Page 122 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
“I never told her how I felt,” I confessed. “And she wasn’t capable of talking about it, so she never brought it up.”
His frown was as sharp as knives. “And-and-and—there weren’t doctors?” he stammered, pointing at the ground like itwas the guilty party while he glared at me. “There weren’t any nurses? Surely, she went to hospital?” Lucais demanded. He waited for me to nod. “None of them determined that it had been caused by the fact someone three times your size had attacked her? None of them fuckingreportedhim?”
Lucais’s expression was incandescent, an unstable blend of being both furious and flabbergasted at once, and I realised that my father had no working memory of what had happened to my brother or else the High King would have already glimpsed it. I’d suspected as much, because Brynn had changed everything for them, but something inside of my stomach reared up with claws and teeth to have it confirmed.
“She went to hospital and told them she’d been in a car accident,” I explained as calmly as possible. “My mother never pressed charges against him for the assault—for any of the assaults—and she hadn’t been far enough along in her pregnancy for my brother’s life to have been considered separately to hers even if he’d survived until birth. We respect women’s rights and autonomy where I’m from, but there is a law that requires a baby to be born alive before it is entitled to any legal protection even in a wanted pregnancy. Her lack of cooperation meant that the police were disinclined to pursue legal repercussions on their own.”
“What about the people who came when you went for help?”
“The neighbours were too scared to speak up, and I wasn’t questioned. One of the nurses at the hospital saw my face and reported it, but by the time anyone came to check on me from child services, he was long gone and the bruises had faded.”
“And they never thought to check if she was actuallyina car accident? The police never thought to check that a car—”
“He drove her car into the neighbour’s garage shortly after the incident,” I cut in, lifting my shoulders. “I don’t know if it was to threaten them into staying quiet or simply to corroboratetheir story. It was all within a couple of hours of it happening, before the police arrived. Back then, nobody had home security cameras to prove it was faked.” I exhaled in a torturously long sigh.
“My mother said that she missed the brakes and hit the accelerator instead when she was parking the car after going to the shops, and that she’d already unclipped her seatbelt. They didn’t check or they would have seen that there was no shopping in the car—there wasn’t even any fucking food in the house.” I shook my head, relaxing my arms. “Everyoneknewwhat really happened, but as long as she was unwilling to cooperate, they wouldn’t do anything about it. They said they couldn’t.”
Lucais clutched his head with both hands and walked around in a tight circle, hissing, “What thefuck…”
I swallowed. “There’s more.”
He halted and gave me a beseeching look.
“She was in hospital for about a week, and they wouldn’t let me stay with her because I was supposed to have had a perfectly capable and loving father to look after me at home,” I went on, suddenly feeling emboldened to see the story through to its bitter end. “He didn’t visit her—probably citing fatherly duties or some other kind of bullshit—so that meant I couldn’t, either. He drank himself to sleep by midafternoon most days, though there were two days when he was simply…gone.He went out and didn’t come back until he had to pick her up from the hospital. She came home, but the baby didn’t, and so…she went to bed.”
I let my gaze drift away with the mist as I amassed the courage to admit to the last of it. Lucais waited patiently, but I had begun to feel the tension rolling off him.
“She went straight to bed, and then she didn’t get up. For four and a half months,” I divulged. My voice was flat. “My father stuck around for three weeks.”
Lucais was in front of me a second later. His hands were in my hair, his eyes feverishly searching for an anchor within mine. When he spoke, his voice was raw and uneven. “Auralie, what are you saying?”
Tears welled up again as I blabbered at him.
“I’m saying that I didn’t grow up like you, Lucais.” I pointed nonspecifically at the enormous palace behind him. “I didn’t have family dinners in a cosy dining room. I didn’t have friends come over after school. I didn’t have food in the fridge or the pantry or parents to help me with my homework. I went into Dante’s Bookstore to escape, but most of the time I was looking after her. He stayed…and I-I don’t know why he bothered because he didn’t help,” I stuttered.
My head was shaking uncontrollably against Lucais’s firm but gentle grip. “I-I washed her sheets. I brought her painkillers. I brought her food and then took it away when she refused to eat. I filled up her water bottle and went to the corner store to buy bread and milk with the money I stole out of his wallet when he was fast asleep on the couch.”
Lucais was slowly shrinking in height as I rambled and sobbed, but my eyes were so blurry I couldn’t get them to focus long enough to figure out why.
“I tried so hard to keep the peace, but we had another fight because she didn’t have any clean fucking sheets. I was so tired of rinsing out the bloodstains.” I groaned, feeling the burn at the base of my throat, and my hands balled into fists. “She just… Sherefusedto get out of bed unless she absolutely had to, and by then, she’d usually soaked through everything. And I tried to be understanding. I did. She was depressed because she had the baby that week she was in hospital, and then they took him away. I-I don’t know what they did with his body, but she came home like a woman who’d had a baby. Except she didn’thaveherbaby. I know she had every right to be depressed, but she was bleeding for weeks and she justwouldn’tget up!”
I wiped away the moisture that was dripping from my nose, a sob hitching in my throat. The horror of reliving it was offset by the sheer relief I felt easing the weight off my shoulders as I recounted the way it had made me feel. Righteously or not.
“She didn’t change her pads until she’d bled through the sheets and fucking blankets and mattress protectors,” I moaned. “I had to change them because she wouldn’t, and he claimed he didn’t know how to, and I thought she might die if I didn’t because that’s how she was acting and Lucais… Lucais, there was so much blood.” My voice wobbled, so I clutched my throat and felt a scream gathering there, ready to tear me to ribbons.
“There was so much fucking blood, Lucais, and I’d never seen so much of it before. I hadn’t even had my first period yet. So I asked him to get some fresh linen for her, but he refused because he was drunk and I-I guess he didn’t want to drive or something. I was so angry because it was our fault. Everything that had happened was his fault, and it was my fault, but he wouldn’t fuckinghelpme…
“I hated him,” I cried. “God, I fucking hated him. I yelled at him, and then it happened all over again, but this time, I was like a grenade. I think I literally blew up the house because I was so upset and I’d let the voices off the leash that first day when I shouldn’t have. One minute, he was standing in the doorway, and then the next, he was laying on the floor and there was a fire in the sink. I passed out, I guess, and I must have hallucinated because I honestly thought he was dead.
“But when I woke up, my mother’s sheets had been changed, and he was gone. I-I-I thought I’d had a psychotic break and killed him and covered it up and then forgot. But eventually, he came back, so many months later, and that’s…” I sucked in a final breath of air that filled my lungs to bursting point, lettingthe rest of my body fall still as I focussed on the sharp tension running from the base of my throat to the top of my stomach.Exhale.“That’s when they started trying for Brynn.”
A few heartbeats thumped inside of my chest while my darkest secrets melted into the fog.
“Aura.” The muffled voice of the High King came from below me. I glanced down to find him on his knees at my feet, arms around the back of my legs, face pressed against my stomach. “I am so violently sorry.”
The realisation of everything that I had confessed slapped me across the face like an icy cold rag, and I shivered to break the spell. Carefully, I took a series of measured breaths until I felt centred and grounded again, and then I gave Lucais the standard response to an apology like that by reaffirming that an apology was unnecessary because none of it had anything to do with him.
“No,” he said, pulling his head back from me. His eyes were molten gold, the colour stronger and more breathtaking than I’d ever seen. “When we met, you should have felt safe with me. I should have been someone you could trust, and not because you’d never had that before, but because that wasmyresponsibility. It only makes my actions more deplorable to discover that I was one of many individuals who assassinated the right to possess your faith. I failed you”—he swallowed—“and for that, I am so immeasurably sorry. I was wrong, Auralie. I was so, so wrong.”
