Page 77 of The Watcher's Bride

“I’m sure you’re wondering why I invited you here,” Cho says to Leo and me. “I see no point in beating around the bush, so I will get right to the point. I would like to extend the hand offriendship and for us to forge an alliance. “I had no desire to ally with your uncle, but you are someone I could work with.”

“You already have an alliance with our enemy,” Leo replies smoothly.

The man waves his hand dismissively. “Only a fool would trust an alliance with Eamonn Quinn. The man breaks them at a moment’s notice and only forms them to try to take down his enemy from within. Quinn is an ally in so much as I have allowed him to exist freely without intervention. He has no involvement with my business, and I stay out of his, provided it doesn’t impact mine.”

“Then why is his son in your inner circle, married to your daughter? Is that not a prime example of Quinn infiltrating your ranks?” Leo points out, eyeing Cillian warily.

“Perhaps Cillian would be best explaining his role here, and why we’ve reached the decisions we have,” the man says, nodding to Cillian, who hasn’t taken his eyes off me since we arrived.

I watch him suspiciously as he speaks. “It’s so good to see you, Nono,” he says, using a childhood pet name from when we were young and still got along.

“I wish I could say the same,” I reply icily, folding my arms.

He winces. “I deserve that. I know I wasn’t always a good brother to you.”

“You were never a good brother to me,” I snap, all of the years of hurt coming out in a rush. “You were Father’s favorite and you took pride in tormenting me.”

“No. Never,” he insists. “Nono, please give me a chance to explain. I’m a victim of our father’s cruelty too.”

I want to scream at him that I won’t believe his lies, that he’s still acting on my father’s behalf and I won’t fall for anything he says. Yet the words don’t come. Something in his expression, or perhaps that small, connected part of our souls tells me to hear him out.

“Fine. But make it quick.”

“I know I wasn’t the best brother when we were kids, I’ll never forgive myself for it, but it wasn’t because I didn’t love you. I was trying to protect you. Father was trying to mold me into his image, to make me a strong, ruthless monster who loved no one and nothing. He knew how much I loved you, how much I cared for you and our mother, and he exploited this weakness. Any time I didn’t act the way he wanted he wouldn’t punish me, he’d punish you. No matter how much I begged for him to hurt me instead, he’d take it out on you, and no matter how hard, I tried my best was never enough.”

He pauses for a moment, looking at me pleadingly. “I realized that if I acted like him, if I pretended I didn’t care about you or Mom, he couldn’t use you both against me. The meaner I treated you, the safer you were. Or so I thought. Then he killed our mother. He killed her because she finally spoke back to him. She discovered what he’d been doing to you, how he’d been… touching you… and she lost it. I tried to help, truly I did, but I was too young and no match for him. He made me watch as he did it, and then he locked me away for a whole year.”

Cillian’s voice breaks as he recounts the story, and despite myself, I want to reach out to comfort my twin. Hejust confirmed what I’d suspected all along, my father was responsible for my mother’s death.

“When he let me out, he thought he had finally broken me, that I was completely under his power. I suppose he had broken me, but I still had you. And to keep you safe I had to do what he wanted.”

“I thought you’d run away. Father acted as though you were dead,” I say.

“I was sent to China as a bargaining chip to live with the Cho family before the wedding. Father arranged it as part of an alliance. Fei and I were married when we turned eighteen,” he says, taking his wife’s hand and looking at her fondly.

“I think he thought it would be a way of punishing me too, of keeping me under his control. But it didn’t work out that way, the Chos treated me well and I learned that you can be powerful without being a cruel psychopath like our father. I was able to become the man I was meant to be without my father’s influence. In return, I told my new father-in-law everything I knew about how our father runs his business. I was happy and safe for the first time, but I never stopped thinking about you.”

“Then why didn’t you come for me?” I ask unable to hide the pain in my voice.

“I tried. When I asked about you, Father told me you’d run away, that you’d vanished. I checked to see if he was telling the truth and I couldn’t find any evidence that he was holding you there. You’d really gotten out. The last thing I wanted was to find you and drag you back into this world. I wanted you to be safe, happy, and out of his reach. So I left you. But then you came back,” he says sadly.

I try to look for any lies, but I see only honesty in his face and those of Mr. Cho and Fei.

“I couldn’t bear to come to the wedding. I knew Father would see and know that I still cared for you, so I stayed away. We’d heard about the infamous brutality of the Belyhs and I wanted to rescue you right away. My father-in-law is the one who convinced me to wait. He saw in Leo what he saw in me, that Dimitri had tried to shape him, but he was not the same.”

“Well, that much is true. He’s a good man and a great leader,” I reply with pride, looking at Leo lovingly.

“I am glad you’re finally happy. I know I have no right to ask your forgiveness, that I have hurt you too much to expect anything. I just needed you to know that my intentions were always to protect you from harm and how sorry I am,” he says sincerely.

“I believe you,” I reply softly, an olive branch.

I’m not ready to forgive him, not yet, maybe I won’t ever. But I do believe him. Part of me wants to reach out and hug my twin, the other half of me. Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. Too much has happened, and it will take a long time to rebuild a relationship, but I’m willing to consider it.

Thankfully, Cillian seems to understand this. “Thank you, Nono,” he replies.

“After the wedding, we started to form a plan to have Quinn take out Dimitri and put you in his place, Pakhan Belyh,” Mr. Cho chimes in.

“You’ve barely met me,” Leo interjects in surprise. “How could you possibly know what I’d be like as head of my family?”

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