Or who I really was.
Or what Zagreus Vitale had done to get me here.
But I knew one thing.
Something had been stolen from me.
And whatever it was, it had a heartbeat.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Memory
“Your mother wasn’t what she seemed,” Isadora said.
“You don’t get to say that,” I snapped, voice rising slightly. “You don’t know her.”
Isadora’s gaze didn’t shift, her hands remained folded in her lap, as calm as a nun before execution. “Don’t I?”
“Don’t talk about her like that,” I hissed. “You show up after decades, after abandoning her, and now you want to play oracle?”
“I didn’t abandon anyone. She abandoned you. She exiled me.”
“I don’t care! She raised me! She fed me, loved me, protected me…”
“From what?”
My mouth opened, but the answer never came. What had she protected me from? I remembered scraped knees and soup when I had a fever. I remembered her cold hands brushing my hair. But I didn’t remember why we were always moving. Why did we never stay anywhere longer than a season? Why I never had friends. Why birthdays often felt like funerals until she remarried my father.
I remembered her love in fragments.
I remembered her fear in full.
“That’s enough,” Zagreus said.
Isadora turned to me slowly, expression unchanged. “You can’t control what’s coming, Celestine. You can’t change the outcomes of your mother’s doings.”
“No,” he said on my behalf. “But I can.”
And that… sent a shiver down my spine.
She looked at me one last time. Her expression haunted, defeated, urgent.
“Remember our deal,” Zagreus added.
Isadora nodded once. The lawyer stood, gesturing politely for her and Leona to follow. They did. The door closed behind them with a quiet finality, as if the truth itself had just been escorted out of the room along with them.
And I was left with him.
Breathing heavily. In disbelief and desperation.
“You are going to tell me what that meant,” I said with broken voice. Because he was the only man who knew everything. He knew more about me than he knew about himself.
When he didn’t say anything, I added with desperation. “Right now, please.”
Zagreus leaned against the edge of his desk, the slow poise of a man who’d walked through centuries of storms and come out dry. “No.”
My fingernails bit into my palms.
