Page 90 of Tethered Souls
“Come stroke your fingers along my handle. Oh yeah, just like that. Stab.”
They rib him for being rubbish, hiding their fear behind jokes and smiles, but I keep quiet as I recognize the look in his eyes. The pain in them that someone he loves is missing from this crowd of people welcoming him back to the world of the living – the woman he started stalking two years ago after she bumped into him on the street.His girl.The only one he really wants to see.
“Vinny?” I ask, cutting through the rest of my brothers.
“Dead,” he says, the word flat, and I know he is grieving.
He needs to see her, needs her to recover.
So I nod, silently communicating we can talk later, and before my head even rises, he’s shifted into his shadow. As exclamations of, “What the fuck,” resonate around the room, with one, “You need to rest!” yelled by Mother, Khalid peels off under our feet and races out the door.
I wish to do the same as him. To leave all this darkness behind for one fucking night and take comfort in my girl.
But I have too many questions that need answering.
And she isn’t my girl...
“Meeting tomorrow at dinner.” I walk out of the room. The others follow behind me, their nerves still drawn tight even as they start joking again about Khalid trying to catch the last hour of some gun and knife show. Out in the hall, they all head downstairs, no one wanting to face their grief alone. Mother stays behind, as do I. She looks at me, and I turn for my study.
Once inside with the silence ward activated, I pivot to her. “Why did Aleric help us?”
She crosses the room to the cabinet where I keep the fine liquor required for toasts in the closing of deals. She pulls out a bottle of single malt scotch and two glass tumblers.
“I don’t want one.”
“It’s for your father.”
I half turn towards the door, expecting to see someone behind me. My pulse pounds in every part of my fucking body until even my skin is vibrating from it.
But there’s no one there.
I turn back around to see her lifting both glasses. One she raises to her lips and knocks back. The other she holds out in front of her.
“I’m sorry,” she murmurs as she tips it sideways, and the fifty-year-old Highland Park pours out onto the floor, then gets eaten by her shadows. For once, I don’t mention her use of magic.
“After Caden cursed me,” she says slowly, “I took him into my shadows.”
“Why? Out of guilt?”
“Out of love.” She smiles softly as she lifts her head, then turns to pour herself another shot. Leaning back on the long cabinet, she meets my eye. “I was gifted to him before I was even a week old. He named me, and from that moment on, my life was his. Everything I learned was to serve him. My parents made me believe it was an honor, that he was a prince and I a princess. I loved him before I even knew what love was.”
Her eyes drop to the floor, to where she poured the other drink, but her shadows are no longer there. Her smile turns sad, then falls away completely. “Khalid thinks Caden and I never loved each other, but he’s only part right. Neither of us really knew what love was, but we believed we had it with each other. But I was gifted to him. I was a thing he latched onto to survive his own hel. If he didn’t marry me, his dad would’ve killed both of his brothers. So he built me up as this great thing, this toy to cherish.” Her eyes mist, and I can feel the pain breaking her apart. It cracks her voice, makes her hands shake. “It wasn’t love. It was obsession. Just in a kinder way than –” She breaks off on a hard swallow. After raising her glass to her lips, she drinks half of it. “And I had the mentality of a child for years. Decades even… I wasn’t raised to think for myself, to have that adult independence. I fell into a coma on my wedding day, and when I woke up…the years had passed, but my mind was the same as it was then…
“It took me a long time, but I realized that I onlythoughtI loved your father. I never chose him. I was given to him, then I latched onto him through trauma.”
“So you asked him to give you space.”
She closes her eyes. “Yes,” she says softly, her voice raw. “I needed to see if it was real or if we were only together because we had to be.”
“So you let me believe he’d left because ofme?” I bite out, unable to stop the words from spewing out of my lips, unable to stop the rage, the pain, the feeling of betrayal from someone I thought would never hurt me. Not Mother. Not the woman who so dearly loves her fucking children.
“I told you it wasn’t your fault,” she says, tears burning her eyes.
“But you didn’t tell me it was because ofyou.” The words claw at the back of my throat. “I thought that was just one of the things parents say. ‘It’s not your fault, Varius.’ ‘Don’t blame yourself, Varius.’” I suck in a breath, trying to keep my calm, my control. But my lungs are being stretched over a fire. Its smoke is filling them, killing me. “Father couldn’t even look at me those last few months before he left,” I say, drawing up all those moments I’ve tried not to think about. “You cried yourself to sleep. Why would you do that if you asked him to leave?”
“Because love is complicated. You were his firstborn. He loved you. He didn’t want to leave you –”
“But you made him.”
