Not a doctor.
Him.
“Mother.” My voice is barely a sound. “Do you believe him?”
She lifts her eyes to mine.
“I did.” She smiles sadly. “But not anymore.” The air leaves my lungs. “I believe he lied,” she whispers. “I believe he took my baby. Hid the child. Gave it away or sent it somewhere I could never find. Because he couldn’t bear the thought of another man’s blood mixing with his legacy.”
I stand abruptly. I can’t stay seated with the storm breaking inside me. I pace, the moss between the cobble stone muffling my booted steps.
“So you think…” I rake a hand through my hair, pulling on the ends in an upwards motion. “You think you have a child somewhere?”
“Yes.”
My pulse thrums like a drumbeat against my skull. “And you want me to find them.”
She stands now too, reaching out to touch my arm. “You’re the only one strong enough. The only one he trusts enough not to watch too closely. The only one with the will to do what I cannot.”
I stare at her. At the desperation in her dark eyes. At the mother I’ve spent my life trying to protect, one who has never asked me for anything ever before no matter how hard things get.
She wants me to find a ghost.
Someone taken.
Hidden.
Stolen.
“Why now?” I whisper. “Why tell me this after all these years?”
Mother closes her eyes, and when she speaks, her voice fractures.
“Because by the end of the year, youwillPair, Billy,” she cups my cheek in her icy hand, and I think of how far away that feels, there’s only one girl for me, and she’s somewhere far from here. “And once your Pair is pregnant.” Her breath shudders. “The thought of him, of that man, touching your child, manipulating its fate, lying to you, to her, the way he lied to me.” She covers her mouth with her hand, tears slipping down her face. “I couldn’t bear it. Not again. Not after Dolly.”
My chest pulls tight, painful.
“And if I can stop the past from repeating,” she says, stepping closer, “I will. Even if it means betraying him. Even if it means risking my life. Or yours.”
I take a slow breath, steadying myself. “Do you have anything?” I ask. “Any clue? Any trace?”
She hesitates, then nods, reaching into the folds of her silk dressing gown, and pulling out a faded piece of cloth, a torn scrap no larger than my palm. Soft, worn, once white but now yellowed with age. Embroidered with a small sigil, broken up by the tear in fabric, half of it missing.
A moon over a burning torch.
The old symbol.
The Obsidian’s early mark, long before it was reshaped into the modern emblem.
“This was wrapped around the baby,” she whispers. “The midwife pressed it into my hand before your father made her leave. I don’t know what happened after that.”
I take the cloth gently. The fabric feels fragile, breakable, like a remnant of a life that was never allowed to begin.
“I need you to find them,” she says, voice trembling. “Before he does something irreversible. Before he realises, I’ve begun to question him.”
I look at her, really look, and see all the pieces of her I’ve never understood.
Her quiet sorrow.
