Page 67 of Mother of Death and Dawn

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he snapped.

“Bullshit. You know what you saw.”

He refused to look at me. “We’re here because we have to be,” he said. “One night, and Sella was kind enough to open her home to us. I won’t thank her by asking invasive questions about her life.”

I couldn’t even believe what I was hearing.

“Sella was practically inviting you to ask, because—”

“I gave up my opportunity to have those kinds of questions.”

He was very focused on the pamphlet of charter ship schedules. I let out a scoff.

Typical. It turned out ten years of memory loss meant nothing. Brayan hadn’t gotten any less hardheaded. He hadn’t gotten any better at seeing truths he didn’t want to see.

“Brayan, if that child is your daughter, that fact doesn’t change because you refuse to acknowledge it.”

It had been so long since I’d seen this happen—since I’d seen how abruptly Brayan’s perfect composure broke, like a snapped thread. One moment his back was to me, and the next, he whirled to me, every line of his form vibrating with anger.

“Youdo not get to lecture me about my responsibilities to my family. Is your mind too broken to even understand the hypocrisy of your bullshit?”

“I—”

“Where the hell were you?”

He took a step closer, pausing, as if he wanted me to actually answer the question.

Words escaped me. I didn’t know what he was asking. “Where was—?”

“Yes, Max.You.Where were you?You didn’t go to their funerals. Did you know that?”

My jaw snapped shut, words dying in my throat.

“Seven pyres, and me, and a thousand strangers asking me, ‘Where is Maxantarius?’ I made excuses for you. I told them you couldn’t get back in time, that you were traveling with the military. You were the renowned hero, then, after Sarlazai. They believed me. But at night when I was by myself, I would try to figure out where you were. Write to all your commanders. Write to every Ascended-damned hospital in Ara.” He scoffed. “Because I figured you had to be dying, right? You had to be dying to miss the funerals of our entire fucking family.”

I couldn’t speak, horrified with my past self.

No, I wanted to say.You’re wrong. I would never have done that.

But I knew, of course, that he wasn’t wrong. That he was the one looking for explanations I couldn’t give him, and I was the one staring in frustration at a past that I no longer remembered, looking for those answers, too.

“You disappeared after that, and I searched for you for years. Years, Max, while I dealt with everything. All the responsibilities of being the new Lord Farlione. All the arrangements, the debts, the politics. I dealt with it alone, and then I would go search for you.Fucking years.And do you know where I finally found you?”

I didn’t want to know. That door loomed there, in the back of my mind, whispering,You don’t want to go here again.

Brayan’s lip twisted into a sneer of disgust. “I found you in a Meriatan slum, so out of your mind on Seveseed that you didn’t even know your own name, let alone mine. And here I thought I was my brother’s rescuer. Here I thought something horrific must have happened to you to make you run away like that. But you had no interest in being anywhere but exactly where you were.”

Brayan had his fair share of flaws, but he was not a liar. I knew that every word of this was true.

Shame simmered at the surface of my skin.

I wanted to believe there had to be some explanation. Some reason. Something I could tell him to make him understand—makemyselfunderstand.

But what excuses could I make for myself?

Brayan let out a low scoff and turned away. “A decade later, and a part of me still hoped I would get answers when I came back to Ara for you.”

I shook my head. “I don’t—”

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