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“Scarlett,” she croaks with a dry mouth.
It’s like someone slams their fist straight through my chest. I shake my head slowly.
Her face pinches together in shame as she looks me over with more lucidity parting the clouds of confusion in her eyes.
“Baby Skylenna,” she rasps.
“Hello, Violet.”
My mother’s eyes pinch close, squeezing tears out of the corners. She blows out a stuttering breath and nods, like even though she knew this day would come, nothing could have prepared her for the way her heart would react.
“Do you remember the last time I saw you?” I ask her with a pang of pettiness and the urge to rub salt in the wound.
“Yes,” she whispers.
“And do you know what happened when we walked back home?”
Violet looks like she might die right here, right now, simply from a broken heart.
“I know how it ended.” She bites down on her chapped lips.
“Do you, though?” My best efforts fail to calm the simmering hate in my stomach. “How about the times before the end? When she’d bang her head against the drywall in that closet in your old room? Or when she’d spend hours in the bathtub scrubbing her skin raw ‘to get them off of her?’”
Tears are running down both of our faces now. But mine are brewed in animosity, and hers are infused with guilt. However, witnessing her cry sends a nostalgic shiver racing through my nervous system. She cries the same way as Scarlett. The same scrunched nose. That soft frown that looks more like a pouting child. The splotchy, rosy pink that spreads from the tip of her nose down to her neck.
It brings me back, softens my heart, pacifies the boil in my gut.
“I t-tried to put her pieces back together,” I choke out, holding the leash of my sobs tightly. “I wanted to be enough for her. I-I wanted to be enough for her to live!”
“That is not on you, my sweet girl. Her fate is a tragedy I must live with. I should have fought Vlademur harder. I should have taken my own life rather than be a pawn on his board.” She reaches her frail hands out to me, clenching my fingers so hard, her knuckles turn white. “You both deserved a stronger mother. I am so sorry, Skylenna.”
I would be lying if I said there isn’t a small part of me that wished she was as strong as Niles’s father. But the outcome would have been the same, wouldn’t it? Niles was still traumatized by Demechnef, whether Charles participated or not. It would have happened regardless.
“If you’ve been sick from the Mind Phantoms, why have you waited so long to reach me?” I ask, using the sleeve on my arm to wipe my nose.
“I didn’t want to distract you when the prophecy said there was a war coming. One that you’d win. And…I didn’t have the words. What could I possibly say? There are no apologies in the world that could redeem me for what I did to my child. Drugs or no drugs. I was her mama. I was her mama!”
Violet breaks out into a coughing fit, wet and filled with mucus. Kane puts his hand on her back, helping her sit up to get it out of her lungs. Though the fluids seem endless, eventually she lies back down from exhaustion.
“There was one thing I did want to tell you, though. One thing I can die in peace knowing that I did for my family and…Kane’s family, a great justice.”
At this, Kane and I lean in.
“In my days of being conditioned and injected by Demechnef, Vlademur took a liking to me. He kept me as a companion. Had me around for years.” Her emerald eyes glaze over as she dives into these memories. “I gained his trust so I could do what needed to be done.”
“What did you do?” Kane can’t help but ask.
“He was quite meticulous about things. He read the same Bible. Slept on the same pillow. Clutched the same string of rosary.” Her eyes dart back and forth between the two of us. “So, I laced them all with a low dose of poison. Aurick’s father did not die a slow and agonizing death from natural causes. He suffered slowly, by my hand, so I could have a front row seat to watch.”
I let go of her hand to press it over my mouth. Something like pride and gratitude enter my soul, like seeing an old friend again when they come home from war. Relief. Satisfaction.
Vlademur wasn’t terminally ill because that’s what fate had in store for him.
My mother, Violet, tortured him. She gave us the justice we all deserved from being under his thumb, a victim of his malicious ideas and experiments.
Violet Ambrose dominated the original puppeteer.
Violet Ambrose was the real master of the game.
