Chapter 202 The Truth
ADRIANA
Landon came to find me before breakfast.
I had been awake since two, which had not been the plan but was not a surprise. I was sitting by the window when the knock came and I said come in and he walked in still in yesterday’s clothes, which told me he also had not slept.
He sat down on the chair near the door without being asked.
“Lisa wasn’t your sister,” he spoke.
I lifted my head sharply. The words rang in my ears.
“Not biologically,” he continued. “Your mother gave birth to you. She wasn’t married to your father when she got pregnant, he had a mate already, a woman the family had chosen. When your mother turned up pregnant he had two options, acknowledge you and face consequences from his family, or deny everything. His family found out anyway and told him to either marry your mother or lose his position. So he married her. But he never stopped loving the other woman.”
I had not moved. I was not going to move until he finished.
“The other woman gave birth to Lisa and died. Your father brought the baby home and made your mother raise her as her own. That’s why he treated them differently. You were the obligation. Lisa was the daughter of the woman he actually wanted.”
The window in front of me showed the pale early morning light coming up over the roofline of the palace. A bird crossed the sky quickly from left to right and was gone.
“You’re lying,” I said, but I said it without conviction because I was already fitting pieces together that had been sitting loose in my memory for years. The way my father looked at Lisa. The way my mother held herself around him, always slightly braced. The thing she had said to me once when I was very young, something about how we would be okay no matter what, just the two of us.
“I found your father’s journal,” Landon said. “I went looking for it when we were together because I needed to know which of you had any claim to the pack and the assets. I didn’t want to invest in the wrong daughter.” He said it without embarrassment, like it was a reasonable thing to have done. “That’s when I found out.”
“And you never told me.”
“It wasn’t useful to me then.”
I looked at him. “But it’s useful to you now?”
I almost scoffed. Even at a moment like this, he was still being selfish.
He shrugged. “I thought you deserved to know.”
“You thought it might make me feel like I had nothing to go back to,” I said. “That’s what you thought.”
He didn’t deny it.
I stood up and walked to the window because I needed to do something with my body. Lisa had poisoned my food. Landon had told me that last night and I had sat with it through the sleepless hours. I had thought about every meal I’d ever eaten in that house, every cup of tea that had tasted slightly off that I had blamed on my own anxiety. The milk in the tea. The pasta. Years of it, systematic and patient and happening right in front of me.
And Landon had known. He had watched it. Had removed the poison on occasion, apparently, which he was presenting as heroism and which was actually just a man protecting his investment.
“My father hated us,” I said. Not to him. To the window. “I knew that. I knew it when I was small enough that I didn’t have words for it. I just didn’t know why.”
“Now you do,” Landon said.
“It doesn’t change anything,” I said. “They’re dead. All of them. Lisa is dead. My father is dead. My mother—” I stopped.
My mother had known all of it and had stayed. She’d made her daughter’s birthday cake every year and taught her to read and called her my heart and stayed in a house with a man who despised her because the alternative was leaving without him, without the pack, without the name that gave me some small protection. “My mother stayed because of me.”
“Your mother stayed because she had nowhere to go.”
“Don’t,” I said. Sharp. He stopped.
I breathed. The morning light was coming up faster now. It was nearly three. Forty-five minutes.
“You said last night that you want to marry me because of my powers,” I said. “You said you overheard something about the special wolf. That whoever is with me benefits from it.” I turned from the window. “That’s the real reason. Not love. Not history. Power.”
He didn’t deny it this time either. He leaned back in the chair and looked at me with an expression that was almost respectful.
“Does it have to be one or the other?” he said. “I can love you and want what comes with you. Those aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“They are when you’ve kidnapped my son to leverage the arrangement,” I said. “That's an acquisition.”
He stood up. “Drea—”
“Adriana,” I said, for the last time. “My name is Adriana.”
He moved toward me and I held my ground and looked at him with the full weight of everything I was now, which was considerably more than he had calculated for, and he stopped about a foot away and searched my face for the girl he remembered.
She wasn’t there.
“I’ll give you until tonight,” he said. “Give me an answer by tonight.”
“I’ll have an answer for you,” I said.
He left.
I sat back down by the window and watched the light and counted the minutes and thought about Leo on the other side of a corridor waiting. I reached out through the mind link and held it open and felt Elijah on the other end, awake, ready, waiting for my word.
Thirty minutes.