize.
My hand found the water glass on the side table of the guest room and I threw it without thinking.
It shattered against the far wall. Dante didn't flinch.
I was sobbing now, ugly and broken, gasping for air that wouldn't fill my lungs.
"He was fine. The last time I saw him he was fine. He promised me he would wait for me once I was settled here."
When I was little, I was terrified whenever my grandfather left the house. Every single time, he would kneel down so we were eye to eye and tell me he was coming back. That promise had become our ritual, even when I got older. He had never broken a promise to me in my entire life.
The guest room door opened again and Mama appeared, her hand flying to her mouth when she saw the broken glass and me shaking in my chair. Dante tried to warn her, but she was already inside, her eyes moving from the shattered glass to my face and then to her son.
It was her expression that changed everything. The color drained from her face too quickly. She knew. I saw it in the way she couldn't look at me, in the way she looked at Dante for guidance.
That cold feeling that is worse than grief began to crawl through me.
"You knew too," I said quietly.
Mama's eyes widened. "Ferial-"
"Don't lie to me. You both knew you were going to tell me tonight, didn't you? That's why you were all looking at me like that in the garden."
Dante was quick to explain that it had only been a few days, that they had been trying to confirm everything before telling me.
But the number of days didn't matter. The fact that they had held this secret together while I sat in that garden talking about my grandparents was what fractured something inside me.
I demanded to know what they had found, because suddenly the strange pieces of the last few months - the Goddess, the district Alpha, the aquarium, the extra guards - no longer felt random.
Mama sat down slowly on the edge of the unfamiliar guest bed, her hands clasped tightly. She told me my grandfather hadn't been an ordinary human. For half a second, relief almost made me laugh, until she added the next part. But your grandmother is connected to our world.
My stomach dropped. I insisted my grandmother was human, a gentle woman who prayed every morning and taught me about the Goddess.
Mama's answer was careful and painful. She was raised as one, she said.
She was born to a human mother, but her father was a werewolf from one of the older packs, from a time when relationships between humans and werewolves were forbidden in that region.
Her mother had hidden the pregnancy to protect her, and she was raised far from that world, believing she was completely human.
She didn't stay unaware forever. At seventeen, she was found by her father's family.
They didn't hurt her, but they wanted her brought back, claimed.
And my grandmother, who had always been terrified of being controlled, ran.
She had always told me, never let anyone tell you where you belong, and for the first time, I understood where that fierce belief came from.
Then Mama said there was more. She told me my grandfather knew what my grandmother was when he met her while she was hiding.
He was not originally from the district where he raised me.
He came there because of her, because he was the first person who ever treated her like she was simply a woman, not a secret.
He stayed. Of course he stayed. That was who he was, that and he was my grandmother's mate.
She's more wolf than human and managed to suppress her wolf side for years in the district, making her scent human.
The news broke me completely. I bent forward in my wheelchair in that cold guest room, sobbing that I wanted him, that I never got to say goodbye. What if he thought I had forgotten him? Dante dropped to his knees in front of me, and this time I didn't push him away.
He said my grandfather never thought that, and when I asked how he could possibly know that, I saw Dante and Mama exchange that look again.
I told them to stop looking at each other as if I wasn't there.
Dante looked me directly in the eyes and said the reason they had found my grandparents at all was because my grandfather had been protecting me.
Dante continued, his voice low and terrified.
My accident hadn't been random. The investigation had found that someone was supposed to make sure I didn't survive that day.
I had been targeted. Not because of anything I had done, but because of who my grandmother was, and because of who my grandfather had been protecting all those years.
They weren't just raising me, he whispered. They were hiding you.
In the silence that followed, Mama whispered a prayer. Dante told me my grandmother had known something about my parents, that my parents weren't ordinary humans either. And then he said the one thing that made my blood freeze.
The man I remembered from my childhood, the warm, familiar presence with the kind smile whose face I could never quite hold onto - he wasn't a stranger.
That was my father.
I stared at him in that quiet, unfamiliar guest room, unable to move, unable to speak. My entire life rearranged itself in that instant. None of it had been random. And the one question I had spent my entire life trying not to ask came rushing back with such force it knocked the breath out of me.
If my father knew where I was all along, why didn't he ever take me with him?
A/n Sorry if is confusing