Page 45 of Scars Beneath a Serpent’s Scales

Nico, then sixteen, had yet to complete his rituals and was still at the Academy. The sister between them had been eighteen and off to the continent for a job Roremar and their mother wouldn’t allow her to renege on. Roremar had been twenty-two and had taken on all the responsibilities.

All of them.

His mother had done her best to care for her newborn daughter amid her own grief, a one-year-old and four-year-old also demanding ample attention.

His hands tightened on one of his little brother’s tunics, the hand-me-down fabrics blurring before his vision. He could handle this. It was his fault they were in this mess anyway.

From the moment his father died, he’d been determined to provide for the family, no matter what it did to him.

Until one night, when he’d heard his four-year-old brother, Leo, crying, thinking dinner had been forgotten—which it had been since Roremar hadn’t received the most recent payment from his father’s business partners and had been distracted trying to track it down.

After finding something for Leo and putting him to bed while their mother was facing another bout of illness, Roremar had stumbled all the way to the Temple Academy in the pouring rain. He begged the uncle he’d been avoiding for the help he’d been staunchly refusing because everything with Aldryn Falliare came at a price.

Deacon Silventa hadn’t trusted the man. Realms, he hadn’t gotten along with any of Roremar’s mother’s family after she chose his penniless love over their wealth.

It had been tearing Roremar up, and he wrestled with what to do. But that night, he’d decided his father would rather his children and partner be cared for. He would have told Roremar to set pride aside and do what a man must.

Thus, a deal had been struck. Small monthly stipends to supplement their other income, and Roremar was leashed.

He dumped the last tunic in the basket, crossing back to the central worktable and brushing the crumbs Nico spilled into his hand, tossing them in the wash basin as he tried not to think about that night.

The mystlights overhead flickered, shadowing a chip they’d put in the counter one summer when Roremar was sixteen and Nico was nine that involved an attempt to sled down the back staircase, a metal board shooting across the room, and a shattered vase.

Their sister, twelve at the time, had watched, jaw dropped open until their father came running in and said, “At least it didn’t hit the window.”

As was his habit, Roremar dug his finger into the chip. The bruise echoed behind his ribs. A wound he couldn’t help pressing.

“I should get breakfast started before they’re up,” he said, rubbing his eyes to banish the flashbacks.

“I got it,” Nico asserted, and when Roremar blinked away the kaleidoscope of colors behind his eyelids, he shot his younger brother a scolding look.

“Don’t be⁠—”

“Rore, you’re still dripping water on the floor.” Nico waved toward the back staircase. “Clean up and change.”

Fuck. He was leaving a puddle. He’d been intending to head straight upstairs and wash up before breakfast, but seeing Nico and his mother had distracted him.

No, he’d been distracted for much longer than that. He shook off that unwarranted thought, lips pursing as he watched Nico gather ingredients for three separate breakfasts.

“They each like⁠—”

“Something different, I know,” Nico placated.

“And Vivienne gets an extra thirty minutes of sleep because her seam-work lesson is canceled, but she wanted to fix up the window planters before the sun gets too high so no more than thirty minutes, or she’ll cry her eyes out once she realizes she missed her chance.” Surely he’d be back downstairs by then, but just in case.

“And the strawberry jam not the mixed berry for Leo, but a sparing amount because we don’t know when we’ll replace it,” Nico finished the instructions and dropped two slices of bread on a plate. Roremar hadn’t even seen him grab the knife.

Stars, how sad was that? His hyper-observance was truly slipping. Before leaving the room, he tried to pull up his usual keen instincts, studying the scene before him.

Everything was in order. As much as it could be, at least. Dishes were drying on the counter; an overwhelming amount of bread and pastries were wrapped in paper on the other side—the only thing they always had in abundance. The walls needed new paint, the lights too dim, and the plants outside the window overgrown. All those imperfections were stark reminders of why he was running himself into the ground, though. Of this home and the people within it he was trying to protect. Why he allowed Uncle Aldryn to drag him into this mess with Emmeline. If his siblings’ schooling was covered, it would allow him to provide all they needed in the present and set them up for a better future.

He nodded at Nico’s recitation of the breakfast menu, but his chest tightened. Nico was never a good liar, and Roremar could see straight through the act.

His brother was worried. It showed in the way his smile instantly dropped the moment he thought Roremar was no longer looking. In the way he so precisely measured each portion of food he plated so it wouldn’t waste what they had but would still be enough.

Roremar recognized it because it was the same worry that coursed through his own veins, more natural than blood. Or perhaps woven in it.

The same concern that measured out the day not in minutes, but in deadlines and budgets and assignments. In the moments that others took safe, healthy breaths, but not that his own heart beat.