Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
“Iwas surprised that she agreed to meet so soon, and it doesn’t look like there are any traps around here.” Severi kneels next to me, all three of us hidden in a hedge not far from the meeting spot. Severi looks at me. “I don’t trust this. We just got you back…”
Hollis clears his throat. “We can’t lose you now.”
“You won’t. My Nexus can sense things too, and no one is here.
Rhodes is out there and he would have messaged us anything he found.
He says it is clear,” I gently remind them both.
The only reason the king got me last time was because of Onyx and because I walked to him.
After today, after this, I will not be taken by any immortal king again.
When Alek and I told all my mates and Annie what I need to do, no one looked at me with judgment.
They supported me in a way I could only dream of being supported and made plans to get a message to Georgina.
Georgina made it easy to contact her, considering she has been quite public in the Vian city.
Rhodes’s friends in the city had no issue delivering a message and collecting a reply the next day to send to us.
Hollis grunts. “I should check it over one more time. We have ten minutes until she is expected here.”
“Severi and you have already done it three times over, but there’s nothing here.
It’s just a bench overlooking what used to be London.
” I push down the guilt I feel when I think of how the city, one of life, is now dust. I can see it from here, at least the tips of the buildings in the distance, and there is nothing but grey towers.
Even the trees of this place, Primrose Hill, are grey and dead like the grass and flowers.
A perfect place to look at the destruction we caused.
I want to feel all the guilt for it. I want the guilt to swallow me whole and spit me out the other side, but I know that it was not something I chose to do.
I cannot be made to feel guilty for an action that was not my choice.
It was something my sister did willingly.
There’s a big difference, and one I need to accept so I can keep moving.
This was her choice. Her destruction. The blood is on her hands, not mine.
I may be a monster, but she was the one who used me to destroy. “We wait.”
Hollis kisses my cheek and sits back, but he is tense and on alert. Severi is still watching the bench as if it might turn into a bomb. “My sister would come to see me, even now, even though she probably thinks I’m a traitor. Family bonds are interesting like that. Georgina will come.”
“I’m surprised your father isn’t using your sister, Severi, to try to get you to come back to him,” Hollis enquires. “If you care for her. I wasn’t sure; you never showed any friendliness with her in court.”
“We kept any friendship and loyalty between us a secret, and it was best to do that within the court. She is a good person, and many respect her,” Severi admits. “And because she is a girl, my father ignores her existence. She is lucky.”
I touch his back just once, just so he knows I’m here as he thinks about what it cost him to be the chosen prince to the mad king.
How much he suffered for it. Rhodes comes back, sitting down just as Georgina appears.
Her long blonde hair flows over her back as she sits down on the bench, looking so casual in jeans and a tank top.
Almost human. Yet she is the reason I can’t sleep at night without nightmares haunting me, without hearing the screams of a city and the pain of the ones left behind, missing their lost ones.
“I want to go out alone. Do not interrupt. Don’t stop anything that happens unless there is a danger to me,” I murmur to them. “It’s time to end this.”
“We’re here.” Hollis looks right at me. So do Severi and Rhodes.
Three members of the Vian, a race of people I hated and was so scared of, but they ended up being mine.
My mates. My best friends. The men who would do anything for me, at any cost, and even this…
this unspeakable thing I am about to do, they are here.
I push to my feet and walk around the hedge, following the path towards the bench.
The warm sunlight makes the grey city sparkle as I sit down on the other side of the bench and watch the dead city with her.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks. I won’t thank her for coming; it seems pointless, and threatening her is pointless too. We are both powerful. “I assume some of your mates are here. Let them know I will kill you long before they can get here if you try anything, Gwenieve.”
“This is between you and me, Georgina.” I turn to look at her. “You came alone.”
It’s a statement, less of a question, but she answers it all the same. “I said I would. Not to you…but to him.”
“Who?” I watch her.
“Our father,” she begins. “Our biological father. I killed him.”
Complete shock has me silent for a long moment.
Of all the things I expected her to say, it wasn’t that.
“I didn’t know that our mother was in contact with him after she got pregnant, but she was.
Our father was called Derek, and he lived in the court as a high up noble.
He had no wife, mate, children, or relatives…
but he watched over me, I suppose, from a distance.
Any time I was dragged out of the pit below the house and brought to court to be shown off—for the king’s friends, or for the king to get to know me better, to train me better—he was there.
No one knew he was my father. Even I didn’t.
I just thought he was the nice man who gave me sweets sometimes.
The man who gave me a tissue when I was bleeding from being punched too hard.
“Everything changed when I was ten. Derek turned up outside my cage door. He was a mess—bloody nose pouring and his arm broken. He had blond hair like me, but he looked more like you. You say I look like our mother…I remember you saying that. Derek came into the cage, sat down with me, and he told me I had a twin. He told me that our destinies were entwined with destruction and pain and death, and that there wasn’t much choice in the matter.
Derek was sorry, and he told me that he wished he had changed something…
but he didn’t. All he cared about was you.
” Her eyes tighten. “He spoke about you with love, even looking at me. I was there! I was his daughter too!” She snaps her teeth together, her fists clenched.
“He had a message from our mother. Derek told me that our mother had asked that, in the future, I fill a vial with blood and give it to a prince. A Vian prince to save you.” Her voice doesn’t waver, but something in her eyes does.
“Our mother didn’t pass any messages saying that she loved me.
Didn’t pass any messages of comfort or care for the daughter she’d abandoned.
No, it was about saving you.” She laughs.
“While she played happy family with you, I suffered in a pit.”
She looks out over the dust of London. I know telling her my childhood wasn’t good either won’t make her feel better. She just wanted to be the twin our parents chose.
“I was furious. So furious that I completely lost it. I lashed out, and I killed him. I watched him drain of all his life on the floor, and he didn’t fight back.
The last thing he said was to go to Primrose Hill alone when my sister calls me.
” She stares at me. “He didn’t even attempt to fight me back.
He just let me kill him. I think maybe he thought it was punishment.
Something he deserved.” She pauses. “Perhaps it was. In his last moments, he asked me to come to you. Here. This moment.”
I want to feel something for this man who was my biological father, but I don’t.
My father was the man I grew up with, who stayed for his mate and a child who was not his, and did everything he could to protect me.
It couldn’t have been easy for him, and yet he did it.
My biological father did nothing of the sort, and it looks like he didn’t even try to save Georgina from the Vian king—he let her be brought up like that when it’s likely he could have stolen her away.
“Then why? Why still give the vial to Severi? Why come here if you clearly hated him?”
Georgina doesn’t answer for a long moment.
“It’s the only contact I ever had with my mother.
My father died for that moment. Those messages.
So I did what they asked. I do what the king asks.
I have always done as I’ve been asked, never broken a rule, never failed him…
but I came here. I knew I shouldn’t have come alone, but I want to know why he chose his last words to be this moment.
Why he wanted Severi to be free for you. ”
For the first time, I really see her. A broken little girl who was given to the Vian and shown nothing.
No mercy, no love. “Our mother never told me that she loved me either. At least, not that I remember. My stepfather told me all the time, like he could make up for it—the lack of love and feeling that came from her—but he couldn’t.
No matter how much he tried, he could not. ”
I lift the box and put it on the bench between us.
“My mother told me this is for you when the moment came, when the world is ending and there is nothing left to do. I never wanted to give it to you, and I wish things had been different, Georgina. I wish we had been brought up together; we could have loved each other through the darkness and fought together to make this world better. We didn’t choose this.
” I gulp. “Could you imagine if our parents had brought us up together in a free city with our aunt? That neither of us had been tortured our whole lives, transformed into this, manipulated by the king? You’d be my best friend and my sister.
” I suck in a deep breath. “I think our mother thought that if she drowned me enough, she would drown out all feeling from me so one day I would make a sacrifice for the world. She made me reject my mates when I was fifteen. Perhaps she thought that would make me as heartless as she felt she was, because she had everything taken from her when she was pregnant. The Gods took it, because they knew what we are and they knew, the bastards knew, they wanted a price for the power we have. Our power rivals theirs, and they will not give it to just anyone. They broke us into two and set up our lives to be like this.” I look at the box, then at her.
“I don’t know who gave our mother this box.
I may never know, but it is destined for you. But it’s time you opened it, sister.”
Sister. I say it softly to her, and her eyes fill with tears. We stare at each other for a long time, a moment passing between us that I will never forget. There is good in her, deep down under the broken cracks, but no one can put her together.
“I wish things were different too,” Georgina softly whispers back, her eyes turning to the box. “She really left this for me? She cared enough to leave me something?”
I almost want to stop her. But I know I can’t.
This is fate. This is destiny. “Yes.” The lie rolls off my lips…
because my mother couldn’t love. She was too broken.
Even as it’s painful, I watch her open the box.
All the years that it would never open for me, and it instantly comes apart in her hands.
Her eyes widen at whatever she sees inside it before something slithers out—a darkness like I’ve never seen before, shaped like a snake.
Something so black and beautiful, glittering like stars.
It slams like an arrow straight into her chest. Into her heart, and her mouth opens on a scream.
Death instantly feels close, echoing in the air around us. She gasps, reaching for her chest as though she might stop it from hurting her. Her body convulses and shakes. I pull her to me, holding her against me as if she were just a child. “Wh-y?”
“I’m sorry.” I clutch her tightly. “It is our fate…and the only way to stop you.”
My Nexus takes her power as she dies, pulling it to us.
I close my eyes, feeling her heart slowly stop, knowing that my mother left us nothing but death.
She trained me to be unfeeling, to accept death like an old friend…
but she failed. She never made me heartless.
It’s just not who I am. I feel all of it as my sister dies, and I weep.
I lower my head to my twin’s, letting my tears fall onto her ashen skin as she goes cold.
The sun softly sets above the city, warm orange light burning over us both.
An orb of light floats before me. It doesn’t look like any orb I’ve ever seen.
I imagine it’s probably what mine looks like—red and black, glittering dust, shining bright.
My Nexus grabs it with everything she has, pulling it straight into our chest.
For the first time in my life, I feel my Nexus free. Complete. She peers into my mind, and her voice is firm and angry. “Everyone who betrayed us will now bleed to grey, and we will remake this world. You and I are sisters, my human. They will bow.”