Chapter 16 16

Chapter 16 16

Oberon’s POV

As Eudora held the journal, I stood in the library’s doorway. Her trembling hands, tears, and the destroyed expression of her face revealed the dead truth-l myself, she has read it. The truth about her father and what he did to my family. A small quiet part of myself knew it would come to that. She would learn about her father’s inane acts of depravity, and I could have told her, laid it out for myself.

However, some coward hidden deep wished to keep her innocent. The other part screamed, wanting her to know the torture, to feel it fester in her soul as it festered within me. Nothing. Seeing the sickness on her face made me feel no joy, no vindication. Only the sinister emptiness rose to swallow me whole. She looked up at me, her red-puffy eyes, inheriting her father’s paintings yet living with a warmth they could never create. Her lips moved, the soft broken whisper now sent chills through me where I was.

“How?” she choked, “How did you watch. How did you hear- how did you know what was happening to your mother?” I stepped into the room. I am unaware of whether she would want me close or far away. The mate bond summoned me to her. However, my mind was still confusion incarnate.

“Hate,” I answered shortly, “I promised myself that one day I would make him pay. That’s the only reason I survived those months. It was going on, and the screams, and the abstinence.”

It seemed that my words had burnt her, though. Eudora set the journal down like it burned her fingers. She stood on shaky legs, wrapping her arms around herself.

“And me?” she asked, her voice barely above a whisper. “And am I part of that payment? Is that really all this marriage is? Your way of getting revenge on his bloodline?”

There was no immediate response on my part. The honest response was far more complicated. Yes, at first. But now? Now everything was tangled and confused. I moved to the chairs near the window and sank into one, suddenly tired.

“Please sit,” I said softly. Eudora hesitated and slowly sat across from me. The chasm between us seemed to stretch miles. “At first, yes,” I admitted, forcing myself to meet her eyes and let her have some measure of knowing the truth. “When I learnt you existed, I wanted you to suffer. I wanted you to experience a tiny fraction of what I had felt.”

She jerked but did not look away. “I had intended to maybe even want to hear you beg just before I destroyed everything you loved,” I continued, the words bitter on my tongue. “Your home. Your people. Then I would force you into marriage and your life made miserable.”

“Then what of now?” she asked, her voice stronger even as tears still streamed from her eyes.

“And now? I have no clue. The whole mate bond makes everything confusing. Makes me feel things I ought not. Cort makes me want to protect you, when I know in plenty I should want to harm you.”

“But it’s not just the bond, is it?” Eudora said quietly. Wholely. Vulnerably. Hopefully. She’s giving me a chance to tell her that what I feel goes deeper than magical compulsion. I looked at her and let her see me.

“No,” I admitted harshly, the word torn from somewhere deep within me. “It’s not just the bond. And that terrifies me, Eudora. Because every time I do start to care about you, every time I feel something real, I feel like I am betraying them. My mother. My father. My sisters. And every thought thought in each of their heads. They deserve my hatred, not my forgiveness. They deserve my revenge, not my weakness.”

Eudora stood, walking toward me. I was surprised when she knelt before my chair. She brought us at eye-level, hands resting on my knees, warm and solid. “I am not asking you to forgive my father,” she said, voice steady despite the incredible depth of emotion in her eyes. “What he did was unforgivable; it was monstrous beyond words. I will carry the shame of his blood for the rest of my life.”

“Eudora...”

“But I am not him, Oberon,” she squeezed my knees gently. “I am not responsible for his sins. I did not know what he was doing. I would have stopped him if I had known. I would have killed him myself.” I looked into her eyes and saw the conviction there.

My hand moved of its own accord, cupping her face. Soft skin, warm, wet with tears.

“I know you are not him,” I said softly. “In my head, I know that. You have shown me who you are. Your strength and intelligence and compassion. But my heart, my memories, are not so reasonable. They do not care.”

Eudora leaned into my touch, her eyes closing for a moment. When she opened them again, they were full of resolve. “Then we figure it out,” she said quietly. “We work through it, slowly, at whatever rate you need. I am not asking for love, right now, Oberon. I am just asking chance. A chance to prove that I am not my father’s daughter. That I can be your partner, your ally, maybe one day more.”

Something about her words, her acceptance of the shattered creature I’d become, cracked something open within me. My chest unlocked for the first time in thirty years. Gently, I pulled her up, settling her on my lap. She went easily, her head tucked into the crook of my shoulder. I wrapped my arms around her. We stayed like that for a long moment, no heat or passion or demand in the air. No pressure to perform, to meet some surface-level expectation. Just slumping relief. Just two discarded fragments of life finding balance in each other for once. The mate bond sat behind my chest in pleasure. But this felt like more than that. This felt like connection.

“There’s something else,” Eudora volunteered after long minutes of stillness, muffled against my neck. “In the journal. A contingency. My father wrote about it. He put something in my blood. Something that would activate if you killed him.”

I drew back at once.

“What do you mean?” she described what she had discovered. The mysterious entry about being overdue a beating from the grave and prosecuting vengeance. About her bringing something she didn’t even know she held, serving some purpose. The other possibilities flooded my mind, all of them terrible. What had the beast done to his girl? What entangle had he constructed?

“Something to his death,” I whispered. “Quoting this in his book warns its newly-born master.” We need to know what he meant already must gearing who may have solution. “Seraphina. The High Witch. She might discover were anything mysterious in your bloodline. Some kind of spell or hex he situated you in You totally get an unspecified arrangement.”

Eudora nodded alongside my chest, almost shaking. “Plus. There’s more. I discovered letters. Mail from my father to someone he dubbed The Shadow. They were scheming for some purpose. Some purpose that included witches and Ruminants.”

I whiffed back fast, clenched her shoulders in my hands. “The Ruminants? Your dad was in league with Ruminants. I do not understand everything. The envelope was cryptic, encoded. Besides, it overcast the information, it seems he had some kind of connection with them.”

“Something involved the witches and the Ruminants. Including some providence to swap.” She gazed into my beloved heart, her purple basilisk-heavy eyes. “ Oberon, whatever he set in my lineage is associated with them? What if I’m disturbing to you? What if I’m unsafe for everyone here? What if I’m an artillery he produced?”

“You aren’t unsafe,” I said carefully, and then there was that creeping off thing anew. “Whatever he does, we’ll determine how to sort it.”

“But what if you can’t?” Her voice broke. “What if I’m meant to destroy from he inside out? What if loving me, caring for me, was the way he planned it? His last revenge?” Before I could reassure her, before I found words of comfort, the door burst open with a crash.

Yamal stood there, covered in dirt and blood. His clothes torn, his face scratched, but he was alive, and I felt relief. “We found the prisoners,” he panted against the doorframe. “I freed them. We lost three warriors, but the prisoners are free now.”

“That’s good,” I started to get up, but Yamal lifted a hand. “But they weren’t only prisoners. They were torturing them. The Ruminant were trying to create a hybrid creature. Part werewolf, part Ruminant. What I’ve seen…” he shook his head. “Some of them didn’t survive the torture. The ones that did are damaged in ways that can’t be fixed.”

I felt horror. Hybrid? That was some dark magic.

“There’s more,” Yamal said, glancing at Eudora. “They knew the Wolfsbane was there. Knew her name. Her marriage. They had maps, Your Grace. They had everything detailing her moves, her bloodline, her schedule.”

A shiver of terror ran through me. “What do you mean, her moves?”

“They have been chasing her,” Yamal explained. “They want her. They are ready to fight for her. And they knew everything about the kingdom to make it happen.”