He’s taking a risk remaining this close to me, and if I could just catch my breath, I might be able to use my legs. Maybe ram my knee into his stomach. But it’s taking all my effort to remain conscious.
A sudden despair fills me because, for the first time since I woke up in this dark place, I wonder if this is where I’ll die.
CHAPTER THREE
“Before I kill you, there’s one thing I want from you, Veda,” my father says.
At this point, I don’t really care what he wants from me. I only have regrets. Mostly, I regret not driving my claws through his throat when I had the chance—assuming I could have. For all I know, he allowed me to get the upper hand in that moment and would have easily repelled me.
Then there are other regrets. Deeper ones.
Not seeing more of the world beyond my cage when I had the chance.
Not asking the keeper to take me to every beach where I could look up and drink in the beautiful darkness of the night sky.
Not trying every food that could possibly be eaten.
Not letting myself lose control when the keeper offered me the chance.
My voice wheezes between my gritted teeth, an exhalation that somehow forms discernible sound. “What… do you… want?”
Taiven’s lips twist. “You will tell me where your mother is.”
I can only blink at him.Does he mean her grave?
Somehow, I manage to make intelligible sounds, although my words are barely more than forced whispers. “I don’t… fucking know.”
“Oh, come now, Daughter.” Hetsksat me. “She may hate me for abandoning her—not that I would have been able to find her in the veil even if I’d wanted to—but she can’t hide from her destiny.”
He’s talking about her as if…
My face falls as a shocking possibility occurs to me. “You think… she’s alive?”
His brow puckers. “Of course she’s alive. Galeia walked with gods. She was over a thousand years old. The closest to an immortal that any dark creature can be. Two decades in prison would have been a mere blink of an eye to her.”
I continue to stare at him in disbelief.
My mother was over a thousand years old? A near immortal?
Fucking bullshit.
I can’t possibly reconcile his description of her with the starved, frail woman who gave me her share of the scraps our jailer fed us and who died in my arms, gasping for breath just as I am now.
A terrible, horrible laugh bubbles between my teeth. “You’re… deluded.”
My laughter only seems to enrage him. His right hand rams the feather further into my shoulder and he roars at me. “Where is she?”
I scream as the weapon travels all the way through my torso and into the wall at my back. Warm blood pools across my shoulder, but it’s a mere trickle of feeling compared to the pain of the feather’s stem raking through my body.
The hurt makes me angry.
So, too, does Taiven’s sickening belief that he didn’t kill the woman he claims to have once loved.
Well, I can play on that.
Why the hell should I insist on the truth?
“Oh, she’ll come for you now,” I whisper. “She’ll destroy you for what you’ve done to me.”
