Page 130 of Every Shade of Shadow

“Did Mortis kill them, while you were hunting him?”

The Professor’s hands stop moving. “No. Your parents were steadfast, devoted…they never wanted a child, but you were a happy accident—one that would ultimately come to end them.”

My throat has gone tight. “How?”

“Your arrival put into motion a series of events that ultimately led to them leaving the Umbral Brotherhood. Without the Brotherhood’s protection, they were left open and vulnerable to certain entities and individuals they’d punished during their time on the job.”

I swallow hard before speaking. “Tell me what happened. I want to hear it.”

He nods, hands working back downwards over my ribs. “There is a faction, the Sable Syndicate, who like to interfere with inais politics, in addition to running Europe’s largest prostitution ring. The petrification spell I used on you tonight…I’m sure you could imagine how that might factor into their enterprise.

“But your parents? They took a particular interest in this syndicate over the years, but without the Brotherhood’s protection, the syndicate saw a chance for retribution, so they took you.”

“I was taken?”

“You were just a baby, but yes. Your parents, on the orders of the syndicate, came after you knowing full well they were walking into a trap, walking to their death. And that is what they found, but not before teleporting you to your grandmother—a spell of which such distance and power would have weakened them considerably.”

I had no idea about any of this. Gran never said a thing about it.

“As your father lay there dying next to your mother, already deceased, the two of them surrounded by countless syndicate members they’d taken with them, he reached out to me.”

“How?”

“Telepathically. We created this connection back in our days at the Academy, much like you and your friends have now. He told me to watch you, to protect you, to guide you when you came of age, and then he passed.”

The fuck. It’s a lot to take in. “But this, what we are doing together…”

“You’re the sole offspring of one of the most powerful magical duos of all time. They knew what you could become.”

I can’t regulate my thoughts. “Did they know what it would require?” A darker thread emerging. “Did they ask you to do it, to train me?”

Damien places a finger on my lips. “Hush now. It does no good to dwell on such things, what they would and would not have wanted for you.”

But I can’t imagine it was this, the deviant acts I’ve performed with the man my father considered a friend. What would he say about what the Professor has done to his daughter, about the taboo acts that have been performed in this very room?

Darkwood continues. “I spent the following years systematically dismantling the Sable Syndicate myself. I started with the pimps and worked my way up, wreaking death until I reached the very top, until there was no one left. I made sure there were no bloodlines, not a single trace of the syndicate that could ever be revived. I owed your parents that much.”

“What about your parents?” I ask, knowing this is pushing far deeper into his personal life than we have ever been before. “Are they still alive?”

He looks away, resigned, before turning back to me. “I was an orphan juggled from home to home until the Brotherhood found me, so I know all about inais, my pet.” His voice is deeper than usual. “I have suffered, suffering which only increased when I started training with the Brotherhood, because there is little compassion or humanity to be found in an organization so deep in the shadows. And maybe it’s there where that final shred of it was snuffed out, but I am stronger for it. I am stronger for what is to come.”

“And what’s that?” I ask tentatively.

He draws back. “Enough of such matters for now. You will meet me back here tomorrow for one of the most challenging trials of all. You will need all your strength, for tomorrow your body may well be broken beyond all comprehension.”

Which doesn’t sound good.

“But for now,” he says, his hands working over my flesh again, “allow me to salve you, a respite.”

It sounds so final, but I steel myself and enjoy at least this small moment of relaxation.

Tomorrow is a new day.

Let him bring his worst then.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

The eerie mood around the castle continues. There hasn’t been another murder, but it feels almost inevitable at this point.

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