“What does that mean?” she asked.
“When I found Voron, he was an old man. He had aged. He could no longer make a blood sword. He couldn’t use magic. He still had his skills, but his body betrayed him. I had waited a long time to meet him. There was a conversation I wanted to have. But he wouldn’t talk to me, and I killed him quickly, because it hurt to look at him.”
Is that what would happen to Hugh? “You haven’t aged.”
He grinned at her. “Give it time.”
They walked some more.
“I knew how that damn trip to the Black Sea would end from the start,” Hugh said. “Violence, magic, and fire. An old power got involved and broke open the mountain under the castle to release the magic of a dormant volcano. It melted the castle from the inside out. Solid stone ran like a glowing river. Beautiful, in a way.”
“What happened?”
“I knew I had to kill Lennart, or Daniels would never leave him. We fought. I broke his legs. He broke my back and threw me into the fire. The whole thing was idiotic.”
Volcanic fire powered by magic that melted stone. He should’ve been instantly burned to a crisp. “How did you survive?”
“I teleported out. Had a water anchor in a vial around my neck. There wasn’t much of me left. Roland put me inside a phoenix egg for three months. Took me another two to get my strength back.”
He’d spent three months in excruciating pain. He’d said it so casually, as if it didn’t matter.
“If it wasn’t for Lennart, I might have convinced her. She wavered.”
“I don’t think she did.”
Hugh turned to her. He didn’t want to speak about it in the first place, but somehow Elara was pulling it out of him and once he started, he couldn’t stop. The void was ripping him apart, and still he talked.
“You said she was a killer,” Elara said. “An orphan. Her real father was a mystery. Her adoptive father made her hide.”
“Your point?” he asked.
Elara tilted her head to glance at his face. “Roland took care of your needs. He probably taught you, right? Provided you with money? You were his right hand.”
“Everything I got, I earned,” Hugh told her. “I worked and bled for it. Everything he asked, I did. No matter what it cost.”
Daniels was Hugh’s only major failure. He never knew he was only allowed one.
“But you got whatever you wanted, right?”
“Your point?”
“She was an orphan, living on the run, probably hungry, poor, always looking over her shoulder. You were exactly like her, but you had everything, and she had nothing. Hugh, you’re an astute, experienced man. Put yourself into her shoes. You were both trained by Voron. You both lived your lives in Roland’s shadow. You worshipped him, and she feared him. Of all the people on this planet, you are the ones who truly know what it’s like to be Roland’s child.”
“Except I wasn’t his child.”
Daniels hated her father. She fought Roland on every turn, while he’d spent decades serving him. But Daniels was blood and that mattered more to Roland than anything Hugh had done. Like the prodigal child, when Daniels was found, she eclipsed the decades of his service without trying simply because she was Roland’s daughter and he would never be his son.
“Try to think like her for a moment,” Elara said. “You knew her father in a way she never did. You knew Voron and you likely had him longer than she did. You have so much in common. Then you killed Voron, whom she must’ve loved; tried to kill Lennart, whom she loves; and then tried to force her to go back to the father she hated, even though you, of all people, knew exactly what waited for her there. The betrayal was catastrophic.”
Hugh felt a vague unease. The void spun around him, making it harder to think. He pushed it aside and focused. A memory came to him, he and Daniels fighting in the castle at the Black Sea. She’d won that fight and trapped him with her sword. He’d had to submit. He’d said, “Uncle.” But there was a hint of something there, when they fought. Rage poured out of her, powerful and seductive. That red-hot boiling rage. It turned him on. He wanted to keep fighting her. He wouldn’t have stopped until one of them was dead, and she knew it.
Her face flashed before him. Daniels had looked horrified. And then she almost fled.
The recollection disturbed him. He groped for the connection to Roland, for the clean feeling of surety that clarified all his doubts, but it wasn’t there. He was on his own.
Hugh locked his teeth, sorting through his memories, going through Daniels’s facial expressions. He remembered the last one best, the time he had starved her, trying to force her to submit to her father. She had this look of resignation on her face as if she had given up on him ever getting it.
She never saw him as a man. He was never in the running; he had known that from the start. He was either an extension of Roland or…
It hit him like a ton of bricks. Daniels saw him as a sibling. She probably didn’t even realize it.
On some level he had always understood it. It wasn’t the woman he had wanted. It was what she represented. He wanted her acceptance. He wanted her to admit how good he was. He would’ve seduced her to get it and then rubbed Roland’s face in it. One way or the other, the bastard would acknowledge him then.
Validation. So simple.
At the Black Sea, Lennart had played a ruse, pretending to be interested in another woman. It was a moronic tactic, one that always backfired, and it took a lot of work to cut off all possible escape routes until Hugh forced Lennart into that path. Hugh had quite enjoyed watching it play out at the time. It seemed odd, when Hugh thought about it now, as if it had happened to someone else. It had made Daniels desperate. It had made her vulnerable.
How the hell did he miscalculate so badly? It was painfully obvious now.
“I should’ve played the brother angle.” He didn’t realize he had spoken out loud until he heard his own voice.
“Come back to your true family?” Elara asked.
He nodded. “It would’ve been so easy too. ‘Look at everything you sacrificed for Lennart, and here he is, sniffing after the first attractive shapeshifter girl that fluttered her eyelashes at him. You’ll never belong with them, but you belong with us. We are your true family. He’ll never understand you, but we will. I will. I know exactly what it’s like. Come with me, and you will have a father and a brother who love you above all others.’ Damn it! I could’ve had her.”
She didn’t say anything.
“Why the hell didn’t I see it?”
“Because you wanted something from her, Hugh,” Elara said, her voice gentle. “And it made you blind. What did you want?”
“Doesn’t matter now.”
He wanted acceptance. If not from Roland, then from her. He would never have it now, and when he thought about it, the ball of conflicting crap those thoughts dragged in their wake was too complicated to deal with.
“Should I worry about this Daniels coming here to kill you?” Elara asked. “If I were her, I’d hunt you to the ends of the Earth.”
Hugh struggled for a moment with the paradox of someone worrying about him. “No. Her hands are tied. She claimed Atlanta as her domain the night Roland exiled me. If she leaves, he will attack.”
“So she sacrificed revenge for her people.”
“That’s the way she’s wired.”
“Do you still want her?”
She’d asked the question so casually, so perfectly flat. Hugh glanced at her. She looked at the road ahead, her face relaxed, but it was too late. He’d caught that one tiny note of female jealousy in her voice.
The untouchable goddess of the castle. Would wonders never cease?
Elara turned to him. “Hugh? I need to know if you will take off looking for her if you get a chance.”
Sure, you do. You shouldn’t have shown your hand, love.
“It doesn’t matter now. It’s in the past.”
“Is it? Is Roland in the past?”
The void opened its mouth and swallowed him whole. For a moment he couldn’t even speak, then the thing that drove him into battle reared its head and he tore free.