They didn’t respond for a few moments. “We’ve been talking, and we aren’t sure that you might not leave us,” Elias said, a miserable look on his face. “Now that you’re introduced in the Unseen world, you could go wherever you wanted. With your position as leader of the Dragons, you could petition the council to provide you with money and power. You’d have influence, and basically anything you wanted out of life. Who are we to stand in the way of that, especially after our betrayal of your trust?”
My mouth dropped. They thought I was contemplating leaving them when the thought hadn’t entered my mind.
“Okay. A couple of things. First of all, I want to put a pool in at the manor.”
Anthony nodded enthusiastically. “We can even have it spelled to never need chemicals or get dirty, the way that one is.”
I blinked. I hadn’t even noticed the absence of chlorine smell or salt water. “Right. The second thing. We’re married. I won’t leave you so easily. Marriages are work, constant work. And yes, we're starting off rough, but that doesn’t mean I would give up on us. I love you both, and we'll work through this.”
“Okay,” said Elias. “We agree, we want to work through this, and we'll do whatever we need to make it work.”
“I think it'll have to be time. I thought a lot about what options you had in front of you while you were ingratiating yourself into my life.”
“At first—” Elias said.
I cut him off. “Let me, please. Tell me if I’ve got the long and short of it.” I wanted to see if I’d sorted it out correctly, and I didn’t want him to get an opportunity to say the wrong thing and piss me off any further. “When you first found Michael, you let him know you’d found him, right?”
“No,” said Anthony. “We let him have his space and occasionally threw the Junta off the scent by telling them we’d had phone calls from random countries. They thought he was gallivanting all over the world.”
“That’s right, you told me that. You didn’t contact him until he ran out of blood and robbed a blood bank to get more.” I’d forgotten that.Baby brain.
“Right.” Elias nodded.
“So, once you found him, and he let you know he was looking for a way to make me a Supay, you helped him get blood and kept his secret?”
More nods.
“Then, the day he died—How'd you find out?”
“Some of the Junta goons turned up at the manor with the kids. They were frightened and tired, and David was asking for his mom and dad.”
My heart cracked hearing those words. “And Michael?” I asked through clenched teeth.
“They told us he’d breached the security and had the kids with a human, which we knew. They said he put up a massive fight and they had no choice but to subdue him, and eventually kill him.”
I pretended those words didn’t hurt as much as they still did. “Once you knew he was dead, what does protocol say you should’ve done?”
“By the laws of the Junta, we should’ve ignored your existence and raised the children.”
“But you didn’t. You watched me, and in a year, Elias, you were well on your way to becoming my best friend.”
“At first,” Anthony said, “we just wanted to know what the allure was. What was it about you that was so special that Michael was willing to give up his life for you?”
Elias took my hand. “Then I got to know you and started seeing why Michael was so enraptured by you.”
I looked at my hand in his and tears formed. “But you still waited years before doing anything or saying anything.”
Anthony took my other hand. “It got really, really hard to talk about revealing ourselves. We couldn’t tell you the truth, about Michael, or the Unseen, or your kids. So, what would we tell you about us?”
“Next we knew, a lot of time had passed, and you still didn’t know anything. Weeks turned to months, which turned to years. I got antsy,” Anthony continued. “I wanted to know you like Elias did. I wanted you to know me. I needed to beinyour life, not watching from the sidelines.
Elias reached behind and clapped him on the back. “You already had it bad, man.”
“Like you didn’t?”
“Anyway,” I interrupted before it turned into a pissing contest. “So, before you got that far, before you suspected I might be Unseen, what was the plan?”
They looked at each other. “We hoped you’d move on. We both secretly didn’t want you to meet anyone else, but when we discussed it, we always said we’d give it until you were in your mid-forties and if you hadn’t started moving on, we would stage their deaths. It’s something our people have been doing for centuries, though we haven’t ever needed to do it before. It always worked out with our kids’ parents.”
