“If it was easy, Mother, why did you send out another to kill the sameaþaswereyou’d told me to protect?”
That question caught her mother off guard.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gisela scoffed. “Yes, you do. I can see it in your eyes that you’re trying to find a lie to get you out of this. Is that why you want me dead now? So that no one else will ever know how duplicitous you are?”
Meara went to slap her, but she ducked and moved away.
“I’m not a child anymore. And you no longer command me.”
“Ungrateful wretch! You’re just like your useless father! Feckless and cruel!”
“Cruel?” Gisela was incredulous that her mother would ever apply that label to anyone other than herself. “Cratus?—”
Her mother cut her words off with a high-pitched scream. “Never say that name out loud!”
“Why? Because he was a unicorn or because his parentage betrays the fact that you are a shape shifter?”
Fury darkened her mother’s eyes.
“So, it’s true. The mark beneath your tongue wasn’t something you put there. You were born with it.”
Her mother lifted her chin. “And I should have killed you at birth as I did your shifter siblings!”
That outraged confession stunned her. While she’d known she had three siblings who hadn’t survived childhood, she’d never dreamed their own mother had slaughtered them over an ability they’d inherited from her.
The nightmare of that truth took her mother to a whole new low.
In that moment, she had an answer as to why she’d been allowed to live when the others had been killed. The one thing that made her different.
“You planned on using me against my father, didn’t you?”
“He wasn’t supposed to die!” That honest shriek caught them both off guard.
It was probably the most honest thing she’d ever heard her mother say.
But that left her with one more question. “Once he was gone, why did you keep me?”
Fury caused her nostrils to flare. “I don’t answer to you!”
No, she didn’t and Gisela should have known her mother would never answer that question.
Before she could move, her mother unsheathed her sword and angled it at her throat. “I’m done with you.”
Gisela barely had time to duck. But her mother’s intent was clear… She intended to behead her.
On the one hoof, she was impressed. Meara didn’t like to get her hooves dirty. This kind of execution was normally relegated to Gisela or another of her mother’s goons.
On the other hoof, she was horrified that her own mother wanted her dead badly enough to do it herself.
Their relationship had just sunk to a whole new level of shit.
And if she’d ever possessed any hope that her mother might have held a modicum of maternal instinct, this extinguished it. The creature in front of her was completely devoid of compassion or love.
That knowledge and reality crushed something deep inside her.
Her own mother wanted her dead. She winced at the truth she could not deny. While Masakage, Candara and Xaydin might have issues with their mother, at least she wasn’t actively trying to kill them.
