you are? All you have become? I gave you. Mine is the seed that planted you. Mine are the hands that forged you. Mine is the blood that flows, cold as ice and black as pitch, in those veins of yours.”
He leaned back on the divan, black eyes burning into her own.
“In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”
Julius Scaeva extended his hand, gold glinting upon his fingers. Upon the wall, his shadow did the same.
“Join me.”
Mia’s laughter bubbled in her throat, threatening to choke her.
“Are you fucking mad?”
“Some might say,” Scaeva replied. “But what possible reason do you have left to want me dead? I killed a man who claimed to be your father. But he was a liar, Mia. A would-be usurper. A man perfectly willing to risk his familia for the sake of his own failed ambition. I killed your mother, aye. Another deceiver. Willing to share my bed and cut my throat before the sweat had even cooled. Alinne Corvere knew the stakes she wagered supporting … nay, encouraging Darius’s gambit. Her life. Her son’s. And yours besides. And she weighed them all lighter than a throne.”
The shadowviper slithered across the ground toward Mia, licking the air. Scaeva spun the gravebone stiletto upon the table, his eyes boring into hers.
“I have never lied to you, daughter,” he said. “Not once, throughout it all. When I ordered you drowned, you were worthless to me. Jonnen was young enough to claim as my own. You were too old. But now you’ve proved yourself my daughter true. Possessed of the same will as I: not only to survive, but to prosper. To carve your name with bloody fingernails into this earth. Darius sought to become a kingmaker? You can truly be one. The blade in my right hand. Whatever you desire will be yours. Wealth. Power. Pleasure. I can do away with those gold-grubbing whores in the Red Church and have you at my side instead. My daughter. My blood. As dark and beautiful and deadly as the night. And together, we can sculpt a dynasty that will live for a thousand years.”
On the wall, his shadow reached out farther toward her own.
“You and your brother are my legacy to this world,” he said. “When I am gone, all this can be yours. Our name will be eternal. Immortal. So aye. I ask you to join me.”
Scaeva’s words rang in the hollow spaces in her head, heavy with truth. Her shadow hung like a crooked portrait upon the wall. But though Mia herself remained perfectly still, slowly,
ever so slowly,
it raised one dark hand toward his.
All her life, she’d thought of her parents as flawless. Godlike. Her mother, sharp and wise and beautiful as the finest rapier of Liisian steel. Her father, brave and noble and bright as the suns. Even as she’d learned more about who they were from Sidonius in the cells beneath Crow’s Nest, it never seemed to dim their reflection in her mind’s eye. It hurt too much to admit they might be imperfect. Selfish. Driven by greed or lust or pride and willing to risk everything for the sake of it. And so she kept them unstained. Untarnished. Locked in a box forever inside her head.
Father is another name for God in a child’s eyes.
And Mother is the very earth beneath her feet.
But now, Mia remembered that turn in the forum—the turn Darius Corvere was hanged. A girl of ten, standing with her mother above the mob, looking down on that horrid scaffold, the line of nooses swinging in the wintersdeep wind. She could still feel the rain upon her face and Alinne’s arm across her breast, another hand at her neck, holding her pinned so she must look outward as they tied the noose around the Kingmaker’s neck. The words Alinne Corvere whispered ringing in Mia’s ears now as clear as the turn she’d first uttered them.
“Never flinch. Never fear. And never, ever forget.”
Alinne must have known what she was making. Knew the seeds of hatred she was planting in her daughter. The vengeance that must grow from it. The blood that must flow. And all over the death of a man who—though he may well have loved her—wasn’t Mia’s father at all. And if she must be furious—and O, Goddess, she was—at Scaeva’s claim that he’d made her all she was, how could she be less angry at the woman who’d stood behind her there on that windblown parapet? Forcing her to watch? Speaking the words that had shaped her, ruled her, ruined her?
Could she still love a woman like that?
And if not, could she hate the man who’d killed her?
Why did she hate Julius Scaeva? When all she’d based her life on was a lie? Was he so different from Alinne and Darius Corvere, save in that he’d emerged the victor? He was a killer, remorseless and cold, that much was certain. A man who’d drenched himself in the blood of dozens, perhaps hundreds, to get his way.
But wasn’t that true of everyone who played this game?
Even me?
Eclipse’s hackles rippled as Scaeva’s serpent slithered closer. The shadowwolf’s growl dragged Mia out of the darkness within, back into the burning light in that study, glinting on the black pawn in Scaeva’s upturned palm.
“… STAY BACK …,” Eclipse warned.
“… Nothing to fear, pup …,” the serpent hissed in reply.
“… STAY BACK …”
Eclipse took a swipe at the shadowviper with her paw, and Mia’s eyes widened as she saw a fine mist of black spatter on the floor, evaporate to nothingness. The serpent reared back, hissing in cold fury.
“… You will regret that insult, little dog …”
“… I DO NOT FEAR YOU, WORM …”
The shadowviper opened its black maw, hissing again.
“Whisper,” Scaeva said. “Enough.”
The serpent hissed again, but held still.
“Mia means us no harm,” Scaeva said, staring at his daughter. “She’s intelligent enough to know where she stands. And pragmatic enough to realize that, if anything unpleasant were to happen to us, her dear Old Mercurio would be treated to the most gruesome of tortures before he was sent to meet his dear dark Goddess.”
Mia’s stomach rolled at the threat against Mercurio, but she tried to keep her face like stone. The serpent turned to regard her darkin counterpart, swaying as if to music only it could hear.
“… She fears, Julius …”
Scaeva gifted Mia a smile that never reached his eyes.
“So. Itreya’s most infamous murderer is capable of love. How touching.”
Mia bristled at that. Felt a soft ripple in the air, glanced toward their shadows on the wall. Where once Scaeva’s had reached out as if to embrace her own, it was now poised, crook-backed and claw-fingered. Reaching toward her own shadow’s throat.
“Where is your brother, Mia?”
“Safe,” she replied.
Scaeva stood slowly, hand drifting to the Trinity hidden at his throat.
“You will bring him to me.”
“I take no orders from you.”
“You will bring him to me, or your mentor dies.”
Mia’s voice turned soft with menace. “If you hurt Mercurio, I swear by the Goddess you will never see your son again.”
She saw fury boiling in his eyes then. A fury born of fear. Even with all his control, his much-vaunted will, Scaeva still couldn’t quite keep it from her. She could sense it on him, sure as she could sense the suns above.
Her mind was working. Probing