Page 329 of Of Sins and Sacrifice

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I say. My voice is finally healed enough that my throat isn’t on fire every time I say a word.

“Of course you would not.” He rolls his eyes at me. “You are not a very bright individual, Minerva.”

There he goes again. Even when he locked me up in this room, all he could talk about was how dumb I am.

And to think I idolized this male… He’s nothing but a bully. A robotic bully.

“Your insults are useless,” I fire back. It’s not as if I don’t already know I’ve made mistakes, that perhaps I was far more naive than I realized.

“It is not an insult. Merely the truth. I saw the same things you did, and yet you never questioned what was right in front of your eyes.”

I frown. He continues, “Perhaps you did not want to see it, but that does not make a difference.”

“What are you talking about?”

He stares me right in the eye.

His eyes are two bottomless pits. His lack of emotion has never been more clear to me than now.

He looks at me, but he doesn’t see me as a being. There is no empathy behind that cold gaze of his, only the mechanical impetus to do his duty. Unfortunately for me, his duty consists of punishing me.

“I initially theorized that your impetuous meddling in the House of Psyche caused a human to be reincarnated as a demon—something that is in itself an abomination. But based on the information I gleaned from your memories, the opposite is true.”

“You’re talking about Marlowe?”

“Valerìon,” he corrects. “Your meddling likely shifted his reincarnation timeline forward, but I doubt it did anything of consequence. I would, in fact, theorize that you did more damage to yourself than him when you interfered with your thread of fate.” He pauses then and shakes his head. “You could not even get that right, Minerva, could you?”

“W-what?”

“Of course you would not. Only someone with your…decreased intellect would confuse thepotentialthread for thelovethread. But perhaps you are as visually challenged as you are mentally.”

“Can you stop commenting on my intellect?” I grit my teeth.

“Why? It is rather challenged.”

“So you’ve said.” I roll my eyes. “But back to my mistake. Did you just say I cut the wrong thread?”

“Indeed.Becauseof your challenged intellect, and vision, perhaps both at the same time, you cut yourpotentialthread instead of thelovethread. I must confess that was quite amusing to witness. It’s not every day that I see such idiocy.”

I decide to ignore his continuous jibes and instead focus on the core of the issue.

“And what does that mean?”

He shrugs.

“It has not been done before, therefore there is no frame of reference for it. But you do not need to concern yourself with it since you will die soon enough and it will be of no consequence then.”

“But did my cutting the wrong thread have anything to do with Marlowe and what happened to him?” I press on.

Azerius sighs in frustration.

“Valerìon. And you do not follow, do you?”

“I…don’t?”

“Of course you do not. Valerionwasa Son of Tenebreis. The Son of Tenebreis that breached Aperion and murdered General Leotar. You lived with him for so long and you never suspected he might be the enemy?”

What? No, that cannot be. Yet as I attempt to deny it, the clues start to assemble in front of me, forming a rather alarming picture.

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