It seemed so, so real.
“I’m inventing you,” I whispered. “Because you’re what I want to see.”
He lifted one shoulder in a delicate half-shrug. It was such a familiar movement, it made my breath stutter. “Perhaps,” he said. “Does it matter?”
In this moment, it felt like it didn’t.
He stepped closer, and I took a step back. He froze, momentary pain crossing his face.
“The things you’ve seen here have so tainted your image of me? I meant to give this place all my greatest achievements, my greatest ambitions. Instead, it became a monument to all my greatest mistakes.”
So many mistakes in the end. Never you.
Vincent’s final words flitted through my mind. He flinched, as if he heard them too.
“So many mistakes in the end,” he murmured. “I never wanted you to see this version of me.”
“I never wanted to see you this way.”
And Goddess, I meant it. Sometimes I envied myself from a year ago, who’d known, beyond any doubt, that her father loved her. Yes, it was the only thing she could believe in, but that, at least, was solid, immovable.
Losing my trust in Vincent was more than losing trust in a single person. It had broken something within me, destroyed my ability to put that trust into anyone else.
Pain flashed over his face, there and gone again so quickly, I thought it might be a trick of the light. The idea that this version of him could be a figment of my own mind slipped further away. If it was a hallucination, it was such a perfect one that it might as well be real.
And with him standing right in front of me, the anger that I’d been suppressing for months bubbled up to the surface.
“You lied to me,” I ground out. “My entire life, you told me the world was a cage. But it was you that put me there. You manipulated me from the time I was—”
“I saved you,” he snapped, lurching closer.
Then he winced, as if he had to clamp down on his anger, force it back.
“You kidnapped me,” I choked out. “You killed my mother and you—”
“I did not kill her.”
“Yes you did!” My voice boomed through the room, echoing off the stone ceilings. “You went to Salinae that night knowing she lived there. You destroyed it knowing—”
“I—”
No. I’d had enough of this. “No more lies. I’ve had almost twenty years worth of them. I’m done. Done.”
Vincent snapped his jaw shut. A muscle twitched in his cheek, as if flexing with the force of withheld words.
The room seemed to grow a little more solid, the fog thinning. He turned to the column, laying his hand against it. He drew in a breath and let it out slowly, his shoulders lowering.
“This magic,” he said, more calmly, “is a living thing. And this, the center, is the most demanding piece of all. I’ve had to come back over the years, feed it more of myself to keep the spells strong. It’s the most important one, and yet the weakest, because I had to get a different sorcerer to help me finish it. After—”
After she left. He didn’t say it. Didn’t need to.
His gaze slipped over his shoulder. The anger was gone. Only sadness remained. Suddenly, my father looked so breathtakingly old. Not the old of wrinkled skin or graying hair, but the old of sheer exhaustion, right from the soul.
“Do you want to see, little serpent,” he murmured, “what memory it took from me?”
No, I almost said.
I didn’t want to see it.
But I’d come too far to turn back now. Swallowed too many lies to turn away the truth.
Slowly, I joined him at the obelisk. I lifted my hand, and laid it over his.
The night is cold, the only heat from raging fires that burn the city of Salinae.
I do not feel either. As I fly over the city, a shell of what it once was, I feel nothing but satisfaction. It has been a hard year. I’ve worn this crown for close to two centuries. Few Nightborn kings—few Obitraen kings, in general—manage to cling to power for so long. I have known this for a long time. But lately, my enemies have been stirring in the shadows. I feel them surrounding me at every party, every meeting. I feel their eyes on me when I am alone in my bedchamber and when I stand before my people.
Power is a bloody, bloody business.
I have gotten soft these last few years.
But the time for softness is over. I need to carve away my weaknesses like rotting flesh. And there is one particular necrosis that I’ve allowed to plague me for too long, because I’ve been weak. Too weak to give up my little fantasies about a woman—a human woman—who scorned me, and the bizarre comfort I got from the idea that she was still alive somewhere, and my shameful commitment to a promise I once made to her.