Chapter 117 Levi's POV

Chapter 117 Levi's POV

The fortress was not what I expected.
I had been building a picture of it in my head since the night Rahul found the symbol on the wall behind my father's face. Something ancient and crumbling. The kind of place that looked like it had been abandoned for two centuries because it had been abandoned for two centuries.
What we drove up to was nothing like that.
The stone was old. That part was accurate. But the structure was intact in a way that suggested it had not simply survived, but had been maintained deliberately and consistently and by someone who had resources and intention and a reason to keep it standing when the rest of the world believed it had burned.
I sat in the back of the car between Derek and Lucifiel and looked at it through the window and said nothing.
Lucifiel had been quiet the entire drive. After our talk he made it obvious he didn't want me to follow but he knew I was going to come along anyway. 
 I couldn't believe the thoughts I was having but as far as I was concerned, I love my grumpy vampire boyfriend.
 His silence wasn't the usual kind though, this was different. It was obvious he was not happy about something. I had noticed it the moment we turned onto the road that led here.
I had not asked yet. There were too many people in the car and whatever was happening on his face was not something I wanted to pull on in front of an audience.
We stopped at the treeline.
Lucifiel got out first, follow by Derek, Rahul and Kael from the front. I climbed out last and stood in the cold air looking at the fortress and feeling something I could not name sitting in the base of my throat.
"So, you've been here before," I said to Lucifiel.
He looked at me briefly. "Yes."
"Recently?"
"No."
He moved toward the others and I fell into step beside him because that was what we did now and also because I was not going to let him put distance between us while his jaw was doing that specific thing it did when something was costing him more than he was showing.
The plan was straightforward. Kael and Rahul took the perimeter. Derek stayed close to me. Lucifiel and I went in through the main entrance because my father had sent the message to Lucifiel specifically, but we later got another message saying I should come along, and showing up any other way would have been the kind of thing that escalated a situation before we understood its full shape.
The doors opened before we reached them. Which meant we were expected.
The inside of the fortress was warmer than the outside, Lit with a combination of modern lighting and older fixtures that suggested the renovation had been practical rather than aesthetic. Someone had been living here.
The man standing at the end of the main hall was not someone I recognized immediately.
He was tall. Broad through the shoulders. The kind of build that suggested someone who had been physically capable before whatever had happened to him and remained so after. His hair was dark with grey at the temples and his face had the specific quality of someone who was older than they appeared, which given everything I had learned about the world in the last months was a more loaded observation than it would have been before.
He was looking at me. Derek standing slightly behind my left shoulder. He was looking at me with a weird expression that I couldn't tell what it was.
"Levi," he said."I didn't think he would agree to bring you along." He looked at Lucifiel."You brought him here." His voice had changed quality.it came out darker now."Did you tell him the truth."
"What truth?" Lucifiel asked.
"What is this. What are you talking about?" I asked my so called father .
He did not look at me. His eyes stayed on Lucifiel " Don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. Tell him," my father said.
Lucifiel was still.
"Tell him," my father said again. "Or I will."
I looked at Lucifiel.
His expression was the most controlled I had seen it in months.
"Lucifiel," I said quietly.
He did not look at me.
"He was not always this nice," my father said. The words came out measured and deliberate,"And he was not always a professor at your university. In fact he owned the school. And when he found you it was not the first time he had found someone connected to your bloodline."
The hall was very quiet.
"Is that why you are soo mad at me."Lucifiel said,"Because of your lover?"
"He hunted us," my father continued ignoring him. "Your bloodline. Hunter families. For two centuries he tracked them and he found them and he..." He stopped. Exhaled. When he continued his voice had changed again. Something raw had come into it. "He found us, I and your mother."
The word landed in my chest like something physical.
I had never known my mother. She was a name on a file in a facility that should not have existed. A presence I had constructed from absence my entire life. A fact rather than a person because facts were what I had been given and I had learned to work with facts.
She was suddenly not a fact anymore.
"What," I said.
"She is the reason, you're you. The forbidden bloodline," my father said. "She carried it the same way you carry it. The same way her parents carried it before her. And he found her the same way he found all of them." He looked at Lucifiel and the rawness in his voice calcified into something harder. "She did not survive it."
I suddenly felt everything I had been building understanding of for the past several months rearrange itself without asking my permission. The careful construction of months laid over a foundation I had not known was there.
I turned to look at Lucifiel.
He was looking at me now. Finally. He had stopped trying to hide his expression.
"Is that true," I said.
He said nothing.
"Lucifiel." My voice came out steady which surprised me. "Is that true."
"Do you want me to give you visuals of how you made me suffer before killing me the way you did. I woke up to a dead wife and no children."
"Please tell me he's lying."I whispered.
"Unfortunately,I do remember you now." he said to my father.
Was it just me or he didn't sound sorry about it. He sounded Simple and direct and entirely without deflection.
It did not make it easier.
" I was going to tell you about it. About that part of my past. But I didn't know your parents were a victim of my past" He said, looking at me."She was from the hunter bloodline,I found twenty three years ago." He held my gaze without flinching from what was in mine. "Her fate was unavoidable. I wondered how he survived" he pointed at my father.
I looked at him for a long time.
Twenty three years ago. A year after I was born. I wasn't even given the opportunity to properly know her.
"And my father," I said.
"Obviously he survived. What I want to know is how."
"I survived," my father said from the end of the hall, "because of Voss. Because his facility found me afterward and what they did to me kept me alive when I should not have been." His voice was steady now. The rawness had gone back underneath whatever he kept it under. "They used your blood, Levi. Samples they had collected from you. Your blood made me what I am now. And it is the reason I am standing in this hall instead of buried in the same ground as your mother."
I processed that.
My blood. Collected from me as a child in a facility, and used on a man I had never met who turned out to be my father. Who had survived because of me without me knowing it.
The shape of it was almost elegant in how terrible it was.
I looked back at Lucifiel.
"Is he telling the truth?"
"Yes," he said.
My father's voice came from the end of the hall again. Quieter than before.
"He killed your mother," my father said. "He tried to kill me. He came into your life knowing all of that." He paused. "And yet you are standing next to him."
I didn't know how to react to the newly acquired information.
All of it was true at the same time.
I did not move toward Lucifiel. I did not move away from him. I stood exactly where I was and looked at him and let the silence say what I did not have words for.
His eyes stayed on mine.
Whatever he was looking for in my face I did not know. Whatever he found there I could not tell.
But my chest kinda hurts.