Chapter 215: A Thousand Years of Silence 2

BONNIE

"That is the whole of it?"

"That is all I know. And somehow, I am involved." My voice cracked on the last word. "That is what she said, Lysander. That I have a role to play. And I do not know whether it means I save him, stop him, or end up dead trying to do either."

He took that in without flinching. For a while, he said nothing, his thumb moving in small circles against my arm. I watched the firelight shift across his face, wishing he could tell me something that would make all of this feel less impossible.

"Is he really trapped in the estate?" I asked.

His thumb stopped.

I watched him decide what to tell me. It showed in the slight shift of his shoulders, in the pause that followed, not quite hesitation but something more deliberate. He was choosing his words carefully, as though he understood that whatever he told me next would change something I could never put back.

"Yes," he said. "He is."

My heart kicked against my ribs.

"You knew."

"Not until recently. And I had no idea he was your father." He drew a slow breath. "My uncle left something behind—a hidden room in the estate, with a tank inside it. There are fifteen old runes surrounding it, placed there by witch families a long time ago. I swore the keeper’s oath before I was allowed to see what was inside."

He held my gaze.

"I think that was what my uncle was trying to tell you at the end. In the library, when he was dying."

The air left my lungs.

I sat with my arms wrapped around my knees, suddenly unable to trust the ground beneath me. The room felt as though it had tilted, leaving everything familiar at an angle I could not quite adjust to.

The night children.

The fragment of memory I had been unable to hold on to. Cornelius’s lips moving, the words lost beneath the terrible effort of his final breaths—the smell of iron. The desperate feeling that he had been trying to leave me something important before death took the chance away.

"So it wasn’t just my mind," I whispered. "He really did tell me that."

"Yeah."

Lysander’s jaw tightened, and something in his expression made me look at him properly.

"But, Bonnie, I need you to understand something." His voice was measured, though I could hear the strain beneath it. "Whatever else he is to you, to me, he is the thing in that tank. I have read what he did. I’m sure you’ve read the poems, too. You know what people say about him, what he did to the people who trusted him, what he left behind. He..."

"Did he look like a terrible person?"

The question slipped out before I could stop it.

Lysander blinked. "What?"

"When you saw him." I swallowed, suddenly embarrassed by the question and yet unable to take it back. "Did he look like a terrible person?"

For a moment, he stared at me.

I knew how it sounded. I knew that a person’s face could not erase the things they had done, that a handsome man could be cruel and an ordinary-looking one could commit unspeakable acts. I knew all of that, and still, some foolish, wounded part of me needed to ask.

Because I had never seen my father.

I had never heard his voice or watched him walk into a room. I had never known whether he smiled with his whole face or whether he had a particular way of tilting his head when he listened. I had nothing to build him from except the terrible things people said about him and the knowledge that my mother had once loved him.

Lysander did not soften his answer to spare me.

"He tried to kill you."

"I know..."

"It doesn’t matter what he looked like." His voice was flat, careful, without cruelty. "He could have looked like the kindest man alive, Bonnie, and it wouldn’t change a thing. He is as terrible as they come. I’m sorry, but I won’t lie to you about that."

"I know." I lowered my head and pressed my forehead against my knees. The words came out muffled. "I know. It’s just..."

I could not explain it. Not without making myself sound as though I were defending him, and I wasn’t. I did not want to defend a man who had tried to kill me. I did not want to find excuses for the blood he had spilled or pretend that being cursed, imprisoned, or abandoned by the gods could absolve him of his choices.

But knowing he was a monster didn’t make the rest of it disappear.

"What?" Lysander asked gently.

"My mother loved this man."

The words came out so quietly that I almost wished he had not heard them.

"She loved him enough to lie with him and have a child. She carried me, gave birth to me, and spent nine years protecting me from a world she knew nothing about how to make safe. And she never once said his name."

My throat tightened. I dug my fingers into the fabric covering my knees, trying to hold on to something while the questions I had spent years avoiding crowded into my head.

"She never told me who he was. She never told me what he had done. I grew up thinking he abandoned us, and I hated him for it. But she knew him. She must have known something about him, something that made her love him, and I cannot understand how those things can exist in the same person."

I lifted my head, my eyes burning.

"If he is as vile as everyone says, if he is as vile as even I believe he is, then what does that make her?"

The room went very quiet.

Lysander moved. He sat beside me on the bed, the mattress dipping under him, and took my chin between two fingers and tilted my head up until I had to meet his eyes.

"Look at me," he said.