The last question makes my stomach twist, ugly and sharp. Not because I haven't, but because once upon a time, I did.
Before Nellie changed me.
Before she took every sharp edge I carried and made me want to be something better, something worthy.
My mother looks at her like she is a miracle.
Penelope looks at her like she is a puzzle.
And I stand here behind them, unseen and aching, knowing that everything I am, every good thing, every tender thing, was carved into me by the woman bending over a pot of lilies across the room.
Helena raised me with gentleness in a place that punished it. She raised me with softness in a house built on cruelty. She taught me how to love in whispers, in shadows, in stolen moments of safety. And now that same softness is what allows me to love the woman standing inches from her.
The room breathes around us, the scent of damp earth, sweetness of night-blooming jasmine. The cold metallic bite of winter pushing against the glass.
My heartbeat throbs in my palm, in my throat, in my teeth. I don’t know which of them I’m more afraid for. Mother, who has suffered too much already. Or my Pair, who carries my heart and my soul, and carried my son’s life inside her fragile, mortal body.
If the cult ever touched either of them, my vision darkens. My hands twitch. I would raze everything. Tear down walls. Burn fields. Bleed men who have never bled before. I would destroy an entire legacy with my bare hands if it meant keeping them safe.
Violence hums in my blood, focused, purposeful, like a blade sharpened under moonlight.
My Nellie glances at me then.
Just a flicker of those heavy dark eyes, just a half-second of connection, but it hits like a blow.
Because the look in her eyes says she knows. She knows what I would do for her. She knows what lives inside my chest. She knows what darkness I keep leashed inside of me.
And she loves me anyway.
I cross my arms, leaning back into the glass, the cold biting into my spine. But I don’t move.
They speak softly, these two strong women, the one who made me, and the one I would die for. My mother brushes a curl behind my Pair’s ear. Penelope whispers something I can’t hear. They both smile. Small, uncertain, cracked at the edges, but real. And suddenly my throat feels too tight. Because I have never seen my mother look at another woman like that. Not the ones she raised in this place, or the ones she pitied. She is looking at Penelope like a daughter.
And Nellie is looking at her like she has never had a woman in her life worth trusting, until now.
I think back to my son’s birth, the story I told Nellie. About Helena being her mother, how she was told Nellie had died at birth and was sent away. About Clara being Helena’s sister, groomed by Milus to keep an eye on Nellie whilst she grew up incare, but really was sending her to different houses of horror for whoever paid the highest price.
About how I was unknowingly sent to the same home, in the hopes that we would form a bond. Something that was meant to bring her here much earlier than now, so she could be here to torment my mother.
I swallow hard, my pulse stutters. This, them meeting without Milus having any idea I’ve told Penelope all of this, this is dangerous. This is precious. It’s everything I have ever wanted and everything I fear losing.
I press my fist against my thigh to stop it from shaking. Thinking of Tolly and Rune guarding August, Gore distracting our father, and Bram keeping watch of us out here in the shadows, just so we could sneak out here for this.
I told them everything too. What Mother had asked of me all those many months ago, how the pieces started coming together.
I shake it off.
The darkness inside me is quiet tonight, watchful, on its knees, reverent, because the two halves of my heart finally exist in the same room.
And they are touching hands. And smiling.
The moon catches on the glass overhead, spilling pale light over them both and illuminating them like an omen.
Good or bad, I can’t tell.
Mother turns then, meeting my eyes.
“I’m so very proud of you, son, thank you,” she says softly.
