48. Athena
FORTY-EIGHT
ATHENA
M y mother’s dying.
My chest felt like it was about to explode. I knew I shouldn’t feel this way, considering her betrayal.
My mother had made her bed and now she was going to die in it. But it wasn’t that simple. I couldn’t hate her. I couldn’t celebrate her death.
“Take me to her, please.”
My feet bare against the Italian marble, I walked silently next to my husband, my brother and uncle behind us.
We made our way down the stairs, the space getting colder and more narrow with each step. The men’s steps echoed in the stone corridor, the air getting heavier and chillier. The smell of dirt and musk was more prominent the deeper we went into the dungeons.
Manuel scooped me up and I welcomed his warmth.
“Are you okay?” he asked softly, his lips brushing against my cheek.
“Yes.”
I burrowed closer into him, clinging to his strength. In such a short time, my husband and his love had become the most important to me. Our marriage might have not started out as a fairy tale, but it would end as one. I was determined to make it so.
We came to a stop and the iron door opened. There my mother sat, hunched over with her head on her knees as she rocked back and forth.
I slipped out of my husband’s arms, then ran over and knelt in front of her. “Mom?”
It felt like déjà vu from all those years ago when the Triads cornered her and hurt her in our apartment. I had run to her back then too, worried about her pain.
She lifted her forehead, tears matting her hair to her cheeks. She coughed and blood trickled down the corner of her mouth.
“ Yavrum ,” came a weak voice as her unfocused eyes searched my face. My throat squeezed. I hadn’t heard her call me her baby in so long. “You came.”
“Yes,” I croaked, wrapping my arms around her while emotions crushed my lungs.
“You hate me, don’t you, yavrum? ”
I shook my head. “I don’t.”
She might deserve a punishment, but I couldn’t find hatred in my heart. Not now.
“Your father came for me,” she said. “He made me pay.”
My blood turned cold. “W-what did he do?”
As she straightened, she winced. “He poisoned me. Because of what I did… to you.”
My stomach lurched.
“I didn’t ask him to do that.” Goose bumps covered my skin from the cold. My gaze flitted to my husband, then to my brother and my uncle. “Is there anything you can do for her?” I pleaded, tears streaming down my face.
Danil was the one who answered. “We don’t know what he gave her.”
“We can take her to the hospital,” I reasoned, although I knew the point was moot. She’d done too much damage and would forever be a target.
Mom grabbed my hand.
“Atticus will only come back to finish the job,” she echoed my own thoughts. Her eyes darted behind me. “And if he doesn’t, others will.”
My shoulders dropped.
“Why, Mama?” I asked. She turned, her eyes finding my husband. “Why so many secrets and lies? We could have been…” I didn’t know what word I was searching for. Happy? Safe? Content? “I just don’t understand,” I whispered.
She took a deep shuddering breath before exhaling.
“It all started with my parents… your grandparents.” She coughed, her body shaking, and I rubbed her back. “They were about to put me in an asylum.”
Shock rippled through me. “What? Why?”
“Because I… fell in love…” She swallowed hard. “With a woman.”
Gasps sounded behind me but I focused on my mother and the secrets she’d kept close to her heart my whole life. Did I ever know her at all? She’d always enchanted men who readily fell at her feet. She used them for her protection and her own benefit, but she was never in love with them. She could take them and leave them without a second thought.
Was it because of that woman? Qian Long’s mother? But it couldn’t be, because according to Qian, his sister was born twenty-three years ago.
“What happened to that woman?” I breathed. “Who was she?”
“A school friend from a normal family. My parents had her killed.”
“That’s horrible,” I said, grappling with the truth about my grandparents.
She flashed me a slightly crazed smile.
“But I showed them. I avenged her, ended their lives before they could put me away.” I took in my mother’s pale face, the ghosts in her eyes that had captivated so many hearts. “Then I went to live with my sister who everyone loved. But do you want to know the funny part?”
I wasn’t sure that I did but I answered just the same. “Okay.”
“She turned out to be the crazy one.” She cackled, eyes crazed. “Their perfect daughter went insane and the one they attempted to commit turned out just fine.”
“That’s debatable.” Someone scoffed behind me and I shot a glare over my shoulder.
Mom let out a bitter laugh. “I might be a murderer, but I’m not crazy.”
I shook my head, although honestly, it was hard to agree. She had done some insane things. “You were young and needed understanding, not judgment.”
She smiled sadly, playing with her hair. “Always the good daughter.”
My heart ached for her despite the monstrous deeds she’d done. She’d been betrayed by her parents, hiding her bitterness and anger from the world. I started to think my mom’s story was a tragedy because it didn’t have to end this way, if only her parents would have given her support and understanding.
“So you didn’t really like my father? Or… my husband.”
She shrugged. “I didn’t like that they discarded me,” she said, the first note of sincerity in her voice. “Everyone always discards me. I’m never important enough, but my sister was.”
It was then that I realized my mother’s wounds were deeper than anyone could have ever fathomed, but she’d done most of the digging.
“I didn’t,” I pointed out.
She blinked, two heartbeats passing before she answered, “But you did, yavrum. When you picked him over me.” A shuddering breath left me, my mother’s insecurity staring back at me for the first time. Or maybe it was there all along and I was too blind to see it. “He… they…” She tilted her chin at my husband, brother, and uncle. “They will leave you. That’s what people in this world do. They always leave when it suits them.”
“You’re wrong,” I said in a low voice. It’d be a lie to say that the thought of losing my newfound family and friends didn’t scare me, but my friends had been with me through thick and thin. My brother and uncle had been watching over me for years. That had to count for something and prove that they would stick by me. And that alone gave me a small relief.
She let out a breath of disbelief, interrupted by a coughing fit. “Time will prove me right.”
“What about Mei Long?” Danil chimed in, cutting through my mother’s attempt to plant seeds into my mind and soul. “What about her mother who was beheaded because she fell in love with you?”
“Li, the wife of the head of the Triads, was unhappy. I was unhappy. We hated this world, yet leaving it and starting over alone was… hard. But together, we were brave. I was helping her with her newborn, and we made a plan. We had so much in common even before I learned of my pregnancy. She fell in love, and slowly so did I, but I couldn’t admit to it. Not to her, not to myself. Nonetheless, we were close and wanted out, so we planned our escape. Everyone assumed I set Atticus’s house on fire out of jealousy, but it was to set our plan in motion.”
“What was the plan?” my uncle asked.
“Get you, Lykos Costello, to cast me out,” she answered weakly. Her strength was leaving her.
“And how would you have known that I’d kick you out?”
She laughed weakly. “I knew once you learned what I did for Atticus, you would have no choice. So, I made sure you found out. I went to Atticus’s home where Li was waiting for me with baby Mei. She broke down. She couldn’t leave her son behind, so she begged me to keep her baby while she got her son, and she promised to meet me. I pleaded with her not to go, but she was determined. Before she left, she asked me whether I loved her. She wanted to hear those words and I wouldn’t—couldn’t—give them to her. I feared if I did, it would end just as it did the last time. With another death of the woman I loved on my hands.”
I was so fucking blind. Yes, I hadn’t spent a lot of time with my mother since my boarding school days, but it seemed inconceivable that I had never seen it before. I didn’t know my mother at all.
“So you never told her?”
“I knew in my bones it wouldn’t end well, but I agreed to her plan. I took the baby and the money and I set the house on fire. Li went back to her husband to steal her son, and we were planning on meeting in New York.”
I swallowed. “But she never made it.”
This story didn’t excuse her behavior or betrayal, but she had done what she thought she needed to in order to survive. It was her family and the circumstances that drove her to it.
“She didn’t.” Her eyes turned misty. “We would have been so happy. The two of us and the two girls who we would have raised as sisters. If only Li didn’t insist on bringing her son…”
It was wrong on so many levels that she would have wanted the woman she loved to leave her son behind.
“Did it ever occur to you if you told me, I would have helped you?” My uncle sounded slightly bitter. Maybe he could have altered the course of her life—my life—and given her the happily-ever-after that she’d always dreamt of.
“Li haunts me every day,” she admitted after a long stretch of silence. “She died, and I desperately needed to confess that it wasn’t one-sided. That I felt it too. Existing without her was torture.” My eyes burned because I knew there was no saving her. She had been battling her own demons for so long that she’d become one with them. “But you, Athena, and Mei kept me going. The promise I made to Li that I would ensure her daughter was happy.”
“Is she?” I asked, finally understanding why my mother would randomly disappear during my childhood. She was visiting Mei Long, a sister that was never meant to be.
She nodded. “She is, and she’s not part of the mafia world. It’s what I wanted for both of you.”
“How did you convince the Windsor family to allow you to be part of her life?” Danil questioned. “They aren’t exactly known for letting outsiders into their family circle.”
She shrugged. “It was the clause of the adoption agreement. I got to visit Mei as her aunt so I could build a relationship with her. They thought she was my daughter, and since they were desperate for a baby girl, they agreed.”
“Jesus, Mom, why didn’t you just keep her? It could have been the three of us together.”
She cupped my cheeks, staring at me with a sad smile. “For the same reason I had to keep you away from me and send you to boarding school. It wasn’t safe. The Triads would have found her if she’d stayed with me. They didn’t know about my pregnancy, so you were safe. At least for a little bit.”
“So many secrets and lies,” I murmured, disheartened. Manuel’s hand came to rest on the small of my back in comfort, being my rock once again. It was so easy to succumb to all the secrets, but instead, I chose to surrender to his protection and love. “Weren’t you worried they’d catch up to you? Hurt everyone around me? Or your grandchild?”
I forgave her betrayal to me, but I struggled to forgive her betrayal to my baby. Her decision to hand me over to the Triads could have resulted in my baby’s death.
She waved her hand. “I knew they’d come for you—your husband, uncle, or father. As it turned out, it was all three.” I couldn’t quite excuse her based on her assumption. What if they had been too late? “I’m so tired,” she whispered, closing her eyes. “Tired of people. Endless noise. Men. I would just like to go to sleep and never wake up.”
A choked sob wrenched from my throat, the reality of her words hitting me. She would get her wish, much too soon. I cried. For her aching heart. For my own. For the cruelty of this world and humans—my grandparents—that judged her when the opposite could have helped her thrive.
Then, as if the angels finally decided to end it all and give her reprieve, she took her last breath. The invisible, cold death swept through the dungeon and silence descended, interrupted only by my soft cries.
I didn’t know how long I cried or how I found myself in the bedroom with Manuel holding me through it all, rocking me gently like I was a child. Time was of no essence where grief was concerned.
“Your mother’s in a better place, amorina ,” he whispered.
I lifted my head, my cheeks tear-smeared messes. “You really think so?”
He nodded.
“I know so. Trust me, this is for the better.” I knew he didn’t care for her. There weren’t many men that did, not that I could blame them considering all the havoc she caused. “Think of our baby.”
I brought my hand to my stomach, rubbing it affectionately.
“What if you end up hating me?” I blurted out, not realizing that my mother’s words managed to plant a poisonous seed of doubt into my mind. “Or Danil and my uncle? It’d be so much worse to find family and then lose it than never to have it to begin with.”
“Impossible.” He pressed a soft kiss to my forehead. “There’s a reason they like you so much. The reason I love you. Your heart isn’t dead. Alexandra’s heart has been dead for a very long time.” He cupped my tearstained cheeks, his thumb brushing against my lower lip. “Life works in mysterious ways, and ours is just beginning.”