Pax nodded before leaving the room, closing the door behind him once Isla had scooted inside. Once we were alone, she stepped closer, coming to a stop on the other side of my desk.
“You read Eximius’ journals and you read Adelaide’s,” she spoke and it took me a moment to realize we were talking about the journals again. Those godsdamned journals I’d wasted somuch of my time sifting through rather than identifying the warning signs of the rebellion growing just under my nose. “Did you read Atticus’?”
I blinked in surprise, trying to place the name. Atticus…
“Eximius’ son?” I asked.
“His Heir,” Isla replied with a nod.
“Atticus took over the official family report once Simi went mad. Between that and correspondences of his recovered from that time, there was never any indication he kept a private journal as well.”
Isla dropped the leatherbound book on my desk with a thud. I stared down at the ripped and curling cover.
“I had an acolyte help me pull this from the archives,” Isla informed me. “It’s old and a little worse for wear. Atticus wasn’t as careful with his possessions as his father or sister, apparently, but there’s a passage you need to read. I’ve marked the page.”
She turned away from me, strolling off to one of the bookshelves on the sides of the room and examining the spines as I reached down and gathered the book in my hands. Curiously, I pulled back the cover and flipped to the dogeared page she’d indicated. The pages I flipped past were full of exceptionally short entries for spread apart dates that held hardly any information at all, as if Atticus had truly been too busy for keeping much of a personal record as I’d expected. But then I reached the page Isla had marked and saw it was full of his sloppy handwriting, front and back and onto the next page beyond.
I glanced up to find my wife pulling a book from the shelf and reading the cover. Then I turned back to the journal and began to read.
Father passed last evening.
I won’t say it was a peaceful death. There was nothing in the last decade of my father’s life that could pass for peaceful. Wearen’t quite sure what caused it. The priests are convinced his disease of the mind simply took too much of a toll on his body.
I went to clear out his study since it’s to be mine now. Not that I’ll have it for long if the rebels practically at our gates have anything to say about it. I found a letter on his desk, already bound within an envelope addressed to the House of Harlowe. It was in a neat script, the sort of handwriting he hasn’t had since he went mad years ago. I almost opened it right then and there but knew that wasn’t what he would have wanted. He hadn’t addressed a letter to me or my mother or sister. It was to the House of Harlowe and to the House of Harlowe it would go. But I found something else as well. Another letter, buried beneath the false bottom of the middle drawer of his desk, a place only he and I knew of. It was addressed to me and it…the handwriting was the same, clear and concise like it had been before, but the contents…
My eyes bulged from my head as my gaze snapped up to my wife.
“Isla, this…”
“I know,” she replied, frowning in my direction as she set the book back on the shelf.
I dropped my gaze to continue reading Atticus’ recounting of his father’s note and, therefore, the story of how a man had lost his mind because he’d met a god.
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Olympia
“Harrison, you fucking idiot!” I wailed, pounding my fists against the bolted shut window in my cell.
I could see the snakes down below, barricading their own gate, reinforcing the bars with metal sheeting and barbed wire. Every single one of them had a weapon or two strapped at their waist, their hip, their arms, or back. Wicked, curved blades, short and sharp daggers, broad longswords, even some bows and arrows. I slammed my hand into the window again and drew the attention of the acolyte below who looked up at me with a frown.
“You let him do this,” I screamed at her, knowing she couldn’t hear me from below. “You’re going to get him killed, Bria. He’s going to get killed!”
“Threatening someone else already?” a cold drawl sounded from behind me.
Every muscle in my body locked at that tone but I turned slowly around to face him, scowl already firmly in place.
“I wouldn’t let anyone hear you trying to intimidate more of my kin, if I were you,” Cosmo added. “You are technically still on trial for murdering one of them.”
“You know I was protecting myself,” I snapped. “You sent him that night. You’re just as culpable for his death as I am.”
“Let’s talk about that, shall we?”
He strode further into the room, revealing his ever-present daughter at his back. Of course she was here.
My lip curled in disgust as Myrine followed her father in, shutting the door behind them and taking up a position in the corner where she could be meek and silent, unseen. I shot her a glare as Cosmo strolled around the room to the vanity table. He pulled the chair out from it and gestured for me to sit. I stared at him, unmoving.
“Things are going to go very poorly for you if you insist on disobeying even a simple order such as this, Olympia,” he warned.
