“We both did. Kane and I…” I exhale a breath that tastes like bitter blood. “We tore the Dark Realm apart, we slaughtered every guard, every scientist, and we never stopped. And when we found our father.” My lip curls. “There was no mercy left in us, we were insatiable beasts, and like beasts, we ripped him apart.”
I shake my head against the violent flashback, remembering as Kane and I stood over the oozing, limbless body of a man who once held scalpels to my skin with glee.
“Instead of escaping, instead of choosing mercy, we chose to unleash hell.”
I see it ripple across her gaze, the weight of what I’ve said, the brutal truth. The grief, the fury. But also, I see her aching, I see her imagining how a boy who held his sister’s body is the man she sees now.
“I don’t know how we survived it,” I say, quieter now. “I only know that we walked out of the Dark together.”
Her fingers move again, brushing my cheek as more tears slip down her face.
“I’m so sorry,” she breathes. “For all of it. For the boy you were, the sister you lost. For the man you had to become.”
“I don’t talk about this anymore,” I admit in a whisper. “Not even with Kane.”
“But you told me,” she says.
“I’ll tell you anything.” And I mean it.
Because we are the same. Two creatures caught between dark and light. Irrevocably bound. I am hers, and she is mine.
Ours.
I study the freckles scattered across her cheeks, over the bridge of her nose, like delicate constellations that remind me of the Light.
Of home.
“So when you asked me what I am…” I pause. “I don’t really know. I can only tell you what I was.”
“Was,” she echoes, gaze hardening into something sharper. “That’s what you think? That what happened to you, what he did, stripped you of who you are?”
“I am not the same, Jasmine.”
“None of us are after trauma.” Her hand lifts, fingers trailing over the scar threading through my brow. “And this?” Her touches are gentle, but the memory flares sharply. “How did this happen?”
“He wanted to take the light from me, literally.” My lips twitch, not quite a smile but something like it. “After my other eye darkened, and this one refused, he tried to tear it out.”
Her fingers still upon the scar.
“But Kane stopped him. I don’t remember how exactly. I just remember the sound of our father striking him, and Kane not even whimpering.” I glance at her hand, how it lingers, then to the storm in her eyes.
“He never tried to take it again.” I curl my fingers around hers. “I think that’s when I realised how powerful Kane truly was. The fact that this man, our father, feared what Kane was capable of even as a boy.”
With her fingers in mine, I trace the shape of the scar from memory, from the tip above my brow, along the arch, to the bottom in the hollow of my eye.
“Kane hates it, the scar. I see him looking at it sometimes, feel his darkness bursting out, like he blames himself for it. But to me, it’s a memory of him. Proof he wasn’t like his father, that he never would be, because he cared enough to intervene, caredenough to bring us…” I swallow. “Food. When we were being starved.”
Her breath stutters, eyes widening just slightly. “Kane… never told me those parts,” she murmurs, searching my gaze. “All those times he pushed me to eat…” Her voice fades as the meaning settles.
“That’s because Kane doesn’t see himself as a hero. He never sees himself as the good guy. But I did. I still do. Kane is the one who saved me. Not some Goddess.”
Her soft expression is something caught between heartbreak and grief. Then her thumb brushes my scar again, so gently I barely feel it.
“I see it now too,” she whispers. “And you didn’t lose your light when you gained the dark, Ezekial. I see it. I feel it.”
“But it’s different now,” I murmur. “I wouldn’t call myself an immaru anymore. I haven’t for centuries.”
“Why?” she suddenly snaps. “You were taken, broken, forced into something you never asked for—” Her voice cracks, eyes burning with a rage she’s trying to suppress.
