“No more!” He raised his hand, silencing me like I was an unruly dog. “No more back talk. I’m done with you, Persephone.”
He slumped into the chair behind the desk, as if the weight ofmewas what exhausted him.
I couldn’t help it—I stepped toward him.
“Do you see me, Father?” I asked.
“What?” he snapped. “What a stupid question.”
But he still wouldn’t look at me.
“Look at me,” I said again, lower, steadier.
He kept rearranging things on the desk, shifting papers, straightening pens—anything to avoid my face.
Anything to pretend I wasn’t his.
I took another step.
“Goddamn it, Father—look at me!”
Gideon spun, fury snapping across his face. He glared at me.
Good.
I met his gaze and lifted my shirt.
“You want to know what Ollie did to me in those woods? You want to know why my power reacted the way it did? Then look at me.”
My stomach was a storm of bruises and welts—sick, spreading colours of pain. One whole side had gone nearly black.
I stripped off Ash’s sweatshirt and peeled away my gloves.
The needle tracks on my forearms stood out stark under the fluorescent lights. Some still red. Some white and puckered.The scars along my fingers were jagged—gifts from potions that tore me apart from the inside out while he took notes.
My whole body was a map of the things done to me.
“You did this,” I said, my voice steady in a way that didn’t feel human. “Not me. You. You made me this way because you couldn’t accept who I was.”
“What—what, a null?” he sneered.
But something flickered in his eyes.
Guilt.
Or maybe I only wanted it to be guilt.
Maybe I was imagining it, the way a starving person imagines food.
“No,” I whispered. “Your daughter. I’m your daughter.”
For the first time in my life, something broke across Gideon Quinn’s expression.
A flicker.
A shimmer.
Grief.
