Silas bit his tongue hard enough to taste blood. It was clear even to someone like him that Petra was an utterly devoted niece and had viewed the dead priest as a father, but that didn’t color howSilassaw him.
The man known as Maximilian Dooraker had abandoned Petra. Instead of whisking her away from a situation with no happy endings, he let her think he was dead.
If you were here, old man, I’d break every one of your fingers one by one.Snap, snap, snap. And when he was done, he’d push Dooraker to his knees and make him recount every sin against Petra until his throat was too raw to speak.
And then Silas would take his head, too.
His mate’s soft voice broke through the haze of rage that had overtaken him. “I was ten when my parents were shot in a deal gone bad. My dad used me as a runner sometimes. I didn’t see it, but I was hiding close by when— when it happened. When I finally worked up the courage to come out of my hiding spot, I found them face-down in the street.”
The breath exploded out of him. “What did you do?”
Petra’s fingers twisted in his shirt when she murmured, “I don’t like to talk about this part.”
His skin crawled at the implication in that quiet statement. What could be worse than what she’d already recounted?
“You don’t have to,” he said, trying to remind himself that if he squeezed her any harder, she wouldn’t be able to breathe.
“No, I want you to know. No one else does.”
“Did your uncle?”
There was a long, tense pause. “Max struggled with a lot of what he’d done. I think he spent most of his time in service to the Temple asking the gods for forgiveness. But… but he didn’t like to talk about it. He never asked me for details. Once he found me, that was it. All better. Whenever I mentioned something, he’d go all white and— I always got the feeling that if I toldhim everything that had happened after my parents’ death, he would’ve never recovered.”
He took back the fantasy of breaking Maximilian’s fingers.I’d shatter his fuckin’ spine, vertebrae by vertebrae.
“The short version of the story is that I had nowhere to go and no one to trust, so I lived on the streets for a year,” she told him, speaking quickly like she needed to get the words out as fast as possible. “I was used to not getting regular meals by then, but obviously it got way worse when I was sleeping in alleys. I had to hoard any kind of scraps I found, since I never knew when I’d find more or if they’d get stolen by someone bigger than me.”
Early in his career, Silas had once botched a job so bad that he ended up strapped to a chair as a big, ugly vampire pulled his claws out one by one. Hearing that she’d been a homeless little girl fighting to survive on food she found in trash cans was worse. Much worse.
“I ended up getting caught by Patrol,” she admitted. “I was terrified of them, but the elves were shockingly nice to me. I didn’t know at the time that they’ve got crazy childcare instincts, but even if I had, I probably would have been terrified anyway. My dad taught me that Patrol meant trouble.
“They gave me new clothes, lots of food, and a bed to sleep in at the station. A nice elvish lady even washed and braided my hair for me as she asked me all kinds of questions I couldn’t answer. Where were my parents? How long had I been lost? Did I have any relatives?”
She laughed a sad, watery little laugh. Not the kind he loved. This one broke his heart. “I spent my whole life believing that the elves were the enemy. They were the ones who had ruined my family. They were the scary predators who would eat me if I stepped out of line. But by the time they found a place for me in a magically gifted children’s home, I was desperate to stay with them.”
His stomach sank.Children’s home?
Of course the elves couldn’t keep her. It wasn’t until basically yesterday that they’d even begun to publicly take non-elves as mates. Fostering a non-elvish child would have been culturally taboo and also legally dubious at best.
But in the years since the last one closed down, the children’s homes that had sprung up across the UTA to care for the generation of orphans left by the war had become synonymous with neglect.
“Why couldn’t they find you a foster home?” There was a desperate edge to his voice, as if he hoped her answer could somehow change the facts of the past.
Petra sighed. “The thought is that children should be placed with families that can understand them — dragons to dragons, elves to elves, witches to witches. There’ve been too many catastrophic accidents and misunderstandings to place a witch of my power into, say, an arrant family, despite the fact that I came from one. What if I had behavioral issues? What if I couldn’t control my abilities? Someone could get seriously hurt.
“But this wasn’t the Coven Collective, Silas. Even if they did find a witch family to send me to, everyone was fighting to survive. No one could take on one more mouth to feed. When they couldn’t find a witch family to foster me, I was sent to a private facility that specialized in magical children.”
“Tell me it wasn’t bad.” He whispered the words into her hair. He demanded it.Tell me something good happened to you. Please.
Petra’s silence was its own answer long before she finally replied, “It could have been worse.”
Fuck.
“Mostly we were forgotten about, which, looking back, was probably a blessing in disguise. Mostly that meant we didn’t get fed and violence broke out, but it also meant that childrenweren’t being outright abused.” She shrugged. “I know that’s a messed up thing to say, but it’s the truth. I’ve heard horror stories about what went on in other children’s homes. My experience was bad, but notthatbad.”
Yes, he could understand that. All things were relative. That didn’t make it right, and it didn’t lessen his rage, but he understood it. “How long were you there?”
“Four years.”
