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Unsure what to expect, how he would react, I touched my wand with my fingers. “Calixta told me.”
Grandfather shot out of his seat and struck me with a backhand that sent me stumbling against the wall. He slapped his cane across my throat, gripped each end, and threw his weight behind pinning me. “Liar.”
“Just like…” I wheezed, tasting blood, “…old times.”
From the corner of my eye, I watched Asa struggle to contain the daemon, but he held himself together.
For me.
“We had a nice chat,” I goaded him. “She told me I take after my grandfather.”
“Stop this,” he rasped. “Now.”
“She would know, wouldn’t she?”
The cane vanished from my throat and embedded itself into the wall beside my head. “You’re lying.”
As much as I wanted to rub my throat, I locked my hands down at my sides, showing no weakness.
“Grandmother wanted to meet me.” I let him soak that in. “She claims I’m her heir.”
When he failed to respond, aside from the ticking beneath his right eye, I kept going.
“I did have a cousin. Delma. She was the one who brought me to Calixta. She challenged me for the right to call herself Calixta’s heir.” I covered Aedan and his siblings with a lie. “She already murdered the rest of the family. I was all that remained between her and her goal.”
“You beat her,” he said, calculations running behind his eyes as he stared at me.
A smug grin curved my lips for his benefit. “I did.”
“You’re Calixta’s heir.”
The smugness of a moment ago fled and left me standing again on uncertain ground. “I am.”
Grandfather lowered his gaze in thought, and when he raised them, magic sparked off his skin.
“You were never supposed to learn of your connection. Calixta is dead. You must not resurrect her.”
What did it say about their relationship that he didn’t even ask where I found her? Or was it a testament to my father’s skill that the old man didn’t bother with the question, knowing he couldn’t get her free if he tried? What did he know that I didn’t? How the ward worked? He taught my father. He knew how his mind worked. And by my own words, I confirmed I was the last of Calixta’s line. Maybe that was why the topic held so little interest for him. He already had his answer. She was locked up tight, unless I bled out.
A life for a life.
Given freely.
Pity he didn’t know about the bag of ashes in my safe. And, yeah. No. I wasn’t about to tell him.
“Why not?” I fluffed up my bravado. “Maybe a throne sounds more comfortable than my recliner.”
“You’re my heir,” he snarled. “She has no claim on you.”
Those three words had sealed her fate, in his mind.
I was his toy, and no one else was allowed to play with me.
“I’m no one’s heir,” I corrected him. “I don’t want your legacy either.”
“You don’t have a choice.”
“I believed that, for a long time. I don’t anymore.”
