So many things I did not want to hear.
“No one could stop her,” Alya went on. “She wanted something more than this place, this life. So she went to Sivrinaj and offered herself up to him. She told us this was her chance at becoming something important. Money. Safety. Not just for her, she said, but for all of us.” She shook her head. “I begged her not to go,” she murmured. “But there was no reasoning with her.”
I clasped my hands together, knuckles white. My body had gone rigid, like I was bracing for a blow. Maybe Raihn sensed this, because he put his hand on my back, and Mother, I was so grateful for that single steadying touch.
I had cursed Vincent in my own head countless times. Screamed into my pillow in rage and hurt over the things he had done to me, the lies he had told me.
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 a purpose. 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—that was 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 a strange visit.”
“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 at us like 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.”
This baffled me. “Why?”
“That, I can’t answer. Like I said, maybe he wanted to love her. Maybe he was trying his best. For a while.”
For a while.
Those words hung in the air for several long seconds. Alya’s gaze lingered at the wall behind me, as if this next part was too painful to let me see in her eyes.
“When she met Alcolm, and they got married... That’s when she started to get scared. For us. For you. For Alcolm. He had family in Salinae. She thought it would be safer there, in Rishan territory. Farther from Vincent’s reach and eyes.”
Alcolm. I remembered that name too, faintly—remembered it called affectionately between rooms in a too-small cottage. I remembered big, rough hands and an embrace that smelled like fresh chopped wood.
“I thought he was my father,” I said.
“You thought he was your father because he became your father. He treated you just as he treated Jona and Leesan. You were all his children.” A sad smile found her lips. “He was a good man.”
Was.
Because all these people were dead now. Murdered, in an explosion that ripped our house apart.
“When I received that letter,” Alya whispered, “it was the worst night of my life.”
I remembered the wings blotting out the sky.
I remembered my mother trying to get me away from the windows—
I had thought it was the night I was saved. The night fate, and only fate, had brought me into Vincent’s arms.
“Did he go there for me?” I asked.
I didn’t want to know the answer.
Alya was silent for a long moment. “I can only speculate. I think he went to Salinae to destroy his enemies. But I think he went to that house, that night, for you. Maybe he tried for a long time to let her go. But when the wars started, and his enemies were at his throat, his true nature returned. He couldn’t bring himself to leave his back exposed.”
I couldn’t breathe.
Did you kill them for me, Vincent?
Vincent, of course, was silent. He could never answer the hard questions.
“Why did he let me live?” I whispered.
I didn’t even mean to say it aloud. But the question was always there, nagging at my soul like a piece of loose thread.