“Nothing she did made any sense to me,” Adria said, feeling more lost than ever. Her ancestor Isadora was betrayed by another of her ancestors. What type of people had she come from? And how would she ever be able to move out of their shadow?
To kill the mother of your children for a seat at the table.
To leave your only daughter in the hands of a pedophile, to ensure she would grow up to hate him.
She looked at Bryson, seeing the softness in his gaze. Adria hated that her mother had gotten to meet them. Speak to them. Hated that Sophia was able to share anything that was now her new life.
“I have something for you,” he said, pulling an item out of his pocket.
Adria watched his palm curl around something small before turning to show her.
A gold ring with an emerald green gem glinted in the evening light.
“My mother’s ring,” Adria said.
She looked up at him, surprised. “You’re the one who took it?”
Adria almost laughed.
“You know the truth now, Dri. About all of it.” Bryson flattened her palm and pressed the now warm object into her, curling her fingers around it. Bryson continued, “It’s your past, but it’s also your future. And only you get to decide what to do with it.”
Adria stared at her hand, following the lines of her father’s ring on her finger, and feeling the weight of her mother’s in her palm.
“I didn’t want any of this,” she said, moving to take her father’s ring off. She would throw them both over the side of the building. Bury them forever.
But Bryson stopped her.
“Maybe stop thinking about it as your father and mother’s ring. And start thinking about them as yours.”
Adria blinked rapidly, trying to stop the tears that were coming.
Bryson pushed the ring back on her finger. “They’re yours, Adria. You earned them. And now you get to speak for every family member that was silenced or stamped out, because the wrong person was in charge.”
Adria’s hands shook. “I’m not in charge.”
“Yet,” he winked, and then more seriously he added, “there was a reason Alessandro had to start working with my father. He tried to stop you on his own, and he couldn’t. You didn’t even know he was coming for you and you still managed to rise in the ranks. Alessandro was so scared that you would ascend to the Triune, so scared that you would figure out the truth, that he was willing to put his life on the line to stop you. Sure, you had help, but it wasyouthat had him running scared.”
“Me?”
“He was scared of you, Dri. Scared of what you built, about what youcanbuild.”
Adria moved to the edge of the roof. Watching the lights dance all around them. The weight of everything Bryson said pressing into her.
He was right.
Knowing her past, her family’s past, was as freeing as it was painful.
She wasn’t them, but at the same time they were tied together, irrevocably linked. She didn’t need to erase her past to have a future.
Bryson’s hands wrapped around her middle. His lips brushed her ear as he whispered, “Ask me, Dri.”
Adria drew back, looking at him. “Ask you what?”
He planted a kiss on her temple. “Just ask me.”
She pressed her lips together, not wanting to ruin the moment. At first, she argued she was waiting for Seth to wake up. But he had. And still she found that she didn’t want to.She took a deep breath and whispered on the surrounding wind. Hoping the air would take it far away and they wouldn’t need to deal with it.
“Why did you leave? Why did you let my mother manipulate you like that?”
