Chapter Thirty-Two #2
I nodded, though I made no promises. I didn’t want to invite Dante to dinner.
I didn’t even want to think about him. Things between us had become too confusing.
I still hadn’t completely forgiven him for defending his grandfather’s actions in regard to Olympia’s attempt to murder me, something I wouldn’t be telling my family.
And I couldn’t help but wonder now if he’d known about what happens after the tenth Trial all along and either kept it from me willingly or foolishly believed I already knew.
That I would’ve made any of the decisions to continue competing if I had.
And this betrothal, the weight of the ring on my finger, the memory of his body pressed against mine, was muddying the waters even further.
“Bria is a good person,” I said instead, looking right at Maurice.
Warren stopped chewing, Dahlia looked up from her soup, even my mother closed her eyes and took a breath. Maurice paused in his chewing and watched me, waiting for me to continue.
“You know an acolyte is restricted from marrying, though, don’t you?”
He nodded. Maurice finished chewing and set his sandwich back onto his plate. He brushed the crumbs from his hands. “If she officially enters religious service, yes.”
“She hasn’t yet?”
He shook his head. “She never signed the papers. Cosmo told her to wait. Just in case, he said. I don’t know what possibility he was preparing for, but I highly doubt it was this one.”
Maurice smiled, actually smiled. I was so taken aback, I could do nothing but stare at my oldest brother.
It was only a smirk, and given simply from pure joy at the thought of Cosmo’s discomfort, but it was a smile all the same.
Morose Maurice still had a bit of joy left in his shriveled up old heart after all.
I snorted. Then chuckled. Pretty soon, I was bent over the table, laughing hysterically. The others all joined in.
We were wiping tears from our eyes, gazing around the room, beaming at one another. It’d been too long since we’d all smiled, since we’d had something to laugh about. It felt good. It reminded us of who we were. And it was the beginning of a bridge built over that fragile gap.
Someone knocked on the door.
Maurice’s smile faltered, as did my own, but my mother was the one who stood.
“I’ll see who that is,” she told us cheerfully and headed for the hall.
“Is it true that the Trials get more dangerous as they go on?” Warren asked me, still smiling.
“You know I can’t talk about them,” I reminded him.
“I’m not asking for details. That’s what that silly oath was made for, right? So we couldn’t tell each other what to expect? That’s not what I’m asking. I’m just asking—”
“Adrian,” my mother interrupted us, “you have a visitor.”
I wiped my mouth with my napkin and looked up. What remained of my smile faltered.
“Dante.”
“So sorry to interrupt, everyone,” he said politely.
Dante could have manners when he wanted to.
He just very, very rarely wanted to. And even though he was smiling for my family’s benefit, the expression was painfully fake.
A fire burned behind his eyes every time they met mine.
“Apparently, Adrian and I have some things we must discuss. If you don’t mind. ”
“Of course not, dear,” my mother replied, waving her hands as if it made no difference to her. “You’re always welcome in our home.”
I rose from the table, gritting my teeth with barely restrained rage, and joined Dante in the threshold where I gestured for him to follow me down the hall, through the kitchen, and into the back yard, the only place we could have some semblance of privacy.
I suspected we were both about to explode. And I was right.
“What the hell, Adrian?” Dante hissed the moment the door closed behind us. “You called him greedy? Vain? You yelled at him, then ran off? What in the Geist’s name has gotten into you? Why—”
“Did you know?” I interrupted, fists clinched at my sides.
He blinked at me. “What?”
“Did you know? Did you know that we don’t come back after the tenth Trial, that no one ever comes back if they’re successful?”
Dante’s shoulders fell, his anger deflated.
“Is that what this is about?” he asked, almost irritated.
“You knew,” I shouted, pointing my finger. I jabbed him hard in the chest. “You knew this whole time, and you knew I didn’t?”
“Adrian, please—“
“You’re unbelievable! Your whole family is just—this is unreal. It’s true what they say about you. The Deckers, the Third Ringers, they all say it. The Major Houses are crazy, they’re certifiably insane. They’d sell their own children if it meant pleasing their absent gods. And now this?”
“I thought you knew! You’ve been studying all the old stories with Bria, spending countless hours sifting through all those books with Milo. How was I supposed to know you’d entered the most famous competition in Sanctuary without understanding how it ended?”
“You know me. You know I never would’ve come this far if it meant abandoning everyone I’ve ever loved in the end.”
“Everyone?”
The question hung between us. I blinked at him, caught off guard by his asking it. He was still seething, that ever present rage simmering just beneath the surface, but there was something else in his expression now. Hurt. It cut me like a knife.
“Dante,” I said his name in a whisper. “A girl like me isn’t supposed to make it this far.
I’m not even supposed to still be in this.
I got my family the advancement they needed, the highest advancement they can attain.
Why would I fight to make it to the tenth just to be ripped away from them?
No. No, thank you. I’m done, Dante. I’m finished. ”
I turned on my heel and strode back toward the house.
“They’ll Cull you.”
I froze. There wasn’t a trace of anger in his voice, not anymore. In fact, there hadn’t been any emotion in his tone, like it was no more than a cold, hard fact.
I turned back to him. “Excuse me?”
“They’ll Cull you,” he repeated, voice lower this time.
“Haven’t you ever wondered why hardly anyone is walking around Sanctuary with super strength or the ability to breathe underwater?
Not even enhanced eyesight or a great sense of smell?
People have made it that far, at least, in the last few decades. ”
“…I don’t…what?”
“It’s because they get Culled. Nearly every single one of them. Haven’t you—” His voice broke and he looked away from me. The way the moonlight caught his face as he turned made me think, for a moment, that tears were gathering in his eyes. “You’ve never asked me what happened to my father.”
I blinked. He was right. I hadn’t. I’d assumed it had been none of my business.
As in everything with Dante, we were always there for one another but never delved any deeper into the relationship than we had to.
I’d thought it had been out of a mutual understanding, that he’d known that some things were simply too painful for me to talk about, and I was expected to do the same for him.
But apparently, he’d been avoiding those difficult discussions in an effort to keep me at arm’s length, to avoid getting to know me so well that I became less of an asset to him and more of a liability.
He’d failed. I could tell by the look in his eyes, by the way he held me at night.
Dante of House Viper had let himself care for me.
“They Culled him,” Dante said, though he couldn’t bear to look at me.
“He made it to the fifth Trial, still connected to my mom, so they Culled him. The connection was severed the moment he entered that swirling dark mass. She hasn’t been able to communicate with him since.
I don’t know why she wasn’t Culled too. She says she’s still here to be punished.
That she did something the Geist are punishing her for. I don’t know. I just—
“It’s too late, Adrian. Don’t you see that? It’s too late for us. We quit now and one of us gets Culled. It might be you. It might be me. It might even be both of us. But be honest. Could you live with yourself either way?”
It was my turn to look away. I hated the points he was making, I hated how much sense they made, and I hated that I hadn’t noticed the pattern on my own.
“So we go on to the tenth, and both of us disappear?” I asked. “Is that any better?”
“It has to be. Doesn’t it?” Dante blinked away the unshed tears.
“The Culling is a mark of failure for people unworthy of the Trials. But making it to the tenth…whatever comes after that has to be better. We wouldn’t fight through the Trials toward a victory that brings us nothing but pain and suffering. It makes no sense.”
“You have no idea,” I exclaimed, throwing my arms up in exasperation. “You know even less about the tenth Trial than you do about the Culling or any of the others. You have no idea what will happen to us.”
“It’s the Trials or the Culling, Adrian.” He shook his head. “It’s been that way since the moment we took our Oaths and found each other in that cold maze. I think we should take our chances with victory.”
“But…” My own voice cracked at the momentous decision before us.
He placed his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes.
“We don’t know,” I forced out, my voice humiliatingly small.
The corners of Dante lips tugged up into a delicate little smile, so unlike himself. “I think that’s why they call it faith.”
My jaw quivered.
“We’ll be together,” he told me then, his voice low as he stared into my eyes. “Whatever we’re to face in the tenth Trial, whatever we find in victory or defeat, we’ll go to it together.”
He took my hand and lifted it between us until we were both staring down at the massive emerald glittering upon my finger in the soft moonlight.
“I meant what I said. I’m here for you. I never meant to claim your future.
If I could, I would give you a choice in this.
But we’re standing on the precipice of the unknown and all I can promise you is my heart.
It’s yours, Adrian Bexley. It has been for some time.
I’m sorry our world is like this, that it pushes us to make decisions we wouldn’t otherwise make, to participate in things we wouldn’t choose for ourselves.
If nothing else, I’m grateful that it pushed me to you.
So I will love you. With all of my heart.
If not in this world, then in the next.”
Then he did something so uncharacteristic, I was left staring after him in surprise long afterward. He bent down and kissed the back of my hand before dropping it gently to my side.
Dante turned away and strode toward the gate, unlatching it and stepping out of view, on his way back to his palatial, ancestral estate.
I watched him go until he was gone, my mind whirring.
I stood still in the moonlight and closed my eyes, just breathing, trying to still my beating heart and return to rational thought.
A faint click of an opening door and an oddly familiar whoosh of it sliding open had me tearing my eyes back open. I looked over just in time to see a head of strawberry blonde hair disappearing into the house next to ours.