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I take in the old house, smell the old smell. Workers will begin their work on the interior soon, although it won’t be anything like my mother has become accustomed to. They’ve already started on the exterior. It’s uninhabitable as-is.
My mother’s eyes are locked on mine when I turn my gaze to hers. As usual, she’s unreadable.
I approach her, lifting a chair from around the old dining table, placing it a few feet from her and taking a seat.
Her wary gaze moves over my shoulder to the man with the bag before settling on me, and it’s like she’s a stranger, like I don’t know this woman at all.
“Mother. I’ve had a hell of a time tracking you down.”
She casts a disdainful glance at the two men behind her. “I don’t appreciate being kidnapped and brought here against my will by my own son.”
I exhale, finding it hard to keep my hands from clenching, my mouth from spouting accusation upon accusation.
“I don’t much care what you appreciate. I know what you did, and this is your punishment.” My father’s words, repeated in my own voice; my heart, twisting inside my chest. “It was you all along. You who started everything.”
She has the grace to lower her lashes for an instant. But maybe I’m giving her too much credit. Maybe it’s just the moment she needs to gather her defenses, prepare her denial.
But to her credit, when she opens her mouth, it’s not to deny. “I had no choice, Santos. It was you or Caius.”
“That in itself is a choice.”
“So you’d rather I’d have let him take Caius?”
“Do you hear yourself? How do you justify the selling of one son over another?”
Her gaze falters momentarily, only momentarily. “You had your father. Who has Caius had apart from me?”
“I’m your son too,” I say, the words coming out more broken than angry because I feel the weight of her betrayal so acutely, it’s like salt in an open wound.
She folds her arms across her chest and leans back in her seat. “What do you want from me? An apology? All right. I’m sorry I had to make an impossible choice. But look at you now. Look how far you’ve come.”
I open my mouth, but I’m dumbstruck for words. “Do you feel any remorse at all for any of it?” I finally ask.
“Why should I? I saved one son. I could only save one son.”
“Alexia. Our child. It was you.”
Her jaw clenches. I see a bead of sweat at her hairline, but when she speaks there’s a hint of distaste to her words, at least the first part. “Your brother couldn’t stomach the thought. I had to step in. I saved him from the Commander. Would you have wanted it to be him and not you?”
“Don’t you dare turn this around.”
“He didn’t deserve what you did to him.”
“He drowned my wife. He deserved worse. Dad found out. That’s why he cut you and Caius off.”
“He found out that Caius was the Commander’s son and that I’d made an agreement with him to trade you.”
“Tell me why Alexia. Why not just send me to him if you were so desperate to save Caius?”
“You think your father would have allowed you, his beloved heir, his blood-born son, to go? I couldn’t leave him with a choice. Alexia was collateral damage.”
“Alexia was a human being! As was our child! And the way…” It takes me a minute to continue, to find the words. “The way you laid her out for me to find. Why?”
“I needed you angry. I knew you’d think it was her father. I knew you’d blame yourself and you’d go after him, and I knew it was the only way to save one of you.”
“Don’t pretend for one fucking second you thought to save me, that it even occurred to you that you’d be sending me, your other son I might remind you, to that monster.”
She opens her mouth, closes it again, and for the first time, she looks chastened. Not repentant though. She has spent too many years justifying her crime to herself.
