Page 51 of Monster's Secret Baby

His wings shudder with rage, feathers rustling like dry leaves. "He wouldn't even consider binding with Lilleth—a match that would have elevated his standing, opened doors that remain forever closed to him now. Because of you. He lashed out over a simple meeting with her all because of you."

The name hits me like a blow. Lilleth. She must have been the woman I saw him with that day, golden-winged and perfect.

But what does he mean Adellum wouldn't consider binding with her? Was it just…sex? Is that worse or better?

"He wouldn't paint," Sior continues, leaning closer, his eyes burning into mine. "When you disappeared, he became obsessed with finding you. Do you know what it's like watching a brilliant mind destroy itself? Watching him tear apart every lead, threaten anyone who might know where you'd gone? He was..." Sior's voice catches, something almost like pain crossing his features, "...unrecognizable. Wasted. All because you ran away like a coward."

"He didn't want me." I shake my head, unable to process this. "He had her?—"

"He rejected her!" Sior's wings flare. "I tried to use her to get him away from you and he fucking lost it."

Realization pours over me like ice water. The memory I've nursed for years—Adellum kissing another woman, planning his future with her while I warmed his bed in secret—begins to warp and fray around the edges.

"You arranged it," I whisper, the truth cutting through years of carefully constructed hatred. "You tried to set him up with someone."

Sior doesn't deny it. Instead, his thin lips curve in grim satisfaction. "I merely accelerated the inevitable. What luck for me that you saw it. Showed you your place in the natural order. Adellum needed to focus on what mattered."

My chest tightens as the full weight of it crashes down. The betrayal I've carried, the bitterness I've nurtured like a poisonous flower—it was built on a lie. Not Adellum's lie, but my own willingness to believe the worst.

"He never wanted her," I say, the words feeling strange in my mouth after years of convincing myself otherwise.

"He pushed her away the moment she touched him." Sior's admission feels like a physical blow. "I couldn't even get him to go to so much as a dinner with another suitor after."

My hands press flat against the rough stone behind me, needing its solidity as my world tilts sideways. All these years wasted on anger and hurt. All the nights I'd lain awake cursing his name, when he had been searching for me, when he had been faithful in all the ways that mattered.

"You ruined everything," Sior snarls, mask finally slipping completely. "And now I find him here, in this nothing village, acting like a common man, besotted with you and a halfling child. Years of work undone because you couldn't accept your proper place."

But I'm not listening. Adellum never hurt me, never wronged me.

Healwaysloved me. Was always true to his word and I ran at the first inkling that he might not be.

What have I done?

25

ADELLUM

Ihate that Sior is here. It has me unsettled and angry, reminds me of all the things I left behind. I realize how much I've come to love being in Saufort, and not just because of Harmony.

Though she will always be the main factor for me.

She should be finishing with work soon, and I am desperate to see her already. I round the corner of Marda's restaurant and the world narrows to a single point.

Sior. His fingers wrapped around Harmony's arm. Her face, pale with shock and pain.

"You won't do it again." His voice carries across the yard, dripping with contempt. He yanks her closer, his other hand raised. "I won't let you get in the way after all I've done?—"

I don't make the conscious decision to move. One heartbeat I'm across the yard, the next I'm there, a sound tearing from my throat that doesn't resemble anything human or xaphan. It's the sound of something ancient, something that lived in the dark before there were names for monsters.

"Get your fucking hands off her."

Sior's head whips toward me, eyes widening. Too late, he recognizes his mistake.

My magic doesn't build gradually like it usually does. It explodes from me in a concussive wave, raw and unfiltered. The pale silver light that normally dances at my fingertips now surges forth like liquid metal, superheated and unstoppable. It slams into Sior with such force that he's lifted off his feet before he can even raise a defensive shield.

"Adellum, don—" Harmony's voice cuts off as I step between her and Sior.

I don't speak. I can't. Everything I am has channeled into the magic pouring from me like blood from an arterial wound. The ground beneath us trembles—not metaphorically, but actually shakes as though the earth itself recoils from what's happening above it. The very air seems to splinter around Sior's body as my magic consumes him.

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