Aveline
Iheard the door open at the bottom of the tower.
I was already on the lower stairs when it happened, already moving, drawn by habit, by obedience, by the history that had shaped my life. But also, drawn by the hope that I could finally have answers. The knowledge that he was here, finally here, and that the conversation I had been building toward my entire life was standing at the bottom of a staircase.
I stopped on the last step.
He stood in the entry.
He looked the way he always had. That was the first thing that struck me, the disorienting ordinariness of his appearance—unchanged, composed, his posture immaculate, the gold of his crown catching the tower’s candlelight the way it always had. So many years of visits, and he had never once appeared diminished or uncertain, or pressed by anything. Despite the rain, the storm brought by Thane, he looked perfectly regal and imposing. As he always did.
His eyes found me on the stairs.
“Aveline,” he said.
Just my name, registering years of disappointment, anger, sadness. Never anything else. And I used to fall over myself for one compliment from him, one nice word. But this time was different. I didn’t react the same way. I didn’t hunch my shoulder, look down, curtsey, and hope he would forgive me. I had nothing to be sorry for. He was the one who owed me. He stole from me. He imprisoned me. He lied to me.
I stayed where I was on the last step and met his gaze evenly, and saw a flicker of unease in his gaze.
“Father,” I said.
He looked at me the way he always looked at me. The assessment, the inventory, the attention that I had spent years interpreting as love, and now recognized as something colder and more functional. He was checking the condition of something he owned.
“You look well,” he said, choosing a new tact.
“I know what you did.”
No preamble. No managed approach. I had learned in the past several days that no matter how you plan something, it never seems to work out, and that the truest things landed best when they weren’t constructed.
Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise—he was not a man who allowed himself surprise—a recalibration.
“Then we won’t waste time,” he said.
“Why?” I came down the last step and stood on the ground floor, ten feet between us. “You had years to tell me the truth. You had years to tell me what I was, what you were doing, what you took from me.” I held his gaze. “Why did you lie?”
“I protected you,” he said. And the thing that made my stomach tighten was that he believed it. I could hear that he meant it, the same way I’d always been able to hear it, his genuine belief in his own justifications. “You were a child with power you couldn’t understand and couldn’t control. The worldis full of people who would have used you before you were capable of recognizing them doing it.”
“So you used me first.”
“I managed you,” he said. “There is a difference.”
“You built a drain in the floor of the dining room. I ate over it every day of my life.”
“The array maintained stability. Your power without regulation would have?—”
“You told me I killed my mother.”
The entry went quiet.
He froze, recalculating.
“You told me,” I said, and my voice was steady in a way I hadn’t known it would be, “that my power drained her. That she suffered. That you ended it.” I took one step toward him. “You told me that when I was a child, and you repeated it every time I asked to leave, every time I questioned whether I was still dangerous, every time I reached toward anything beyond this tower.” My hands were loose at my sides. “She built this tower. Not you. She built it to protect me from you, and she died doing it. You took her death and made it into a leash.”
Anger and annoyance flickered across his face.
Not guilt. I had hoped, in some private part of myself that I hadn’t fully acknowledged, that I would see guilt. What I saw instead was the expression of a man who had assessed a situation and found it more complicated than he’d expected and was adjusting accordingly.
“Your mother was idealistic. She didn’t understand what you would become, what the kingdom would face. What you would need to be.” He moved, not toward me, but laterally, the way he moved when he was thinking. “No alpha she could have chosen for you would have been adequate. Not for your power at full strength. Not for what you are.”
