Page 215 of The Ashes and the Star-Cursed King

This baffled me. “Why?”

“That, I can’t answer. Like I said, maybe he wanted to love her. Maybe he was trying his best. For a while.”

For a while.

Those words hung in the air for several long seconds. Alya’s gaze lingered at the wall behind me, as if this next part was too painful to let me see in her eyes.

“When she met Alcolm, and they got married... That’s when she started to get scared. For us. For you. For Alcolm. He had family in Salinae. She thought it would be safer there, in Rishan territory. Farther from Vincent’s reach and eyes.”

Alcolm. I remembered that name too, faintly—remembered it called affectionately between rooms in a too-small cottage. I remembered big, rough hands and an embrace that smelled like fresh chopped wood.

“I thought he was my father,” I said.

“You thought he was your father because he became your father. He treated you just as he treated Jona and Leesan. You were all his children.” A sad smile found her lips. “He was a good man.”

Was.

Because all these people were dead now. Murdered, in an explosion that ripped our house apart.

“When I received that letter,” Alya whispered, “it was the worst night of my life.”

I remembered the wings blotting out the sky.

I remembered my mother trying to get me away from the windows—

I had thought it was the night I was saved. The night fate, and only fate, had brought me into Vincent’s arms.

“Did he go there for me?” I asked.

I didn’t want to know the answer.

Alya was silent for a long moment. “I can only speculate. I think he went to Salinae to destroy his enemies. But I think he went to that house, that night, for you. Maybe he tried for a long time to let her go. But when the wars started, and his enemies were at his throat, his true nature returned. He couldn’t bring himself to leave his back exposed.”

I couldn’t breathe.

Did you kill them for me, Vincent?

Vincent, of course, was silent. He could never answer the hard questions.

“Why did he let me live?” I whispered.

I didn’t even mean to say it aloud. But the question was always there, nagging at my soul like a piece of loose thread.

If he came there that night for me, why wouldn’t he kill me?

That would be the logical choice. I was a danger to be mitigated. A wound to be cauterized. He had enemies. He had power to protect—power threatened by no one so much as it was threatened by me.

Did he go there that night intending to identify a body, or make sure he left one behind if I was still alive?

If so... why did he change his mind?

“I can’t answer that, Oraya,” Alya said softly. “I’m afraid no one will ever be able to.”

The truth. But such an agonizing one.

“I thought you were dead,” she went on, “for a long time. He kept you very quiet for the first few years. But then when you got a little older, people began to talk about you. The king’s human daughter. I knew it had to be you. Ever since then, I’ve been following you. During the Kejari I had friends in Sivrinaj send me updates every trial. And then these last few months...”

She let out a long, slow breath. Her hand fell over mine. “I never thought I would see you again,” she choked out, the emotion in that one sentence overwhelming, like it all poured forth at once.

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