“I don’t know,” she said again. “I like to think he’s at least capable of it. Otherwise, why risk his life to keep you close? And even with Yorrick.” She squeezed her eyes shut. “I was so angry to be sold off to the highest bidder like a prize Aldrath steed. But Father didn’t need money. I’ve seen the state of the accounts. He didn’t care about status. He married me to someone who was known to be… eccentric. Out of court life. Placid. Yorrick’s family was old, untouchable.”
I digested her words, looking at her marriage in a different light. Had it been to keep her safe… or both of us? Away from politics and shrouded in the protection of an ancient family line, no one would ask questions about her shut-in bastard sister.
Did his motives even matter when he had still been an absentee whoremongering drunk?
“It doesn’t excuse everything else he was,” she said as though she had plucked the thought from my mind. “But also…” Wynnie trailed off uncharacteristically, biting her lip.
“What?” I pushed, my chest tightening again.
“Do you remember all the servants who disappeared?” she asked, returning her gaze to me.
I tilted my head. “Yes, but I always assumed they just left when he wasn’t there to keep them in line.”
“Well… maybe.” She took a reluctant bite of her roll, chewing slowly.
I narrowed my eyes. “But?”
A breath of air whooshed out of her. “But it was always after you had lost control of your wings, or one of them had questioned why you never used your mana.”
“So the stableboy didn’t just abandon his post…” My mouth went dry. Batty pressed harder into my collarbone as if she feared my heartbeat might outrun the room.
I had taken a risk, losing my virginity to anyone at all. Even then, I had been prepared. Lanterns off. Clothes on. Measures that were wholly unnecessary when his downstairs fumbling left me in no danger at all of losing control.
Still, I had thought the danger was tome. It hadn’t occurred to me that my father would find out—or care. That I would put the fae’s life in danger just to sate my endless curiosity.
Guilt stabbed at my gut. Lumen let out a low whine, barely audible, his nose bumping my knee like he could scent the spike of shame rolling through me.
Wynnie pursed her lips like she wanted to lie, but that wasn’t what we did. “It does seem unlikely,” she acknowledged.
“So what, when he isn’t losing himself in booze and boobs,” I said, rubbing a hand across my face, “you think he’s eliminating anyone who poses a threat and actually giving a single damn about the daughters he never speaks to? How would he even know?”
“Who the hells knows?” she said, throwing up a hand. “He knew about the portal to the Wilds and that he had a secret lovechild out in the world somewhere, and he never bothered to share either of those things. He only told me about the portal when he was ass-faced wasted, and even then mostly in slurring words I only half believed. He’s a vault when he wants to be.”
She drained half of her glass in one go.
“It doesn’t matter now.” She stabbed half-heartedly at a piece of roasted carrot, then abandoned it entirely. “It doesn’t change the fact that he abandoned us every shards-damned chance he got, or that he left you completely alone at that estate after I left.”
“So why do you think he’s here now?” I asked, swirling my pale blue wine in my glass and watching it catch the blazing firelight.
Wynnie poked listlessly at her roll. “I don’t know. I suppose we could ask him,” she said, though her tone made it painfully clear how little she wanted to do that.
“Assuming he was lucid enough, we’d still have to go see him again,” I muttered, taking a small sip of the wine that did absolutely nothing to settle the tightness in my chest.
Batty peeked over the edge of my plate, nose twitching in sympathy before she stole a crumb and curled up against my hip.
Wynnie snorted into her cup. “There is that. So… icewine and unanswered questions it is.”
She clinked her glass against mine, a soft, resigned toast to the emotional mess neither of us wanted to excavate.
In spite of the circumstances, I couldn’t help a small smile from creeping onto my lips. Even if the rest of my family was an excrement show of epic proportions, at least I had Wynnie.
And our honesty, always.
By the time Draven returned from his longer-than-necessary shower, we had polished off the bottle of wine. And also another larger one that I had coaxed out of Mirelda by finishing all my vegetables like a good little queen.
My husband surveyed us through his dark lashes. His hair was damp, curling slightly at the ends, and the scent of juniper and snow drifted behind him.
“There’s a… poetic… shustice in being drunk while our father is finally sober,” Wynnie mused, staring up at the ceiling from her position on the rug in front of the fire, the final glass of wine held in her precarious grasp.
