Chapter 71 Without mercy

Chapter 71 Without mercy

Sera's Pov

"You came here for me to heal her," I repeated.

"Yes."

"You came all this way. You broke my father out of a cell. You sent her ahead as a messenger." I looked at Wren's door and then back at Gia. "And the actual reason was that you needed something from me."

"It was never only that—"

"But it was part of it."

Gia didn't deny it. "Yes, It was part of it."

"If you didn't need me, we wouldn't have ever met?" I took a deep breath. "I need a minute....just give me a minute."

Gia closed her mouth.

Everyone was watching from the side of the clearing. My father was still catching his breath from the walk in, leaning carefully against the nearest tree with Tobias already crouched beside him doing an assessment he was pretending to tolerate.

I turned away from all of them and pressed both hands over my face and breathed.

I was three things and the third one had only been awake for hours and someone was already telling me to use it to save a life or watch a girl die.

"Sera."

My mother's voice. I dropped my hands.

She was standing at the camp entrance. I don't know when she'd come outside. She was looking past me, and her face had gone pale.

I turned to follow her gaze. Gia too had gone completely still.

“Elena.” Gia said first. " Eighteen years, not a single letter or single word."

"Gia, don't do that.”

"Do you know what it was like?" Gia's voice cracked on the last word. Just slightly. She pulled it back fast. "Do you have any idea what you left behind when you walked out?"

"I left behind a coven that didn't want me," my mother said. "I left behind a mother who made it very clear which daughter she actually needed."

"So that's your justification?" Gia said. "Fifteen years of silence because you felt unwanted?"

"Don't rewrite it," my mother said sharply. "You were her favorite. You were always her favorite. Every decision she made, every responsibility she handed down, it was always going to you, Gia. With or without me in the picture."

"The point is that you left. You didn't just leave the coven. You left me! You left us to carry everything while you went off and built a quiet little life and pretended none of it existed."

"I built a life," my mother said. "I had a daughter. I had a family—"

"So did I." Gia's eyes burned. "I had a daughter too. Alone, without her father. Without my sister. While I held up every responsibility you walked away from and tried to raise a child and keep a coven together and protect people who needed protecting." Her voice dropped to something raw and thin. "Did you ever once think about what that cost me?"

"Did you ever once think about what staying would have cost me?" my mother shot back.

"You don't get to compare."

"I get to tell the truth," my mother said. "And the truth is our mother chose you before I was old enough to understand what that meant. The truth is every time I tried to be what she needed she looked straight through me to find you. I loved you. I still love you and I left because staying was destroying me, and I will not stand here and apologize for surviving."

"I'm not asking you to apologize for surviving!" Gia's voice finally broke open. "I'm asking you to acknowledge that your survival had a cost and someone else paid it. Someone who loved you and had no say in any of it."

Gia was breathing hard now. Her hands were pressed flat at her sides and her eyes were bright. I looked at my mother's face.

“Please stop.”

Both of them turned to look at me.

"I mean it," I said. "Stop right now."

"Sera, this doesn't concern you."

"It concerns me," I said firmly. "All of it concerns me. But a girl is inside that room running out of time and my father just walked in here, and he has been through things I don't want to think about and you are both standing here bleeding on each other in the middle of a camp that has enemies closing in from every direction."

"There is so much to say. I know that. I can feel it from here, but please, not now." My voice dropped.

My mother looked away first, Gia exhaled.

"Fine," Gia said quietly.

Nobody said anything else. I walked toward my father.

Tobias had gotten him inside and onto a cot in the side room off the main chamber by the time the rest of us came through. He already had his kit open.

"How bad is it ?" I asked Tobias.

"He needs rest and about four days of actual food," Tobias said without looking up. "Nothing is broken that won't heal. Nothing permanent, considering where he was, that's just pure luck.”

I sat on the cot. My father looked at me the way he always did, like I was the most important person in any room, and right now that look made my chest ache in ways I couldn't explain.

"You're thinner," I said.

"You're stronger," he replied.

"Tobias is right," I said. "So for once in your life you're going to listen to someone who knows what they're talking about."

The corner of his mouth moved. "There she is."

"Don't do the proud face right now or I'll actually cry and I've been holding that off since so I need you to work with me."

"Noted," he said.

"Tell us what happened," Maera approached him. She was always so strict and knowing.

My father looked at her.

"How much do you already know?" he asked.

"That you were taken," I said. "That they had you underground. That Gia found you before…….before they finished whatever they started."

His jaw tightened. "Then you know enough to understand what I'm about to say."

He looked around the room. At every face in the room, taking his time. Like he was making sure everyone was actually prepared.

"They didn't take me for information," he said. "I want you to understand that. They already had what they needed. They took me because they wanted you to know they could. They wanted you scared. They wanted you to make a mistake."

"Who?" Maera asked. "How many?"

"More than we can fight the way we are right now," he said. "And they're not waiting for the Blood Moon. They're not waiting for anything." He looked straight at me. His eyes were steady and tired and absolutely certain of what he was saying.

"Listen, we don't have much time left, Sera," he held onto my hands firmly.

"They're coming without mercy.”