Chapter 214: A Thousand Years of Silence 1

BONNIE

"Hush."

"I have to..."

"No." His voice was rough against my scalp. "Not yet. Let me hold you for a moment."

So I let him.

My hands, which had been twisted together so tightly that my knuckles ached, slowly came apart. I slid my arms around his shoulders and held on, feeling the tremor in my muscles ease by degrees, the way a limb slowly relaxed after being clenched for too long.

Through the thin linen of his shirt, I could feel his heart beating beneath my cheek.

It was steady.

It was steady.

For the first time since I had begun telling him everything, I allowed myself to believe that perhaps I did not have to brace for what came next.

When he finally spoke, he did not pull away. He kept his mouth against my hair, his arm firm around my back.

"Your heritage changes nothing," he said. "Do you hear me? Nothing. Not who your father is, not what your blood is, and certainly not what either of those things might mean to anyone else. I would have chosen you under any circumstances, and I will choose you now, knowing everything I know."

A sound escaped me, wet and wordless. I pressed my face more firmly against him, embarrassed by how much those words had undone me.

"I am also glad you got answers from the goddess," he continued, his voice quieter now. "I mean that. You have spent your whole life wondering why she never came for you, even when you begged her to. You were a child asking her mother for help, and you were left to make sense of that silence on your own. Whatever else you must feel about what she told you, at least you finally know why."

I laughed, though the sound cracked halfway through.

"I do not know if I see it in that light."

He eased back just enough to look at me. His hands remained on my arms, warm and reassuring, his thumbs moving absently against my skin.

"Tell me."

"I have never met him." I wiped my face with the heel of my palm, though it did little to clear away the tears. "My father. For years, I told myself I did not care about him. I convinced myself that whoever he was, wherever he had gone, he was not worth thinking about."

I drew a shaky breath.

"But some part of me always wondered whether he was out there somewhere, living an ordinary life. Perhaps in some town, in some house, waking up every morning without giving us a second thought. I hated him for that. For leaving us behind, for never looking for my mother or for me. I built an entire wall of resentment around that idea, and I sat behind it for nearly a decade, quite comfortable in my certainty that he was a terrible man."

"That was not an unreasonable conclusion to draw."

"No, it wasn’t." I picked at a loose thread on my sleeve. "But now I find out he was never out there at all. He was trapped in the royal estate. For years. He could have been right beneath my feet while I worked, while I protected nobles and went about my duties, while I slept in the retainer barracks and never once thought to look for him there."

The thought made my chest tighten.

"All that time, I was so certain he had chosen not to find us. I never considered that he might have been unable to."

Lysander’s expression softened, and I wished it would have stayed that way.

"Because now," I continued, "I am supposed to break some curse that he started. That is what Selene told me. That I am the one who is meant to do it."

I looked down at my hands.

"And I do not even know what that means. I do not know what she expects me to do, what it will cost, or why she thinks I am capable of accomplishing something that has remained undone for... thousands of years."

Lysander’s brows drew together.

He sat back on his heels, and although the tenderness remained in his face, something sharper settled behind his eyes. I knew that look. I had seen it when he was studying a ledger and came across a figure that refused to reconcile, when he sensed that a seemingly straightforward problem concealed something far more complicated beneath the surface.

"The curse," he said slowly. "What curse?"

I blinked at him. "You do not know?"

"I know the old stories. I know the Lycans were cursed, and I know the curse has endured for generations before extermination. But I have never heard the particulars explained in any detail." His gaze held mine. "I am asking you to tell me what you were told. I know it is possible for history books to lie."

I drew my knees up and wrapped my arms around them. It was easier, somehow, to speak to my kneecaps than to watch his expression change as I explained the fate of his kind.

"Lycaon was Selene’s son," I began. "Half god, half mortal. He did something terrible to Aureon, the sun god. I do not know all the details, and Selene did not explain everything. But I know it involved bloodshed. He killed people, and what he did eventually sparked a war."

I paused, trying to arrange what I knew into something that made sense.

"His mother cursed him for it. And the curse did not end with him. It spread to others. His then-allies who carried his will in good faith. That is why the Lycans suffer. They cannot shift properly, and their bodies are never entirely free of the curse’s influence. Even having children has become a kind of punishment."

My fingers tightened around my knees.

"Those who are born into it often do not survive. The children who live grow up knowing that their bodies might fail them before they have had a chance to live. The males, especially, die young. Some barely make it out of their twenties. The curse wears them down, little by little, until there is nothing left for it to take."

I fell silent for a moment, thinking of all the lives contained in those words, all the families who had watched their sons weaken and die, all the parents who had buried children they had spent their lives praying to keep.

Then I looked at Lysander.

"According to Selene, there is a way to end it. The curse will lift if Lycaon bends the knee to Aureon."

Something changed in his face.

"But he refuses," I added. "He has refused for thousands of years."