Page 85 of Cheating Fate

“Like I mentioned, this place is a pit of snakes. They’re all vying for power. Every minute of every day, they’re plotting and scheming on ways to further elevate and enrich themselves,” Taseus continued bitterly. “The Divine’s purpose used to be to foresee great disasters and provide assistance in preventing them. They’ve perverted it to where now only the rich and wealthy get to purchase an audience with me.”

My back stiffened. I had indeed heard growing rumors about corruption and greed taking over the Divine Basilica. Many poor communities received the help they sought much too late to avert tragedies that the Divine might have assisted them with. Others talked of payment requests to merely access the contents of an impromptu communication from Taseus.

“It is no longer about protecting vulnerable populations but helping corporations finding loopholes for their unethical plans. Over the past decades, CEOs and Oligarchs have been seeking out my services to know how much backlash their future ventures might trigger. How many people will die due to the toxic component in their products? How extensive will the environmental fallout be? How long before their guilt is discovered? They just want to know if they’ll have time to make enough profit to offset any penalty they may face.”

“This is corruption of the highest degree!” I snarled.

“It is, and it has gone on for far too long. It ends now, especially in light of the dark times ahead. You have no idea how many hoops I had to jump through to get this message to you,” the Divine said with a disgusted expression. “You asked why now. Because they made sure I couldn’t reach out to you or anyone else.”

He heaved a sigh and shook his head, the hard line of his jaw hinting that he was replaying somber thoughts in his mind.

“I was seventeen years old when I met your grandmother. Alana Murphy was sixteen. She came to Dantor with her father, who was leading the human delegation. The moment I laid eyes on her, I knew she was the one. Love at first sight is not a myth. She was perfect in every way.”

My chest constricted at the deep pain audible in his voice as he spoke.

“As soon as the high priestess realized what was happening, she forbade me from pursuing Alana. She was mundane, and I had already been selected to be the next Divine. They couldn’t allow me to waste my seed on her. I had to mate with the most powerful among us to increase the chances any offspring of mine would inherit my powers,” he said with contempt.

“Clearly that didn’t stop you,” I said softly.

He snorted with self-derision and nodded slowly.

“At first, we met secretly. Then I realized this couldn’t go on. I wanted her to be my wife. So I told the Conclave that if it came to that, I would abdicate to be with her. As you can guess, it caused major diplomatic backlash with the humans. Her father threatened to disown her if she didn’t back down. When she refused, he did. As I remained steadfast in my determination, the Conclave relented. And all was well with the world.”

He went quiet for a moment, his lips pressed into a thin line, and his hands holding the armrests of his throne with such force his knuckles blanched. Clearly overwhelmed by emotions, he was struggling to regain his composure before continuing his tale.

“Two weeks later, Alana was gone. She vanished during the two-day pilgrimage I had to partake in. No message, no video, nothing. Just gone,” Taseus said angrily. “I knew they had taken her. But they deprived me of any means of trying to contact her. My access to any form of intergalactic com system was blocked. It was only four months later that one of the members of a visiting human delegation informed me that she was pregnant with my child on Haven.”

My heart leapt. The refugee planet often sheltered desperate expecting mothers who couldn’t risk giving birth on their homeworld. Many Braxian hybrids had fled there to escape the abuse the pureblood used to subject them to before Ravik changed the laws. But that they would take my grandmother all the way to the Eastern Quadrant further proved their determination to keep her apart from the Divine.

“I demanded that they bring her back to me at once,” he ground through his teeth. “The Head Priestess Zolina went to investigate with her daughter. That daughter conveniently happened to be our dear Gotia.”

The amount of venom in his voice as he glanced at his consort took my breath away. How could you be mated to someone you hated so much? Even before he continued the story, I already had a strong sense of where things were headed.

“They returned months later claiming that both Alana and our baby died during childbirth. In the case of my Alana, it was true. Haven held a public funeral for her. It destroyed me,” he said, his voice breaking.

Zhara slipped her hand in mine, and I gave it a comforting squeeze. Even though I had just met him, the love he bore my grandmother after all these years rang deep and true. In that instant, I realized that, should such a tragedy ever befall my Zhara, I would also never stop mourning her.

“As they had hoped, now that I had nothing else to live for, I just conformed to the life the Conclave dictated,” he continued, his voice filled with resentment. “It took Braxia bouncing back from the verge of bankruptcy for me to discover the truth. At the time, your father approached Dantorian merchants on behalf of Magnar Ravik to inquire about potential resource trades. So they came to see me to assess whether it was a sound investment.”

I recoiled, failing to see the link.

“Why would they come to you about that?” I asked.

“For the same reason the CEOs and oligarchs came to me. Except, in their case, it was to genuinely make sure they wouldn’t cause harm to our environment or population with products they knew little about. Regular testing could take months, even years,” Taseus explained.

I nodded. “That makes sense.”

“The thing is that, whenever commercial transactions are involved, I always look up the source. My powers work better when the divination is on a person or a biological target than on an inanimate object or concept. When I looked him up, I saw him holding my Alana’s spitting image, but with my golden eyes. Her name was Grace, the name my beloved always said she wanted for her daughter should the Goddess ever bless us with one. And you were there, in that photo, at six years old, staring right back at me with my eyes. That’s when I knew.”

Even without seeing it, I knew exactly which picture he was referring to. It was usually the one that came up first whenever people looked up my family. My siblings used to tease me about the fact that pictures including them required a bit more searching.

“For thirty-two blasted years, they let me believe she had died. Instead, that foul wretch sent my baby to an orphanage well-known for abuse against their wards. My daughter never should have suffered!”

He smashed his fist on the armrest of his throne as he shouted those last words. Breathing heavily, he looked in Gotia’s direction. The tension in his body screamed that he wanted to lunge at her and beat her senseless. Lips pinched, back stiff, the High Priestess kept her face slightly averted, likely avoiding eye contact. I hated those damn masks robbing me of the ability to fully read their emotions.

And yet, my mind was reeling at all those revelations. My mother never fully got over the sense of rejection and abandonment that her parents just gave her up for adoption in that godforsaken place. As Taseus accurately stated, she did suffer greatly there. It took her a long time to tell me what happened. My mother had always been stunning. And the twisted caretaker of the orphanage started sexually assaulting her when she was only nine. Uncle Marcus—who was also an orphan at the same establishment, only found out once she was twelve. He killed the caretaker and ran with her. For years thereafter, he protected her the best he could.

“Grace was loved,” Taseus said with deep pain in his voice. “She was wanted. And I never got a chance to tell her.”