“What did you do to him?” I almost sneered.
“What I had to.” Remorse suffused Unir’s face. “I knew a great, powerful witch.”
I shook my head, disgust coating my tongue. “I can’t believe you. So what? It worried you, so you did what you always do? You hid it, didn’t you?”
“It was for his protection!” Unir snapped back at me. “Sometimes darkness isn’t created. It is born.”
“That’s why you pushed him so hard, trying to shove righteousness down his throat. You tried to thrust a crown on him because you feared what lived beneath his skin. For as old as you are, you are dumb. You cannot cage or tame a beast. In trying, you only make it more feral, and now he has no idea how to control it because you denied him the ability to even know it.”
Unir lunged to his feet, his voice booming. “You speak to me as if I’d ever hurt my children, but I protected him, all of them, the best I could.”
“Best for who?” I snapped back. It didn’t matter if he was a god or a ghost. I didn’t care. I’d fight him the second I got out of these chains.
Unir pointed an accusing finger at me, as if I were a child who needed reprimanding. “You do not know the gods. What they cannot control, they fear, and what they fear most is their own annihilation. They crave one thing more than power, and that’s perseverance. Had they known, they would have slaughtered him as a babe.”
His words knocked the air from my lungs. How would I tell Samkiel this? How could I show him and not create another wound on his already battered and bruised heart? I shook my head at Unir. “So you forged a ring of lies to trap that power inside him and never told him?”
Unir was quiet.
“Am I right?”
Unir said nothing.
“Admit it. Out loud,” I snapped. “Am I right?”
Unir’s temper flared, the godly part of him reacting to being spoken to in such a way. “I do not answer to you.”
“You answer to no one now because you’re dead. You’re dead, and you can’t rest because of this. Tell me I’m wrong about that.”
For the first time since I met him, he turned away from me. “You do not understand.”
“You’re wrong. I do. You’re a coward,” I said, meaning every word.
Unir spun toward me, looking as if I’d slapped him. It was then that I realized just how like his sons he was. He had never been spoken to like that, and he wasn’t sure how to process it.
“I—”
“A coward,” I enunciated. The chains bit into my worn flesh, and my bones ached, but I struggled to my feet. My anger and the firmness of my belief gave me just enough momentum to stand. “You have no idea the damage you’ve done to these men. Damage I have witnessed, and in some cases, borne the brunt of. Damage I have soothed and tried to heal. There is love in all of them. Gods, even Kaden. I saw it in the beginning, felt it before the pain, trauma, and rage creeped back in. You are just like the other gods. You didn’t understand them, and so you feared them. Instead of nurturing them and the love inside of them, you shaped it into something ugly. Instead of protecting the beings you created, you allowed your fear to dictate your actions, and you abandoned them. The other gods threatened you? Fine, threaten them back. You are their father! You have the universe’s strongest children bleeding all over the realms because of a pain that could have been avoided.”
Unir blinked at me, and his head reared back as if I had struck him. Good. I had meant to use my words as weapons, and maybe the only way to get through to him was to force him to face what he had done.
“I did nothing to Kaden or Isaiah,” Unir said defiantly. “They abandoned me.”
“Is that what you tell yourself?” I said. “After you locked them up in Yejedin and left them to rot for hundreds of years. How did you expect them to react? Did you think they would return to a place they had called home, to a family who had forgotten them and moved on? You may scream and yell about monsters, but you molded two of the deadliest, and the blood of innocents, of my sister, is as much on your hands as theirs.”
Unir’s nostrils flared. “I never locked them up. They left after slaughtering their grand sire, leaving with barely a note. So whatever lies they have fed you, make sure you tell them how I searched for them for centuries. We cried and ached over their loss, following every whisper of a lead, but always came up empty.”
I blinked at his raw confession, not because I didn’t believe him, but because I did. If he could still breathe, his chest would have been heaving. We stared at each other as realization struck both of us. Neither of us was wrong because she’d deceived all of us.
A slow clap came from the doorway.
“Wow,” Nismera said.
I swallowed and settled against my chains as she walked into the room, her heels clicking against the stone. She was no longer dressed in battle gear and armor, but in a beautiful red and gold silk dress. Even her makeup was perfect, down to the gold eyeshadow and lipstick. For some reason, this elegant perfection was more terrifying than her geared up for war.
“Bravo. I don’t think anyone has ever stood up to my father like that. It’s about time someone put the old geezer in his place,” she said, her silver eyes glowing like a beast’s in the gloom as she stalked toward me. I eyed the spear she carried, but it was the fragments of the medallion embedded where the sharp tip of the spear met the hilt that gave me true pause.
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