Threats usually come with a sound, but Zagreus had learned to make them without any sound, taught by nights when silence had been the only currency that mattered. He did not raise his voice. He moved a fraction, the smallest correction of his posture, and the room tightened as though someone had turned the key on an invisible lock.
“Temper your curiosity,” he said, and the words were not for the man before him so much as a blade sheathed under a velvet glove. He kept his tone even; cruelty had long ago learned the usefulness of ease.
The other man answered with a smile that had nothing of humour in it. He stepped closer, the press of movement deliberate and the motion of one who relished testing limits. Up close, his eyes were clever, like a hazard contained inglass. “Would you risk killing your only family, Zagreus?” he murmured. “You would not.”
My world shuddered.
Only family?
My chest thudded, a frantic beating in there. Zagreus had a family. He had roots. I had thought I lived in a house of one man’s absolutes; instead, there were others, lines of blood I had not seen.
I turned, stupidly certain that my mind would supply proof of error, some explanation that would stitch the quicksand beneath my feet. The man who had spoken loosened his suit cuff.
I looked between him and Zagreus. There was a resemblance between them, but it was a subtler inheritance of expression, a mirror altered by time.
All the questions in my head, all the emotions I felt, were very strange. As if reading my confused expressions, the man chuckled and nodded.
“Yes,” he answered before Zagreus could. “We have no parents to call. No cousins or extended family who come with casseroles and small talk. We buried what remained of that world and learned how to be the only thing left.” He watched me as if measuring whether my face would crack from the truth. “They… did not survive her.”
“Enough, Corvin,” Zagreus warned. But Corvin only stepped closer.
“Why? She’s your wife. She deserves to know your past. That’s how you make your relationship strong, isn’t it? By living in the past.”
“Corvin.”
Corvin scoffed. “I don’t listen to you, big brother. You left the family four years ago, so don’t pretend you have any right over me.”
I swallowed hard, feeling Zagreus's hold tightening on my waist. He was pissed. But he had done excellently in masking his anger. Instead, he took a deep breath. “You will stop,” he grumbled. “You will step back and hold your tongue where it belongs. I will not have my home turned into a theatre for your entertainment.”
Corvin shrugged, more insolent than fearful. “And if I don’t?” he asked, curious as if the world had been made to display provocation. And strangely it did.
I looked between them, aware of the tension and wanting to escape it anyhow.
Zagreus’s hand slid from my waist to his side; for a second, his face softened with an emotion I could not name – pity would be the wrong word, anger would be insufficient. There was a danger in him now that had edges I did not want to be near.
“We do not speak in riddles here,” Corvin said quietly. He looked to his brother. “You have always guarded what is yours. We know why. I remember the days before ash. Very clearly. The woman you loved… she took more than a heart, Zagreus. I am not watching the past repeat again.”
I wanted to step forward and squeeze the truth out of their mouths until the bones of my questions showed. Instead, my limbs obeyed some older, more frightened counsel. I made a small, ridiculous attempt at composure and spoke where any sane silence would have been wiser. “I… I have no right to be in your affairs. I apologise for intruding.”
Corvin’s gaze slid to me, and I placed the weight of all my questions against my ribcage and hoped they would not make me cough up what I had found.
Zagreus’s look snapped from Corvin back to me. His brows lowered until they met the top of his nose, and the room contracted again. I felt suffocated.
“You are his wife. You have every right to know, Selene.”
“Enough, Corvin,” Zagreus muttered.
I shook my head. “Why? Why are you telling all this now? It doesn’t make sense. You don’t know me. Why are you calling me Selene? I am not her, I’m Celestine.”
Corvin chuckled. “Maybe I like calling you that.”
“I will kill you,” Zagreus growled while taking a step forward, before I pushed myself in between them and stared wide-eyed at him.
Behind me, Corvin laughed. “You forget,” he whispered, “that there are debts that blood cannot pay. You would not risk destroying your only family. You wouldn’t risk losing a brother. After your first wife killed our parents, I wouldn’t risk losing my brother to others.”
I tried to steady myself. “I should go,” I whispered. Before I could move, Zagreus’s hand slid out to capture me.
“You are not to wander by yourself,” he said softly, and that softness suffocated me more.
