“How about when you took away Noah and Cabe’s memories of…” I quickly snapped my mouth shut. He knew too much already; he didn’t need me confirming any of it out loud.
“Of your bond?” He smiled, uncapping the cream and dabbing it onto my knuckles. “Is that what you were about to say?” He didn’t wait for me to answer. “Weston forced me to do that, though he didn’t realise what he was asking. You see, someone managed to plant the idea in his head that the Adairs and Quillans were forging some kind of a relationship with you just to keep you away from him, to punish him for what he had done to Silas. Silas was the one who eventually offered a solution to the Klovoda’s problem of how to bring you back into the fold, after all. He was the one to finally connect with you, to earn your trust. Miro was doing it as well, but he wasn’t reporting back to the Klovoda. He was just doing it because he wanted to. Weston assumed that it was all to spite him, personally. Because you were so important to him. If I had truly wanted to do you harm, I would have taken away Silas’s and Miro’s memories too.”
“Okay… you said you wiped Cabe’s and Noah’s memories because Weston forced you… couldn’t you just say no?”
“He forced me the same way he forced Silas to shoot you. Well… actually, not entirely the same way, since Weston’s ability doesn’t work on me. But when he tries to use it, I still have to do what he wants, otherwise he’ll find out that his ability doesn’t work on me.”
“Why doesn’t his ability work on you?”
“Do you know how the Zevghéri are sworn in? How they are bound to Weston?”
“A blood transfusion.”
“That’s right. Dominic has—had—us all taking S19. It’s a pill that kills the Voda magic inside of us. As long as Weston doesn’t give us anymore blood, we’re immune to his control.”
“Who’s us?”
“Us, Seraph. The four test subjects.” He wiped his hands on the towel and dug into his pocket, pulling out a tiny pill box and placing it on the counter, sliding it over to me. “Dominic was going to start you on it after he kidnapped you, but then you escaped. You can have these. You have to take it once a month for a year to kill the magic completely.”
I stared at the little pill box, not touching it. After a few moments of tense silence, Jayden started wrapping a bandage around my right hand.
“Were you going to take me to Dominic that night?” I asked, watching him carefully.
He finished bandaging both of my hands and then walked around to the other side of the counter, his arms crossed over his chest, a blankness rising to cover any emotion in his mismatched eyes.
“I wasn’t part of that plan, I was just keeping tabs on you. I found out later that Dominic was trying to get pictures of you in a compromising situation, probably hoping to blackmail you with them. Maybe he thought it would be a good way to force you to meet with the Klovoda. He drugged you with S20 and S18, two more of his alchemic creations. Particularly nasty when combined, if you’re already bonded to a pair. Then again, he didn’t realise that you were bonded. He assumed that you would hurt the men once they started assaulting you—he wanted to see how powerful you were, but he didn’t want you remembering anything—that’s where the S18 comes into play. It only takes half an hour to make a person comatose if the dosage is high enough. In the end, you gave him everything he could have wanted, and more. He didn’t even care that the pictures were destroyed, if they even got that far. You killed all seven of the men in the limousine and seemingly stitched yourself right back together after the explosion.”
“You’re lying,” I choked out, jumping off the stool and planting my bandaged hands on the table. “I’m not a killer.”
“But you are.” He didn’t speak in an accusatory way—instead he sounded almost as though he pitied me. “You’ve forgotten that the Klovoda—me specifically—had to clean up after your first murder, so that the humans didn’t start meddling. I know you didn’t mean to, I know that you were only trying to protect your bond-mates, just like you were only trying to protect yourself in that car… but you have to accept what happened, Seraph.” He pulled back a little bit, moving to lean against the refrigerator. He threaded his hand into his hair, the gesture nervous. “You need to accept the other thing, too. You need to accept responsibility. If you do, everything will fall into place. It will give you the strength to do what you have to… you know what you have to do, don’t you?”
It annoyed me that he was avoiding speaking in specifics—not because I didn’t understand him, but because I knew exactly what he was talking about. He was pandering to the indecipherable mess of thoughts and memories that I was trying to drown my fears in; drawing attention to that fact that I was trying not to think of things in certain terms, trying to escape any kind of absolute reality.
He was talking about the fact that I…