Chapter 130
Lowell's POV
Nearly two decades of lies. The truth only surfaced after both my parents were gone.
My mother's difficult labor was not an accident—he had poisoned her. My father's death was not the work of a political enemy—he had been the one to give up the intelligence.
These two people had run through my entire childhood and into my adult life like load-bearing walls, holding up everything I understood about family.
I had always believed my father died because someone retaliated against him for trying to clean up the family's name. I had always believed my mother was simply too frail to survive childbirth.
Neither was true. The real reason both of them died was Antonio—a hand working against them from the dark all along.
And the attempts on my life when I was young—the assassins who had come for me again and again, the people who had died in my place—all of it, almost certainly, had Antonio's hand behind it too.
I pressed my fist closed. I wanted to drive it through every lie I had ever been told. But I couldn't raise my arm. I had been hanging there too long. My shoulder joints felt dislocated; every attempt to move tore at me with a pain that felt like something being pulled apart.
In the middle of that pain, something settled in me with complete clarity.
My father had been honest and decent, and his own brother had destroyed him for it. My mother had been gentle and trusting, and someone had used that against her until she was dead. If I went on the way I had been—hesitating, holding back, leaving space where softness shouldn't exist—I would end the same way.
For the family. For Alina. I had to leave behind the limits I had held onto and accept the rules that actually governed this world. In a world built on blood and violence, softness was not a virtue. It was a vulnerability.
My father had been soft. He wanted to legitimize the family, to negotiate with politicians, to trade his way toward some respectable future through civilized means. He died for it.
My mother had been kind. She trusted the women who served her, and she spent her pregnancy in patience and quiet obedience. She died for that too.
And the day my grandmother sent me away—I watched the estate through the car window as it grew smaller and finally disappeared. I should have understood then.
---
I was seven years old when I left my father. I sat in the back seat, flanked by a nanny and a bodyguard, the driver in front. The fields outside ran past the window in a blur. The nanny rested her hand over mine and said, gently, that we were only going somewhere else for a while.
My father had told me before I left that I was to call her mother. So I turned to her and asked: "Mother, will we come back? Why is Father sending me away?"
She hesitated, then touched my head. "Of course you'll come back. Your father is sending you away to keep you safe—so you can grow up."
Even then I had some dim sense of it—that the family was dangerous, that my father was standing in something that could swallow him. Whenever I said I wanted to go back to him, the nanny would stop me. She told me that I was my father's only weakness. That when I was near him, the danger to him only grew.
So I accepted what they told me, day after day, until it became what I believed. For years after leaving, I lived without a name anyone could trace.
The people assigned to watch over me changed constantly. At first, when one of them disappeared without explanation, I would lie awake worrying. Eventually I stopped doing that too.
They were loyal enough to die for me. As I grew up, I tried not to count the number of people who had given their lives for mine—the trying was a way of managing a grief that had no natural end. Their graves, added together, formed a weight I carried in the center of my chest. On bad nights I would see their faces, the way they had looked in the moments before the end.
I learned silence gradually. I stopped asking questions. When someone died I kept quiet, attended the small ceremony in the courtyard, and grieved without speaking it aloud.
---
I turned over in the bed that still held Alina's scent, pressed her old sleeping shirt against my face, and allowed myself the pretense that she was still nearby.
For a moment, something between memory and hallucination moved through me—she was sitting in the armchair by the window, sunlight falling across the open pages of a book in her lap. Her eyes were lowered. Her lashes cast a small fan-shaped shadow on her cheek. Then she looked up and our eyes met.
"You're back?" She smiled, just slightly—that quality she had of making room for other people, easy and without condition.
I shut my eyes and tried to push the image out. It refused. The two of us, in fragments, came flooding back without asking permission—
Her in the kitchen with her apron tied, working at a tomato with that old knife of hers, her slices uneven, thick and thin. She frowned and stacked them back together, trying again for something more consistent. When she caught me watching, she looked away quickly. "Food's almost ready. Go wash your hands."
Her climbing down from the training platform, sweat running along her jaw, unwinding her hand wraps and looking over at me with an open, uncomplicated smile. "When did you get here? Did you see my combination just now? Better than last time?"
Every detail was still there, vivid and intact, as though it had all happened yesterday rather than at some impossible distance. The images moved through the dark behind my closed eyes like scenes on a loop.
I had believed that keeping her at a distance would keep her out of danger. I had believed that having her somewhere within my sight meant she was safe. I had believed that once I had finished handling everything, she would still be there, waiting.
But what I had actually done was tell her nothing. I had let her know nothing. I had locked her in a hospital room like something that needed to be stored safely, and made her feel like a person who had been set aside and no longer needed.
Every word she had said before she left had lodged in me like something with a point.
You've been pushing me to the margins. You don't let me be part of anything.
When I ask you what's going on, you always say you're busy.
She was right. I had pushed her out.
With protection I had decided she needed. With reasons that sounded reasonable. With one I'm busy after another, until she stopped knocking.
I closed my eyes and held the pillow tighter. My knuckles went pale. Something inside my chest pulled closed around itself like a fist.
---
In the dark behind my eyes, another image came up.
A street from my childhood. A small girl standing outside the corner store, holding two lollipops, looking up at me.
"Are you alone too?"
I had not been in that city long. My nanny and bodyguard were with me, but there was not a single person I knew. She stood in front of the store with her hair in two uneven plaits and a smudge of dirt on her cheek that she hadn't quite wiped away.
That day I had slipped away from the bodyguard's line of sight, found a quiet stretch of pavement, and stolen a few minutes outside without being watched.
"I don't know you," I told her.
"That's all right. We know each other now." She smiled and held out one of the lollipops. "You can have this one. Don't eat it where your mother can see."
I don't remember much of what came after. I remember the lollipop was orange-flavored, and the wrapper was crumpled from being held too long.
That was the first time I had ever wanted to stay near someone.
I never saw her again after that day. The nanny found out I had gone and brought me straight back. The bodyguard detail was doubled, and I was never allowed near that part of the street again. But I kept her with me—the girl with the uneven plaits, the orange lollipop, the way she had looked up at me.
Until the night of the auction, outside the castle, when a woman covered in blood knelt on the ground and lifted her face toward me and said: please, save me—please—I'll do anything.
Time had done its extraordinary work on her. But her eyes were the same eyes I had been carrying for years. The moment they met mine, I knew.
I had assumed she would recognize me the same way. When I finally asked her, in the basement, I found out she remembered nothing. After her parents died she had been taken in, and her memories had been processed—her word for it—and much of her childhood was gone. Including me.
I cannot describe how much I had wanted her to know me in that moment. Even a shadow of recognition. Even the faintest sense of familiarity. But she only looked at me with a kind of frightened confusion and asked me to stop pressing her.
So I never raised it again. I folded that small connection away and kept it to myself. She didn't remember—that was the fact. We could begin again from where we were.
But now she was gone. Gone so completely that she hadn't even left a word behind.