Page 127 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
Why couldn’t you love me anyway?
Did you ever want me at all?
Were you sorry?
Why?
“You wouldn’t.” The dark voice of the man on his knees sent wicked chills down my spine, though it was no more than a hoarse whisper. “You wouldn’t kill your own father.”
I laughed once without humour. “I’m well aware by now that you are not my real father.”
Surprise lit his eyes for a brief moment. “No,” he declared, not even pretending to sound disappointed. “But I am Brynn’s father.” He coughed, the sound a wet rasp. “You wouldn’t do that to her.”
At the mention of my sister, guilt crawled over my skin like ants, and I hung my head. “No,” I breathed, fighting back the onslaught of emotion.Eight years.“But I would do itforher. For my brother, too.”
From a few paces away, Lucais posed a quiet question. “What was his name?”
“I don’t know. They never told me, and I was too scared to ask.” I gripped a fistful of my father’s hair and forced his head back to look him in the eye, though he refused to meet my gaze. My hands were shaking, and I knew he could feel it. Disgust rose up in my throat with demands that I stopped touching him and moved far away. “Whatwashis name? Do you remember?”
“I’m never telling you.” He hacked up a ball of spit and phlegm. “Because you don’t deserve to know, Auralie. You weren’t even his real sister. You’re the brat of some dumb fuck who used your bitch mother as a cumrag—”
I couldn’t name the feeling that came over me, but I snapped back at him. For the last time in my life, I bit him back, and it was fatal.
The wet heat of tears rolling down my face matched the sticky warmth I felt sliding between my fingers as I held the blade over the open wound in his throat, closing my eyes as if that could block out the gurgling sounds he made as he bled out on the cobblestone.
He’d killed my brother. He’d tried to killme. He’d abused my mother and Brynn. I could have spent the rest of my life trying to understand, but not anymore.
Not anymore.
He had finally answered for the things he’d done, for the cruelty he had placed on me when I was too young to know the difference from love, for the torment he inflicted upon me, and all of that useless shame. He answered in the only way he ever could, the only way he understood—
With violence.
The body slumped over, hitting the ground with a dull thump.
“Bring me Hanson,” I breathed, the exhale of air clouding in wisps in front of my face.
I was so hot, positively burning up from the inside out, but I couldn’t move. I was paralysed, glued to the spot with a death grip on the hilt of the blade, and I knew that I needed to seize the moment of clarity before the wind changed directions and I became lost inside the smoke again.
Through the bond, I could sense Lucais’s uncertainty, but he did exactly as I asked without question, and a moment later, Hanson appeared in the courtyard beside my father’s lifeless body.
Hanson was in as poor condition as I recalled. Worse, even. Far worse than my father had been, likely due to somekind of spell suppressing his cognitive functions, based on what I’d witnessed when he was in the dungeon. Hanson was given no such privileges—his lack of awareness was due to pure exhaustion. Swaying on his knees, he struggled to remain upright, and his eyes were barely able to split open wide enough to look at his surroundings. I had a feeling that he was too far gone to register anything even if he had.
My throat immediately tightened up, but I pushed through the encroaching panic attack and stepped towards him with the blade in my hand. Blood from my father’s corpse leaked across the stones, red as a rose. It soaked into the fabric of Hanson’s pants and trickled beneath my shoes—the only colour I could see in the gloomy morning.
I didn’t hesitate, though my stomach churned, and a pinch in my chest squeezed a small sound of abhorrence from my mouth as I placed the blade against the paper-thin skin of Hanson’s pallid throat and ripped it across from left to right.
When he collapsed, it barely made a sound because the impact was so light. Even the overflow of his lifeblood rushing out of the new opening in his throat was weak compared to my father’s. Hanson had been left to slowly leak magic and blood in the dungeon for months, malnourished and atrophied—until the moment I’d ended it for him.
I sucked in a ragged breath and dropped the blade with a clang, staggering a few steps back. Willing my racing heart to quiet, I turned and found Lucais’s golden eyes trained on me in a curious, evaluating stare. Swallowing tightly, I nodded and started to make my way back towards the palace, wrapping the blanket tightly around myself. Lucais lingered behind without a word, either to piece the picture together or to clean up the mess. Either way, I knew he could see it—the line.
Killing my father was justice.
Killing Hanson was mercy.
forty-one
You Should See Yourself From My Point of View
