“I want to go out alone. Do not interrupt. Don’t stop anything that happens unless there is a danger to me,” I murmur to them. “It’s time to end this.”
“We’re here.” Hollis looks right at me. So do Severi and Rhodes. Three members of the Vian, a race of people I hated and was so scared of, but they ended up being mine. My mates. My best friends. The men who would do anything for me, at any cost, and even this…this unspeakable thing I am about to do, they are here. I push to my feet and walk around the hedge, following the path towards the bench. The warm sunlight makes the grey city sparkle as I sit down on the other side of the bench and watch the dead city with her.
For a long moment, neither of us speaks. I won’t thank her for coming; it seems pointless, and threatening her is pointless too. We are both powerful. “I assume some of your mates are here. Let them know I will kill you long before they can get here if you try anything, Gwenieve.”
“This is between you and me, Georgina.” I turn to look at her. “You came alone.”
It’s a statement, less of a question, but she answers it all the same. “I said I would. Not to you…but to him.”
“Who?” I watch her.
“Our father,” she begins. “Our biological father. I killed him.”
Complete shock has me silent for a long moment. Of all the things I expected her to say, it wasn’t that. “I didn’t know that our mother was in contact with him after she got pregnant, but she was. Our father was called Derek, and he lived in the court asa high up noble. He had no wife, mate, children, or relatives…but he watched over me, I suppose, from a distance. Any time I was dragged out of the pit below the house and brought to court to be shown off—for the king’s friends, or for the king to get to know me better, to train me better—he was there. No one knew he was my father. Even I didn’t. I just thought he was the nice man who gave me sweets sometimes. The man who gave me a tissue when I was bleeding from being punched too hard.
“Everything changed when I was ten. Derek turned up outside my cage door. He was a mess—bloody nose pouring and his arm broken. He had blond hair like me, but he looked more like you. You say I look like our mother…I remember you saying that. Derek came into the cage, sat down with me, and he told me I had a twin. He told me that our destinies were entwined with destruction and pain and death, and that there wasn’t much choice in the matter. Derek was sorry, and he told me that he wished he had changed something…but he didn’t. All he cared about was you.” Her eyes tighten. “He spoke about you with love, even looking at me. I was there! I was his daughter too!” She snaps her teeth together, her fists clenched. “He had a message from our mother. Derek told me that our mother had asked that, in the future, I fill a vial with blood and give it to a prince. A Vian prince to save you.” Her voice doesn’t waver, but something in her eyes does. “Our mother didn’t pass any messages saying that she loved me. Didn’t pass any messages of comfort or care for the daughter she’d abandoned. No, it was about saving you.” She laughs. “While she played happy family with you, I suffered in a pit.”
She looks out over the dust of London. I know telling her my childhood wasn’t good either won’t make her feel better. She just wanted to be the twin our parents chose.
“I was furious. So furious that I completely lost it. I lashed out, and I killed him. I watched him drain of all his life on thefloor, and he didn’t fight back. The last thing he said was to go to Primrose Hill alone when my sister calls me.” She stares at me. “He didn’t even attempt to fight me back. He just let me kill him. I think maybe he thought it was punishment. Something he deserved.” She pauses. “Perhaps it was. In his last moments, he asked me to come to you. Here. This moment.”
I want to feel something for this man who was my biological father, but I don’t. My father was the man I grew up with, who stayed for his mate and a child who was not his, and did everything he could to protect me. It couldn’t have been easy for him, and yet he did it. My biological father did nothing of the sort, and it looks like he didn’t even try to save Georgina from the Vian king—he let her be brought up like that when it’s likely he could have stolen her away.
“Then why? Why still give the vial to Severi? Why come here if you clearly hated him?”
Georgina doesn’t answer for a long moment. “It’s the only contact I ever had with my mother. My father died for that moment. Those messages. So I did what they asked. I do what the king asks. I have always done as I’ve been asked, never broken a rule, never failed him…but I came here. I knew I shouldn’t have come alone, but I want to know why he chose his last words to be this moment. Why he wanted Severi to be free for you.”
For the first time, I really see her. A broken little girl who was given to the Vian and shown nothing. No mercy, no love. “Our mother never told me that she loved me either. At least, not that I remember. My stepfather told me all the time, like he could make up for it—the lack of love and feeling that came from her—but he couldn’t. No matter how much he tried, he could not.”
I lift the box and put it on the bench between us.
“My mother told me this is for you when the moment came, when the world is ending and there is nothing left to do. I neverwanted to give it to you, and I wish things had been different, Georgina. I wish we had been brought up together; we could have loved each other through the darkness and fought together to make this world better. We didn’t choose this.” I gulp. “Could you imagine if our parents had brought us up together in a free city with our aunt? That neither of us had been tortured our whole lives, transformed into this, manipulated by the king? You’d be my best friend and my sister.” I suck in a deep breath. “I think our mother thought that if she drowned me enough, she would drown out all feeling from me so one day I would make a sacrifice for the world. She made me reject my mates when I was fifteen. Perhaps she thought that would make me as heartless as she felt she was, because she had everything taken from her when she was pregnant. The Gods took it, because they knew what we are and they knew, the bastards knew, they wanted a price for the power we have. Our power rivals theirs, and they will not give it to just anyone. They broke us into two and set up our lives to be like this.” I look at the box, then at her. “I don’t know who gave our mother this box. I may never know, but it is destined for you. But it’s time you opened it, sister.”
Sister. I say it softly to her, and her eyes fill with tears. We stare at each other for a long time, a moment passing between us that I will never forget. There is good in her, deep down under the broken cracks, but no one can put her together.
“I wish things were different too,” Georgina softly whispers back, her eyes turning to the box. “She really left this for me? She cared enough to leave me something?”
I almost want to stop her. But I know I can’t. This is fate. This is destiny. “Yes.” The lie rolls off my lips…because my mother couldn’t love. She was too broken. Even as it’s painful, I watch her open the box. All the years that it would never open for me, and it instantly comes apart in her hands. Her eyes widen at whatever she sees inside it before something slithersout—a darkness like I’ve never seen before, shaped like a snake. Something so black and beautiful, glittering like stars. It slams like an arrow straight into her chest. Into her heart, and her mouth opens on a scream.
Death instantly feels close, echoing in the air around us. She gasps, reaching for her chest as though she might stop it from hurting her. Her body convulses and shakes. I pull her to me, holding her against me as if she were just a child. “Wh-y?”
“I’m sorry.” I clutch her tightly. “It is our fate…and the only way to stop you.”
My Nexus takes her power as she dies, pulling it to us. I close my eyes, feeling her heart slowly stop, knowing that my mother left us nothing but death. She trained me to be unfeeling, to accept death like an old friend…but she failed. She never made me heartless. It’s just not who I am. I feel all of it as my sister dies, and I weep. I lower my head to my twin’s, letting my tears fall onto her ashen skin as she goes cold. The sun softly sets above the city, warm orange light burning over us both. An orb of light floats before me. It doesn’t look like any orb I’ve ever seen. I imagine it’s probably what mine looks like—red and black, glittering dust, shining bright. My Nexus grabs it with everything she has, pulling it straight into our chest.
For the first time in my life, I feel my Nexus free. Complete. She peers into my mind, and her voice is firm and angry. “Everyone who betrayed us will now bleed to grey, and we will remake this world. You and I are sisters, my human. They will bow.”
Chapter
Nine
Aknock at the door nearly makes me jump, and I turn away from the map of the Vian city I was looking over again and again. Nothing is going to change on it, but it makes me feel better to have a good sense of the city layout for what we are planning together. “Come in.” Rhodes nudges the door open, standing in the doorway but not coming into my room. All my mates take turns sleeping in here with me, mostly to wake me when the nightmares are too much, and they calm me down. I can’t remember when I last got a full night’s sleep. “Hi. What are you doing here?”
“Everyone’s training, and I was sent to ask whether you wanted to come and join us.” He rubs the back of his neck. “Or save me from Finnegan and Onyx’s intense workout methods.”
I look back at the map. “I don’t want to train.”
He steps into the room, leaving the door open. A clear offer that he will leave if I want him too. This is why I fell in love with Rhodes in the first place—he was so goddamn respectful and perfect. Until he wasn’t. We haven’t spoken about it or tried to fix it beyond that letter he sent me, explaining and apologising. I guess I’m waiting for him to make the first move in thisconversation. His hand runs over the soft comforter on the end of my bed, a gift from Annie. “You’ve been a bit quiet since…”