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Chapter Nineteen
“You were not made to kneel.” I didn’t recognize the voice, but I wasn’t sure I had the energy to care.
It took everything I had to not close my eyes and just give in.
I’d had the smallest moment of happiness when I’d accepted that Lilith had won. I didn’t have to fight anymore, didn’t have to try and fail and worry. There was something to be said for blessed nothingness.
“Up,” the voice said again, something deep and dark and unmistakably masculine.
While collapsing sounded great, I had a feeling that whoever spoke wasn’t going to let me, and there was no way I could rest withthatvoice bothering me.
I lifted my head and sat back on my heels to find a man before me.
He was tall—six and a half feet at least—with black hair and nearly white eyes. He wore a suit—black with pinstripes—but it looked like something from centuries ago.
I was sure I’d never seen him before. “What do you want?”
He approached and crouched before me, perfectly balanced as if he weighed nothing, as if gravity had no effect on him. “You are giving up.”
“I’m accepting reality,” I countered. “There’s a difference.”
“No, there isn’t. I can’t say I expected you to give up.”
“Well, eventually everyone runs out of moves.” I wanted to be annoyed at him, but I was too tired, too sore, too raw from a fight I was giving everything to and was losing.
He cocked his head, the action familiar, though I couldn’t place where I’d seen it before. “When you were born—something that never had been, that never should have been possible—I would not have foreseen you giving up so easily.”
“Easily?” I pointed at my shoulder, at the still smoldering flesh there. “This wasn’t easy! Why don’t you take a few shots and see howyoumanage!”
Maybe it was my injuries or my frustration, but it took longer than it should have to register his words, to think through them.
“When you were born.”
I lifted my gaze, my eyes wide. “Wait. You were there when I was born?”
He nodded, so still it was eerie.
“Does that mean you’re…” I couldn’t say it. It felt childish and stupid to say it out loud.
Still, he nodded again as if he knew the question. “Yes. Your father.”
All the years I’d wanted so badly to understand where I’d come from, to know my parents, to have some idea of what I was, andthisasshole had known it all along? He’d known aboutmeand chosen to stay away?
I lifted my hand without thinking and a blast of that shadow escaped, rushing toward him.
He didn’t divert it, instead simply shifting to the left to miss it by a breath of space, as if it didn’t matter.
“You asshole,” I whispered when words seemed like my only weapon. “All this time and you’ve known about me?” The idea that my father, at least, might have been unaware of me, that he hadn’t left me on purpose, was ruined.
I hated him for that, for stealing at least the fantasy that I hadn’t been purposely left by both my parents. I’d clung to ignorance over indifference.
He didn’t react with shame, withanything. “Of course I have known about you. You are my only child, the only one I would ever have. I have watched you from your first breath.”
“Well, then you know exactly what a shitty world you left me in.”
“It was your world.”
“I wasalone.”
