Chapter 114: Is it love?

BONNIE

I stared at the meadow until the edges blurred. My mother laughed again, that sound I’d spent years trying to remember, and the man with dark hair spun her again, both of them breathless and bright with joy. The sun hit them at an angle that turned everything gold, and I hated how beautiful it looked. I hated that he had this memory and I didn’t.

"You cannot be good." I turned away from the vision. My voice scraped out rough and uneven. "You tried to kill me before you knew who I was. You would have if I wasn’t..."

I couldn’t say it. The word stuck in my throat like a bone.

"If you were not my daughter?" He finished for me. He stood with his hands loose at his sides, no longer smiling, no longer bleeding. The wind from the meadow memory stirred his white hair, though the grass didn’t touch his boots. "Most likely, yes. I am not an altruistic person. I can be honest about that."

"Then why should I believe anything you say?"

"Because I have no reason to lie to you." He stepped closer. The meadow flickered, losing cohesion, and the yellowed walls of my Omega quarters started bleeding through at the edges. "I have been locked like an animal in a cage, unable to stimulate my mind as I would like because of the fear of people. Do you know who locked me?"

I shook my head, but I had a suspicion. The way he said it, weighted and careful, made my stomach clench.

"The man who currently claims you as his mate. He and his ancestors before him."

I laughed. The sound came out sharp and broken, bouncing off the walls that were solidifying around us again. "With no reason? I find that hard to believe, sorry. The goddess said you were as evil as they come and you are the reason for the suffering of many."

"I see she has gotten to you already. But me... as evil as they come?" He tilted his head. "The idea that I was the reason for the suffering of many?"

"It is not a ridiculous thought."

"Do you actually know who she is? Who I am? Who you are?"

"I assume you’re going to tell me."

He nodded slowly. "She’s my mother."

The word landed strangely, and I stared at him. "What?"

"It’s true," he said. "I have no reason to lie to you about this. I’m a demigod. You might already know the name. The demigod Lycaon." He watched my face carefully as he said it. "Which would make you a quarter god yourself."

Something clicked into place then, cold and sudden, and I thought of Alpha King Cornelius, dying in that library, whispering about night children. About Lycans.

Was this it? Was this what he’d been trying to warn Lysander about with his last breath.

"She was the one who cursed you," I said. "In that memory. Selene."

"I showed you that memory," he said. "I’m not entirely sure why you tore yourself out of it before it finished. I wanted our introduction to go better than that."

I shook my head, the whole thing pressing down on me at once, too heavy, too fast. "I want nothing to do with you."

"That isn’t true," he said. "What exactly did my mother say to you?"

"I don’t care what she said," I said. "She practically called you a hellspawn." I crossed my arms over my chest. My hands were shaking, so I hid them against my ribs. "No mother would call her child that without reason."

He laughed then, a real sound, warm and startled. "That would be the first order of business. My mother loved my father. It is why the werewolf race exists today. But I do not think she really loved her children. So yes, she would."

"I don’t believe you one bit."

"Then do you really believe your mother was involved with a monster with no scruples?" He gestured toward the fading meadow, where the ghost of my mother still smiled at a man who looked nothing like the creature standing before me. "She spoke nothing but life about us. I saw it in your head... She protected you. She died for you. So tell me, daughter, why would she lie down with evil? Why would she love it?"

I turned back to the memory. The woman there had my eyes. She had my chin. She looked at that man like he hung the moon, and I felt tears burning again, hot and humiliating. "I don’t know. I don’t know anything anymore."

"She saw something in me," he said. His voice dropped, stripped of its theatrical cruelty. "Something worth saving. Just as you might, if you allowed yourself."

I wiped my face with my sleeve. The fabric came away damp. "Why did you abandon us then?"

He went still. The silence stretched between us, filled with the drip of the faucet I’d manifested, the hum of the light fixture, the sound of my own heartbeat thudding in my ears.

"Because of you." He said it flat, no inflection, like he was stating the weather. "When your mother became pregnant, I lashed out. Because I knew it was not possible. My mother had made it impossible. The curse locked my seed in stone, made me barren as winter earth. So when your mother told me she was going to have a child, I knew my mother was playing games. I knew she wanted to royally play in our faces, to dangle something I could never have and then snatch it away as she always did. And I wanted retribution."

He started pacing, three steps to the wall, three steps back. His boots didn’t make noise on the tile, which felt wrong. Everything about him felt wrong, half-real, half-myth.

"I attacked this very place," he continued. "Intending to kill the Alpha King and destabilize the people she chose and loved over me. The ones who had me cursed, who kept me locked in darkness for decades. I thought if I could not have you, if I could not understand why the universe had decided to mock me with a child I should not be able to conceive, then I would make them pay for it. Then I got sealed again. For over two decades for it. I have been awake all those years in my own head."

I pressed my back against the wall. The tile was cold through my shirt. "You’re saying you attacked because of me? That’s supposed to make me feel what, exactly? Guilty? Sympathetic?"

"I am saying I am not the only monster in this story." He stopped pacing and faced me. His eyes were gray, the color of storm clouds over water, and they held mine without blinking. "I am saying that your existence broke something fundamental about the world I understood. And rather than rejoice, rather than accept the miracle, I chose violence. I chose destruction. I am not proud of that, though I suspect you will not believe me."

"Why would I? You tried to gut me in my sleep."

"And now I am standing here, talking to you, allowing you to pin me to walls and threaten me, because I cannot bring myself to hurt you." He spread his hands again, palms up, empty. "Does that sound like the behavior of a man with no scruples? A man who cares for nothing?"

"It sounds like manipulation." I pushed off the wall. My legs felt steadier now, anger returning like a tide. "You’re trying to get inside my head. You’re trying to make me doubt myself, doubt my mother, doubt everything. And I refuse. I refuse to let you do this."

I shook my head. The motion made me dizzy, but I kept doing it, denying the words, denying the pull of his voice. "I want nothing to do with you. I don’t care about any of this goddess and demigod nonsense. I am not a pawn in your family drama. I am not a piece to be moved around so you can get revenge on your mother."

"That is not true." He moved closer, and I backed up until my shoulder blades hit the wall again. "You care very much what my mother said to you. You care that she abandoned you to see if you would break. You care that she watched your mother die and did nothing. You care that she broke divine law just to tell you to embrace your power, but she would not break it to save the woman who raised you."

"How do you know all that... Stop it."

"She used you. Just as she used me. Just as she uses everyone who comes into contact with her." His voice rose, not shouting, but filling the small room until it seemed to come from everywhere at once. "So tell me, daughter, what exactly did my mother say to you? Did she tell you that you were special? That you were chosen? Did she tell you that you had a great destiny?"