Page 102 of The Eighth Isle

“And you expect me to believe that?” I hated that my voice shook, but I said the words anyway. “You expect me to believe that whatIwant means something to you?”

“It means everything to me regardless of what you believe.” And he turned toward me with his whole body. “I am a bad man, Sunshine. There’s no going in rounds about it. Your well-being means everything to me, but that doesn’t mean I am tobe trusted. It just means I’m okay with doing exactly what bad people do to make sure you’re safe, that’s all.”

I was laughing while tears slipped down my cheeks. “Oh, you’re not a bad man, Valentine. You’ve just done some bad things, that’s all. Some pretty fucked up things.” But he wasn’t bad in his core. I’d die before I believed it because Isawhim. It was only my imagination, yes, but I saw him when he was just a little boy, motherless, and it must have been so easy for Genevieve to sink her filthy claws in his mind, to plant whichever seeds she wanted in him. To manipulate him, make him believe things that weren’t even halfway true.

“Isn’t that what bad men do?” he wondered, but he wasn’t sad about it. He wasn’t regretful. In typical Valentine fashion, he’d just…accepted it.

“Good men can do bad things, too. And bad men can sometimes do good.” Mama Si wasbad,or at least mostly bad, and she was capable of doing good. She’d helped me before. She was helping me now, by keeping me here.

Then Valentine sighed. “Labels. Unimportant.”

“They’re very important. Without them how can we know who we are?”

“I know who I am, and I’ve never claimed to be otherwise. I was very certain of it, too, until you came along, Sunshine,” he said. “So, no—I couldn’t let you leave last night. Not just because I knew Syra would never give up searching for you, and she’d kill a lot of people and destroy a lot of land while she did, but because she’d find you. She would find you within days, maybe hours, and when she did, she wouldn’t show any mercy. When she did, she would be pissed off and she would throw you in a cage somewhere and wait for you to give birth, then kill you.” He said all of it like he’d thought those same words a million times before.

“But last night when I called for her, I knew she wouldn’t be that angry. Irritated, yes, but not angry. The chances of her reacting out of spite were minimal, so I did it. I did what I had to do to keep you safe.”

I saw it. Really, I saw how it all looked from his point of view. “What were you planning, Valentine? What the hell were you up to?” He was always up to something and it really had become impossible to predict his next move.

“To get you out,” Valentine said. “That day when your magic let go of me, and I found you in the garden, I heard everything, and I had to make a plan right then and there. Act quickly before my chance slipped. Then I made a deal with the sirens, too, when I found out that Syra planned to unload her magic in you. They were going to come and stop herwhileshe was doing it and kill her right there on the spot. She’d be too distracted to stop them. Too weak.” His eyes closed and his fists tightened over his lap.

I laughed bitterly. “You miscalculated a few things there, I’m afraid.”

“I did. It wasn’t the best plan, I’ll admit,” he said, shaking his head. “First, I thought I had more time to prepare, and second, I didn’t think for a second she’d want to go ahead with the ritual right away last night. A miracle Shadow managed to find the sirens and call for them—he hates water.” Slowly he raised his finger to Shadow’s chest and rubbed it a few times, causing the little dragon to let out that sound I heard so rarely—like a cat purring.

“You played your part well. I believed all of it.” I hadn’t even hesitated to think he’d betrayed me—again.With everything that he’d already done, trying to kill me and awakening Syra, I wasn’t going to feel guilty about it, but maybe next time I could stop and think for a minute.

Or maybe it would be best if there wasn’t a next time at all.

“I had to. Everything was at stake, and Syra was a very smart woman. Nothing escaped her attention, not even the smallest expressions,” he said.

“I can’t believe you did that, Valentine. Or that that happened. Or that she’sdead.” My hands closed around my neck, and the image of Syra’s face was right in front of me again, behind my closed lids. Those eyes and the blood and her words…don’t be good.I had no idea why I kept replaying those three words over and over again. Why they mattered so much.

“And I can’t believe you’re going to have a baby, Sunshine. That I’m going to have a nephew.” There wasn’t a hint of a bad emotion anywhere on his face as he looked down at my stomach. I closed my hands around it instinctively and laughed.

“Don’t worry—I have yet to believe it myself,” I admitted. “You—an uncle? It’s too absurd.”

“Uncle Valentine.It has a ring to it,” he said as he smiled at the ocean—a smile I’d never seen on him before.

“Agreed,” I said, and for some reason tears pricked the back of my eyes. I wouldn’t let them spill, but I got so emotional when it came to Valentine—so fucking emotional. “And maybe you can teach him how to ride a bike now that Syra is gone.”

That was just me and my wishful thinking, unfortunately. I wasn’t as naive anymore as to think this was the end of it.

“A bike, yes,” Valentine said, chuckling. “Absolutely. I will.”

I sighed, closing my eyes for a moment, shaking my head to clear those silly thoughts. Forcing myself back to the present because we still needed to talk.

“She’s really gone. Syra’s dead,” I repeated, more to myself than him.

“That’s one thing the sisters miscalculated—how easy it would be to kill her,” he said with a flinch. “Even when she was barely standing, she killed one of them. Such power…” He shook his head as his voice trailed off.

“Call me crazy but I’m really glad Sedelis couldn’t do what she planned to do.Reallyglad!” Because if Sedelis had been the one to wield Syra’s power, we’d have all been dead and buried by now.

“Only because Syra didn’t have the time. She’d have become worse than Sedelis, believe me. In just a couple of years,” Valentine said. “It was terrifying how quickly she was getting used to the power. To the way people submitted to her. She was starting to imagine herself asqueen.”

“And nobody could have stood in her way.” Nobody would even try.

“True. Her interest shifted in the past few days—I felt it,” Valentine said, shaking his head in wonder. “She came to terms with her past, I think, once she saw the modern world. Once she saw what more she could have.”

---