“In six months,” she says, “if you don’t come, I’m going to take it as a rejection. The second one I’ve ever had from you.” She has to stop a moment before she can say the rest. “So come get me, Aaron. Don’t make me spend forever in this bed alone. Come back and get your son.”
She can’t hear me. The words come out of me anyway. “But what if you get here,” I ask, “and you decide you hate it?”
She smiles, certain, her hand spreading flat over the swell. “I won’t, Aaron. I choose you. I’ll always choose you. That was never the question.”
I sit up so fast the realm swims in my hand. “You can hear me?”
“Yes.” Her wet eyes find the exact place I’m standing. “Our son has magic, Aaron, and it’s so strong I can feel it moving in me. I think he’s the one carrying your voice to me.” Her mouth wobbles. “But I can’t see you. I wish I could.”
“Mara, I?—“
“Don’t.” She shakes her head. “Don’t make it harder. Just do what you have to do. Fix your realm, then come back and get us. I am not raising this boy without his father. Do you hear me?”
I clear my throat and push up off the sofa. She can’t see me, but she feels the change in me even across a realm, and she settles.
“I love you so much,” I tell her. “More than the throne, more than any of it.”
She lies back down on the bed and curls up small again, her tail coming around her, her eyes closing. “Then prove it,” she says. “Now go away, Aaron Blackwood, and give me the home I deserve.”
I’m smiling like a fool when I close my hand. The realm folds shut and her room winks out. I stand there alone in the firelight and laugh once, wet-faced and shocked she heard me at all.
Give me the home I deserve.
I laugh again. She’s grieving, gutted, and still bossing me around—and God, I love her for it. Her words are already in my magic, burning into the root of it. I’ll spend the rest of my life giving her the home she deserves.
I turn and walk to the far wall, to the painting. There he is, full-length in a frame of heavy gold, painted in some dead century when he still had a face worth the canvas. He stares down out of it, young and flawless and pleased with himself.
“You’re beautiful,” I tell it. “So handsome. Just gorgeous, Father.” I tilt my head at the painted version of the man. “Real shame I didn’t take after you in the looks department.”
I turn my back on it. A portal tears open black and bottomless in the middle of the study, no light in it anywhere. I reach into the place I’ve been keeping him and pull. Eric comes spilling out of the dark and lands hard on the sofa, gasping. His face has knit back together some on its own, but only some. The damage Josiah did won’t fully mend—not without somebody choosing to heal it. It sits on him now in seams and dents, the cheekbone gone wrong, the once-perfect line of him broken for good.
I close the portal with a thought and walk toward him. He’s too weak to do more than drag himself up against the cushions.
“Damn.” I look him over. “Josiah really did a number on you.” The name pulls a flash of hate out of him, but he’s too wrung out to do anything with it.
“Why don’t you just kill me?” he rasps.
“I needed some time to decide what I wanted to do with you.” I look around the study, at the new glass and the fire. “My Mara wants me to turn this place into a home worthy of her and our son.”
“I don’t know why you’re telling me this.”
“A whole month I’ve shown you mercy, kept you fed in the dark instead of ending you, and you still can’t be bothered to give one single damn.”
He laughs, weak and wet, and it turns into a cough. “When are you going to get it, boy? The council offered me a position. Your own bloodline came to me—the Blackwood witch Tabatha herself—and I didn’t give a single shit about any of it. I wanted to live, enjoy myself, stay young.” He wipes blood off his lip with the back of his hand and studies it. “Not that making you wasn’t worth a pleasant evening. I had some good times with your mother. Sweet little thing, eager to please her man, gave herself over so completely it scared me.” His ruined mouth curls. “And the pussy was nothing special, but it did the job. You know how it is with men. We don’t have to love the woman. We just have to want her enough to get there.”
My hand curls at my side, but I don’t give him the rise he’s fishing for. He sits back into the cushions, laughing.
“So here we are,” he says. “Stuck in the Glen together, father and son. Now you get a front-row seat to exactly how little I care about you, your mother, or those other three bastards she keeps hoping I’ll come around for.”
“Oh, I stopped worrying about that a while ago.”
“Good.” His ruined mouth pulls into something that wants to be a smile. “I’m tired of the game, frankly. It’s better that you finally know where we stand.” He pushes himself up off the sofa on shaking arms. “Now get out of my house. I’m going to bed. My mission may have failed, but I promise you it isn’t the end, not by a long way.”
I watch him stagger toward the dark of the hall, and I think about Seth, about what I did to him, and what Amir told me right after. There’s a cruelty in giving a man exactly what he begs for. A thing you covet hard enough stops being a want and becomes the bars of your own cell, if you let it. Standing there in Eric’srestored study, I finally understand what I’m going to do with him.
“Hey, Dad.”
He turns on me, his ruined face twisting up. “Don’t you call me your father, boy. We just got done?—“
