Chapter 16 The Fiction of Her Own Purity #4
Elloven shook her head. “What are you saying? He didn’t kill my brother?”
“I wish I could say he didn’t, Elloven,” Sesto said. “Gennady was the first to learn what the Edevanes had been up to and, for months, slowly and discreetly snuck the girls and the children out of the cellar and set them up with new lives.”
“Yes, this I know.”
“He knew how Jesstin tortured himself over their actions and didn’t want him to suffer further.
He also knew Jesstin would ride to the manor and kill them both, so he said nothing.
While no one would lament that outcome, their power and influence would demand justice be served, and Jesstin would have been locked away the rest of his days.
If nothing else, the two owed a great deal of money to some very powerful people who would want to be made whole.
So your brother did his work in secret, and Jesstin.
.. Well, I know he can be daft, but when he’s keen on something, he won’t let it go.
His suspicions led him to the fateful night he told you about. ”
Little of Sesto’s explanation was new to her, but she let him speak.
“Jesstin’s memory of that night was fractured and unreliable until he saw the full truth of it in the Infinitum, during a trial he endured on his way to find you.
We often bury our trauma, sometimes as penance for an act we could not otherwise live with.
That night, he followed Gennady to the manor and heard for himself how dire matters were.
But he misread the situation because he’d worked himself into such a stir with his suspicions that he wasn’t in the right mind at all.
He thought Gennady’s secretiveness was complicity.
And so, in the midst of a heated exchange, he shoved Gennady, hard enough to send him across the room but not hard enough to kill him—or shouldn’t have been, but your brother’s head struck a table and his neck broke. He died immediately.”
Elloven’s hands crossed over her mouth. Sesto was now the second person to describe her brother’s death in explicit terms, and she’d never get used to that.
“In the Conductor’s tests, he saw the details he’d suppressed, as well as some he couldn’t have known. Gennady conspiring to help, not hurt. Gennady trying to explain. The reality that the poor girl, Bellessa, had died not by Gennady’s hand but by her own.”
“So... So you’re telling me—” Her voice choked. Hot tears slid down her cheeks. “His impulsiveness is why my brother is dead?”
“Castien and Sestinn Edevane are why Gennady is dead, Elloven. Never, ever lose sight of how it all begins and ends with them. I won’t excuse Jesstin’s hotheadedness that night, but it came from a place of unfathomable revulsion at the horrors done by his own kin.
The terror, deep in his soul, of thinking he was just like them.
He asked me, when we were on the road to Rivenholde, about how he should tell you.
He wondered if you’d be more hurt by the act, or that your brother was guilty of the same crimes as the men who had hurt you.
“He’d spent the next two years continuing Gen’s work, which I know because I helped.
For every three we rescued, we’d discover one more we didn’t know about.
Those monsters churned through girls like it was nothing.
” Sesto stopped for a moment. “Jesstin is still obsessed with saving those girls. He doesn’t think I know this, but he donates a significant portion of his own earnings to helping these young women.
” He sighed. “Though after last night, we can all safely say it’s done. ”
“I don’t know what I’m supposed to think, Sesto.” Elloven’s face furrowed in anguish, and more cursed tears flowed. Always the tears. They never ended. “Tell me what I’m supposed to think. Please. Please tell me.”
“You know I cannot,” he said gently. “But now you have the full read of the situation. It is yours to decide what to do with it, and I’ve said what I needed to say. Ah, but there is one more thing, and this, I believe, will offer you some modicum of comfort.”
Elloven sniffled. “All right.”
“Jesstin told you Gennady visited him after his death? Rather frequently.”
She nodded.
“I suspected in the beginning it was an authentic haunting. Had our share in the Reliquary. They’re nothing special.
” Sesto chuckled as he glanced aside in thought.
“But it was Jesstin’s guilt and his power as a necromancer that kept Gennady from moving on.
After Jesstin’s experiences with you in the netherworld, and his confession, the tether disappeared.
And now Gennady has moved on and is finally at peace, not in the Infinitum but in the place beyond, because if no one has told you, Jesstin did succeed in freeing the dead before he saved you.
He waited hours to watch them leave, taking years away from him here. ”
“I see.” Her voice warbled. She didn’t see. She didn’t see at all. It was far too much to take in at once, and after such a harrowing night.
“He had a choice, you know, Jesstin.”
“A choice?”
“You and I know the Conductor was a trickster, but Jesstin... He knew it better than anyone, but on the chance he was wrong, he played its game. The final trial was a choice. He could return to you, be with you, and the truth would never be revealed. He’d have to live with it, but he’d have you.
Or he could finally speak the truth but lose you in the doing.
The temptation for the first option was so powerful, he knew it wasn’t the right one. ”
Elloven wept into her hands. “So he chose to unburden himself and break my heart?”
“He chose what he believed would save you, knowing it meant he would lose you.” Sesto raised his hands.
“Now, I love Jesstin, and so I feel compelled to expound on his love for you, but he wouldn’t want me to, and you didn’t ask for it.
You deserve to feel whatever you feel, Elloven.
I told you the truth because Jesstin is my friend, but I will not sway you one way or the other because you are also my friend.
I did look after you for thirty-three years, you know.
” He reached across the table for her hands.
“And though it may be confusing to hear it, both Jesstin and I want you to be happy.”
Elloven shook her head vigorously as she stained the table with even more cursed tears. “When I saw him last night, standing over Castien, I have never felt more lost, more confused. There’s a lesson here, but I’ll be damned if I can decipher it.”
He patted her hands and gave them a loving squeeze. “But you will, Elloven. When you’re ready, you will.”
“You sound more confident than I’ve ever felt,” she said with a bitter laugh.
“You did not watch an astonishing woman tear apart the skies. If you could see yourself as we see you, you’d have more confidence than you would ever know what to do with.”