Page 214 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

And yet, he was still my father. I loved him. I missed him. I treasured what little pieces of goodness I had left in my memories of him. I didn’t want to sacrifice them to what Alya was about to tell me.

But I wanted the truth more.

“What happened?” I whispered.

Alya laughed softly. “What happened? She fell in love. That’s what happened. She was a pretty young woman with big dreams who had grown up in poverty. He was a handsome vampire king who made her feel—” She hesitated here, looking for the right word. “He gave her something she’d never had before. He gave her apurpose. Of course she fell in love with him. How could she not?”

I let out a shaky breath.

“What did he want her for?” I asked. “What were they working on together?”

“I didn’t know at the time. I only got pieces, sometimes, when she would write to me for advice. I gathered she was trying to restore something that had been lost, or perhaps create something new. Something very powerful. But she was extremely secretive.” Alya’s eyes flicked to Raihn. “But now, after hearing about Vincent’s supposed experimentations… I suspect she was helping him harness this god blood.”

I blinked in surprise, then glanced at Raihn, who shrugged.

“We got to talking,” he said. “While you were out.”

“I didn’t pry too much about it at the time,” Alya said. “I didn’t care about the machinations of a vampire king. I cared about my sister. She lived with him for years. And at first… she seemed happy. That was all that mattered to me. She came here with him, once.”

My brows leapt.

Now that—thatwas beyond the wildest bounds of my imagination. Vincent,here?In a shack in the human district of a little town that barely made it onto maps?

Alya laughed bitterly. “I made that face, too, when he showed up at our door. And it was—Weaver, it was astrangevisit.”

“What was he like, back then?”

I couldn’t help but ask. Couldn’t stop myself.

She thought for a moment before answering. “I had suspected for a long time what was happening between them. But that night was when I was certain. She looked at him like he was the sun. And he looked at her like she was the moon.”

My heart clenched at this—at the thought that maybe they had actually loved each other.

Why did it make me so happy, to believe that?

But Alya’s face darkened. “But he looked atuslike we were nothing. He looked at our life like it was repulsive. And that’s when I knew. Maybe he loved her in a way. But he could never love her for what she really was. Loving everything in her but her humanity wasn’t loving her at all. Even if he wished it was. Even if he wanted it with all his being.”

My heart clenched. Her words slid straight through the weakest spots of the armor that I’d been nursing for months—hell, years.

Alya saw the pain on my face.

“Vincent was a complicated man,” she murmured. “He was lonely. I think perhaps a part of him genuinely wanted to love her. But he had been alive for a very long time in a very cruel world. He had turned himself into something incapable of such a love in order to survive it.”

“So what changed?” I choked out. “How did she leave?”

“She left,” Alya said softly, “because of you.”

A suspicion that hurt to hear confirmed.

“We had been hearing from her less and less over those last couple of years. I thought she was just preoccupied with her new, exciting life. But then, one day, she turned up at my doorstep and told me she was pregnant. She told me she left Vincent, and she wasn’t going back.”

Alya let out a shaky breath. “I was terrified. I thought, ‘Weaver help us, she’s about to lead an enraged vampire king to our doorstep, and he’s going to kill us all.’ But she said he wouldn’t come after her, and... he didn’t.”

My brow furrowed. “He didn’t?”

Even in my best possible memories of my father, he was never good at letting go of what he considered his.

“Months passed. And then years. And he never came.”

---