Chapter 53 #3
With a frustrated groan, I lifted my shirt to show the scar below my navel, ignoring the searing pain in my core begging me to stop, and turned around. “What is this?”
Simeon stared at my stomach, swallowed thickly and paled.
No, no, no, no ? —
“What did you do to me?” I demanded, my voice breaking with a sob.
“Aryella, please understand.” He backed away slowly. “It needed… to end with us. With you .”
My hands fell helplessly at my sides. “What are you talking about?”
“Our bloodline’s power,” he answered. “And your power. It’s too much. For someone to wield the power of the Selvaren is?—”
“What the fuck did you do to me!” I screeched, panic thinning the air in my lungs “Tell me!”
“I sterilized you!” he rushed out. “After putting you to sleep, I performed an operation.” Finally, he found the audacity to look me in the eyes. “You will never have children.”
His words rattled around in my mind without settling.
Sterilized.
I wasn’t even sure I wanted children, but now that choice was gone. Another thing he’d taken from me, just when I thought he couldn’t get worse.
“Fuck you,” I breathed tearfully, too numb and exhausted to come up with words brutal enough to capture my hate.
I turned to go, desperate for space, but a tug in my chest stopped me in the doorway.
In my mind, I heard a distant, begging voice, “ Please don’t forget me.
” I winced as the sound of screams echoed in my ears, along with a deep, empty ache.
The same ache that haunted me every month when my cycle came.
I’d told myself it was nothing, ignored it and locked it away.
But I knew there was something there, in the past.
Or some one .
Maybe Gavin had awoken a distant fragment of a memory, embedded in me somehow. I just knew…. the cries . I still heard crying. For him—for us —I had to face that part of me that no magic could ever erase.
Always assume your uncle is hiding something.
Stomach clenched in iron knots, I turned back to Simeon.
“I was nineteen and a half when you woke me, but Gavin and I were married when I was eighteen and three quarters. He and I were together in that cabin for ten days before you took me. Then, you waited months to put me to sleep.” I swallowed the lump in my throat.
“ Nine months.” It was the first time I’d said it aloud.
Admitted it to myself, even. Of all the half-truths and suspicions I’d shoved deep, deep down into boxes I was too afraid to open, this one was the deepest.
Of all the things I’d lost—even him —I knew this was a loss I was not equipped to handle. But if it was true, I couldn’t not know . Not anymore.
“Why did you wait nine months, Simeon?” My voice was a rasping whisper. “You’re not telling me the whole truth. What happened before you sterilized me?”
He carefully set down his book of spells and closed it. He didn’t even have the courage to look me in the eyes as he quietly answered, “I think you already know.”
My knees crumpled beneath me, I collapsed into a chair, and a low, mournful cry escaped from those agonized depths I’d kept sealed away. Before the will to speak could wither and die, I croaked out, “What did you do with my baby?”
His head dropped between his shoulders. “I did exactly what you begged me to. You begged me to keep it safe from everyone, even you. At all costs.”
Dread twisted in my chest. And rage. And sadness. My hands rested shakily over my chest as I struggled to breathe. “What happened?”
Simeon crossed his arms and looked right past me.
“Your labor stopped progressing. The infant got stuck. I’d known midwives to try different methods to encourage stalled labor to continue, but I was no midwife.
I had, however, once witnessed a child being cut out of its mother.
Both lived, and I knew, given Viridian’s power in your veins, that you would, too.
You begged me to act quickly to save it, and that’s exactly what I did.
” My uncle shook off a shudder. The uncontrolled emotion was so out of character for him.
“You were awake, and you felt everything.”
The ache in my chest slithered down to the base of my torso, biting at my spine the way it always did. A part of me remembered.
“It lived?”
Simeon gave a single, firm nod.
“And you won’t tell me what you did with my own child.”
“Do you think I should?” he retorted.
“Yes!” I cried.
“No.” Cruel. Cold. Heartless. That was truly all he was. “No, Aryella, I should not.”
“How could you?—”
“What would have happened to the child of the Butcher and the queen if they knew?” He closed the distance between us and bent down, peering into my watery eyes. “Think, girl! You are smarter than this. Tell me what would have happened to Molochai’s grandchild if the world knew! If Molochai knew!”
“But you kept it—the baby —with me,” I objected. “In whatever coffin you kept me in. I dreamt about it, more than once.”
“Yes.”
“Why?” I begged. “And how long were we together, asleep?”
Simeon stood up straight. “A while.”
I was going to vomit. “You’re sick.” I rose from my chair and staggered away from him. Shera followed, lingering like she might have to catch me at any time. “You’re no better than Molochai.”
“I was protecting you both.”
Even if that had been his true intent, he was wrong. He was so wrong.
“Tell me where my baby is,” I demanded.
“It’s not safe for you to know.”
Flames burned the surface of my skin, threatening to erupt. I wanted, more than nearly anything, to burn him alive right here, in his study. But Simeon was the only one who knew so many things. With this, I was at his mercy.
“Was it a boy or a girl?” I cried weakly.
Simeon sighed. “Do you really want to know these things, Aryella?”