“You’re Hadrian.”
He inclines his head and points to his face. “I don’t blame you for not knowing who I am. It’s the eyes. Brown. Not a hint of Mother’s power.”
“I nearly met you…so many times.” I take a step back, snatching a breath at how close I came to seeing him. “You were waiting with Galla at the top of a Constellation tower when I first arrived.”
He shrugs and matches my step. “But you went to the forge instead.”
“And then when I first met Galla, she ordered you out of the room.”
“Right before you entered it,” he says. “The door had barely closed behind me.”
“This morning, Cassia said we just missed you.”
“You passed me in the hall outside the training room. Did you know that?”
My skin prickles at the memory of how bustling with activity the hallways had been this morning.
Hadrian shrugs, and for a second, I glimpse once again the shadowed rage with which he dragged a knife across my flesh. “The advantage of being overlooked is that people forget I’m there. I see things they don’t know I’ve seen. Hear things they don’t know I’ve heard. Things they don’t want anyone to know about. But I know.”
He takes another step, but not toward me, angling toward the wall on his left, planting his hand on it. “Which is why I can’t stand by now and watch you destroy yourself, Thyra. Not for someone like my brother.” Hadrian shakes his head, his teeth visibly gritted. “Not when he’s lied to you about his true intentions.”
My heart thumps too rapidly, but I remind myself of Antony’s warning. Lies and liars. Even if the same applies to him. “What do you want from me?”
“All I ask is that you listen.” Hadrian raises his eyes to mine. “Once I’ve told you what I came here to say, you’re free to make your own choices.” He sweeps his hand across the air beside him, gesturing at the space he vacated. “You’re free to leave. With or without the hammer. I won’t stop you.”
Slowly, I lower my hands.
If it weren’t for Antony’s warnings, I wouldn’t listen at all.
But Antony himself told me… He would weave his lies with truths so I can’t tell which is which.
If there is any truth hidden in what Hadrian is about to tell me, I need to know it.
Quietly placing emotional shields around my heart and mind, preparing to consider with suspicion everything Hadrian says, I utter a harsh command. “Speak.”
Hadrian leans against the wall, keeping his distance, chewing hard on his lower lip before he begins. “Did Antony tell you the story about that lady? The one Mother had killed because she attracted Quintus’s attention? How Mother sent five brutish?—”
“Five brutish men.”
“Yes,” Hadrian says, pausing. “Except, it wasn’t five. It was one. And Mother didn’t send him.”
My brow furrows, but before I can speak, Hadrian continues. “What about the time our father dragged Antony through the blood magic into the catacombs?”
“Your father was a tyrant,” I say, unable to keep the fury from my voice.
“True.” Hadrian nods. “But did Antony tell youwhyour father deemed it necessary to carry his eleven-year-old son through powerful magic that could have torn them both apart?”
I shake my head, a stiff motion. Antony told me it happened. Given what I knew of his father, thewhyseemed self-explanatory.
Hadrian responds with a heavy exhale. “Of course he wouldn’t tell you…” He chews his lip again. “What about the night the Vividari were slaughtered? Did he tell you what really happened to his mother?”
My eyes flywide. “Stop.”
All I can see within my mind is Antony’s furious focus on my bloodied cheek, feel the clamp of his arms as he hurried me from the library back to the catacombs, hear theclickof the shackle I snapped closed around his arm to force him to stay and talk to me…
He told me he was there the night his mother died. His father made him watch, and Antony couldn’t do anything to stop it.
Tense with fury, unable to maintain the emotional shields I’d placed around my heart only moments ago, I take a step toward Hadrian. “What are you trying to do?”
