Chapter 53
FIFTY-THREE
ARYELLA
I kept my back to him at first. Once Shera entered behind me, I closed the door and locked Elias out, knowing I was trading one challenge for another.
“If they try to force you to do something you don’t want to do, you tell them no, and you don’t give in… Promise me.”
Silently promising him I’d obey, I turned and took in Simeon’s impressive study. Wall-to-wall bookshelves. Multiple tables filled with glass orbs and beakers and flasks. And then… my uncle.
Seeing that silver hair on anyone but myself was surreal.
I wanted to find comfort in his bright green, gold-speckled stare identical to my own, but I couldn’t.
He was lean and of average height, quite a bit taller than me.
He wore black pants and shoes, a perfectly unwrinkled ivory button-down shirt and round spectacles.
Not physically intimidating, but he carried himself with unnerving, omniscient authority that made me want to cower.
But I didn’t.
This man had been the one to break into my mind, steal and unravel it. Wipe me clean for his benefit. Especially now, with Gavin gone… what I wouldn’t give to regain the memories of our past.
Simeon closed the book in his hands and smiled warmly. “It’s good to finally see you, Aryella.”
“Do you want me to rip out his throat?”
“ Let me handle this, please ,” I answered Shera, who’d remained mostly calm and unwavering at my side until this moment.
I gave Simeon no answer, only stared. The way my body bristled in his presence made me think that part of me remembered how he once made me feel.
“Aryella.” He took a step toward me. I tensed and let my disgust read plainly on my face.
“Come any closer, and I’ll let it be a surprise which god’s power I show you first.”
He pursed his lips. “You and I used to be very close. I helped raise you. We’re family .”
He was nostalgic over the niece he had erased, and the person left in her wake was the product of his manipulation. I was forgiving, but Simeon would perhaps take more work than I was capable of. Family didn’t do what he did or take what he took.
When he stepped toward me despite my warning, I kept my word. I unclenched my fists, grabbed the nearest spoke in my wheel and blasted him backward into the craggy stone cave wall with the winds of Sussurro.
Simeon groaned and coughed before pushing himself slowly to his feet. While I stalked closer, he outstretched his palm while he pushed himself to stand with the other arm. “I understand if you’re upset with me.”
“Upset,” I repeated, breathless in my disbelief as I stood over him. “You think I’m upset ?”
“I did what I felt was the only option.”
“You took my life away from me!” One hand fell to my chest, the other over my abdomen. “You took everything !”
“It’s impossible to miss a life you don’t even know you had!” The glass on the tables trembled, as if his own magic, catalyzed by anger, vibrated the air. “And do you think I took pleasure in it? Punishing my only niece, my sister’s only child, for the sake of all these strangers?”
I grimaced. “I think you might have, actually.”
“No.” Simeon scowled and shook his head. “ He was not the only one who loved you. He was not the only one terrified of losing you for good.”
The sudden need to believe that Simeon might care rose up in me like a child’s need for her parent’s approval. But I wasn’t so naive anymore.
“What a way to show your love, Uncle ,” I seethed.
“You don’t know everything, Aryella !” His voice shook, and his stare—a mirror into a past forgotten—lifted the hairs on the nape of my neck.
“I have loved you since the day you were born! I stood beside your father as he held you, tiny and precious in his arms. I heard your first cry. I was there when your mother, my sweet sister, found you at three days old, stabbed through the heart by a man I had trusted and allowed near my family.”
“If this is you blaming yourself for it all, you won’t hear an argument from me.”
Shera nudged my side to remind me of her presence. Simeon’s eyes dropped there. His sneer fell, and his skin paled. “Is that what I think it is?”
“ She is Shera.” My fingers brushed over her soft, silver head, now taller than my hip. “And she is an umbra.”
“And where did you get her?” His body grew stiff the longer he stared.
I smiled proudly. “Where do you think?”
His nostrils flared. What he had against umbras, I didn’t know, but I was pleased with anything that got under his skin. I thought I even saw a flicker of fear in his eyes as he assessed her.
“Of course, the bastard found her and gave her to you. Strays are always drawn to one another.” His expression soured with disgust.
Shera growled. I scratched her behind her tufted ears. I wanted to burn Simeon alive for that insult, but his knowledge was too valuable.
“His name is…” Pain unfurled behind my sternum. “His name was Gavin Smyth, and you knew I loved him.”
“You were children, both of you,” he scoffed, waving my words away like they meant nothing. “Infatuated, irresponsible children blinded by lust. He had no idea what it would take for you to survive in this world.”
“He proved you wrong.”
“I underestimated him,” he corrected me. “I underestimated his obsession, his stubbornness, just as I’d underestimated those qualities in his father who he made the grave decision of going to?—”
“He only went to Molochai because you turned him away!”
“And I could have done much worse than turn him away for even daring to come near you!” Simeon snapped. “But because you loved him, I let him go free. That , I did for you . He could have had a calm, comfortable life and loved again. But like his father, he let obsession consume him.”
“He was nothing like his father,” I growled.
“You didn’t know him, Aryella,” said Simeon. “You had mere weeks with him. You can’t possibly fathom the things he did, what he was capable of.”
“Do not speak to me of what I know!” This time, the vibration of power in the room came from me.
“What I know is how it feels to wake up erased ! To open my eyes from a long, dreamless sleep and feel like a shell of a person!” My throat burned, my words heavy with sorrow, and my body begged to curl up and hide.
But I’d been waiting to tell my uncle what he had done to me, and I wasn’t going to stop now.
“My life felt… disjointed,” I continued, voice quivering in my chest. “I could feel something missing . Phillip and Oliver were dear to me, even Elowen, but they weren’t mine no matter how much I wanted them to be.
When I reached for purpose, there was nothing , and I felt that emptiness everywhere.
” When I tried to grasp the air in front of my face, my fist clenched around nothing . “Until him .”
“You couldn’t have remembered him, Aryella.” Wide-eyed, he lifted a hand in warning like he was daring it not to be true. “Even before, you barely knew him?—”
“But I could feel him!” I yelled over him. “I could feel him like he was the missing part of me! Because he was the only thing that was truly mine , and now he’s gone! After four hundred years of pain and death and loneliness, he died just trying to get back to me?—”
“That was his choice, Ary?—”
“Oh, fuck you!” Flames burst from my fingertips, begging to burn down this entire room. “It was the only choice he had because you took away our choice!”
He scowled down at me. “I see you’ve picked up his foul mouth.” I reared back. “You’re lucky I learned from him!”
“Am I?” Simeon countered. “And why is that, Aryella?”
“Because without him, I’d be dead!”
“Because of him, you did die!” Simeon roared. “Was he really any better than me ? Stealing you away without you knowing why ? Driving you to sacrifice yourself to the enemy because he was too much of a coward to tell you the truth about what he was?”
“He was flawed,” I agreed, “but his heart was good . He fed me, warmed me, gave me time and words and the care I needed to find the will to fight. He made mistakes with grave consequences, but unlike you, I know I was his priority. He loved me.” My voice cracked.
I swallowed the lump in my throat. “ Gods , he loved me, Simeon, and I want my memories of him back .”
For those, I would fall to my knees and beg. I’d do anything to bring a piece of him back to me. But Simeon’s cold eyes told me all I needed to know.
“You refuse?” I whispered.
“I can’t ,” he corrected me. For once, he looked remorseful.
“There is some magic that can be undone. Things suppressed or hidden or bound might return under the right circumstances, with enough power. Death, even, may be reversed.” Simeon gestured to my torso, where Molochai gutted me and ripped out my heart.
“But I did not suppress your memories like I suppressed your power. I used a spell to erase them. They cannot be retrieved. They are gone .”
My stomach lurched. Maybe Simeon really believed that, but I wasn’t sure I did.
There were traces of the past within me.
The emotions I felt and the things I thought I saw in Brinnea before dying.
The nightmares. As if when I slept, my body was trying to make my mind remember what it had endured.
Fragments of my past life. Only, I couldn’t retrieve anything tangible or lasting.
Clearly, Simeon would be of no help, so I turned on my heel and muttered, “Then I have nothing more to say to you.”
“Aryella, please?—”
“It’s ‘Your Highness’ to you, Uncle ,” I corrected him, feeling nothing but cold resentment. “I’m your queen, too. You made damn sure of that.”
“ Let’s go ,” I told Shera, turning to go.
“My power is weakening, Aryella.”
Simeon’s voice made me halt before I could touch the door. I turned back. “What?”
He crossed his arms, his face solemn. “You need to learn all of it. Not just the power of the Selvaren—that, I can still help you learn to control—but also the power that runs in our bloodline, from your mother. My magic, especially the wards.”
“The wards?—”
“—are weakening, too.”