119. Violette #2
He takes a few steps away to open one of the double doors behind us.
“You were born here. You belong here.”
I can’t stop myself from peering inside.
It’s very clearly a girl’s nursery room—one that hasn’t been tidied, but remains frozen and dusty with time.
A small pile of scattered plush toys; a crib, sheets dishevelled; a rocking chair with a blanket askew over one arm and a pile of children’s books beside it.
My mind takes in every detail, trying to detect any hint of recognition, but there is none.
“All I have ever wanted is for you to be here.”
Tension and distrust radiates from my males standing beside me as tears continue to spill down my cheeks from beneath my mask.
“Then why?”
“Your mother wanted a different life for you.”
I rear back.
“You left us to live in squalor. To come and go as you please. You didn’t even come to her ascension ceremony. You left me in the hands of House Mothers at an orphanage. To then orchestrate?—”
My throat closes around Thessaly’s name, forcing all that grief into my already streaming eyes. The words come out a whispered hiss.
“You killed Thessaly.”
He shakes his head. “He was trying to keep you from me. What else would you have me do to a male who plots to steal my own daughter from me?”
My body trembles from barely restrained fury. “You could have come to me! Instead you thrust me into the arms of a male too broken to love me, who would willingly pawn me off to his clients, and beat me within an inch of my life!”
The energy radiating from behind and beside me from Azrael, Levi, and Lazarus burns.
My father’s pained expression, somehow, calms at those words.
My father’s head tilts as if I’ve uttered some intriguing revelation. The glint in his steely eyes turns lethal. “Did he?”
I might have wished harm to Lucen, but death... even after his violence and learning his betrayal is not something I desire. The male is as broken as the cane he beat me with—presumably thanks to my father.
My throat works as if it might try to reclaim words too hastily liberated.
As if my father can read my mind, he shakes his head. “Your heart is too soft, minishti.”
Little pearl, in Sinsóli.
The audacity he has to speak to me in such a familiar tone makes me want to rake my claws down his face.
“He cannot go unpunished for such violence against you.”
“I already punished him. You have his soulbound. You have him. Forced them both into your sexual servitude.”
My father smirks. “Ah, yes, but they are together. I am not without my mercy. And I didn’t force Lucen into anything.
He chose to come here. To be with her. Even now, he is likely coupling with her.
I scarcely touch her anymore because she always reeks of his seed.
Her skin, marred by his marks. She’s hardly of any interest to me anymore. ”
“Why not let them be free?”
The grin on my father’s face tells me he thought I’d never ask. “Take the throne as Queen of Sinsól, and you’ll have the power to do so.”
I shake my head. “Who are you? If all this time you actually wanted a daughter, why were you never there?”
My father’s smile dissolves like ash in the wind.
“Your mother and I had a great many differences, and she couldn’t appreciate my aspirations to grow my empire—so that one day, you, and all the generations to come after you, might be able to live and rule beyond this city beneath the sea.”
He pauses, features giving way to resignation.
“I will not try to deceive you into believing that she had no just reason for keeping you from me. From here, your home. She feared that I would corrupt you. Inspire you to be... like me.”
His throat dips as his eyes briefly cast over Levi, Azrael, and Lazarus.
“... A monster.”
When his gaze returns to mine, there’s a brief flash of vulnerability.
“Until her ascension, I tried with all my powers of persuasion to convince her to come back home to me. To convince her that this was the best place for both of you but no matter what I did to make Sinsól more appealing to her, nor what words, platitudes, promises, and gifts I gave, it made no difference. Not when I was waging a war, and I was incapable of being the male she wanted me to be.”
His gaze grows distant as if his mind is traversing memories. Painful ones if the grim look on his face is anything to go by.
“We were never right for each other... I will never understand why Akash bound our souls together; even if there isn’t another soul in existence I’d desire.”
His brows knit together as his gaze returns to mine. “I loved your mother more than life itself. It broke me when she left with you. It’s why I waged war above in the first place.”
The floor beneath my very feet seems to tilt at his words. My features slacken with shock. “What?”
“Your mother left for many reasons, but perhaps most undeniably was that she was not meant to live her life beneath the sea, away from the sun and the forest. Sinsól was once submerged underwater with only the mer, selkies, and other sea-dwelling people as its citizens. After I met her, naturally, I wanted to take her home with me. I had to, after all, the sea is my domain.”
I have almost no historical knowledge of Sinsól. I had denied my curiosities and predilections so that I could continue to ignore the half of me that felt like a wound that refused to close—but I do know that, once upon a time, Sinsól was only inhabited by mer-folk and the like.
The realization that he changed it for her makes me feel like I’m standing on a fault line threatening to split the ground beneath me and swallow me.
He draws in a deep breath, expression deflated. “She wanted trees and flowers, so I filled my city with flora like she’d never seen. Welcomed beings from land to seek refuge so that she might feel more at home.”
His features tighten. “None of it worked... So I followed her above.” His features contort into a scowl as if tasting something putrid. “To live in Narudi.”
He pauses for a moment before he gives a mirthless chuckle. “I was still so naive then.”
It’s nigh impossible for me to imagine my father as anything but the cruel king that he is, much less naive.
“The ways above were more corrupt than anything I could have imagined or prepared myself for..."
My father’s eyes glint; like a blade catching lunar light. “It requires a certain... ruthlessness to survive there..." His voice takes on a bitter note at his next admission. “And pearls aren’t exactly a form of currency.”
I shake my head. “But you said I was born here.”
His gaze slides back to mine. “You were.”
“So she came back with you eventually.”
He heaves a sigh. “Not of her own free will. At least not at first. She hated me for a time... but she eventually forgave me.”
An echo of my mother’s words are a whisper in the back of my mind. Words that I was too young to understand at the time, but that had forever been imprinted in my mind.
“Nothing I do is for him..."
“Everything I do is to protect you.”
“Your father is my soulbound. I couldn’t be with anyone else even if I tried.”
Unease winds tight in my gut, as the many years worth of memories return to me—all subtle hints that my mother left him for reasons beyond what she could have explained to my child-self.