Page 57 of The Traitor's Curse
As if he’d been trying to get to me and hadn’t had the strength.
“I won’t ask you to forgive me,” he said, “but please, Lucian. I didn’t want to hurt you. I never wanted to hurt you. Believe that, even if you hate me for the rest of your life.”
He’d never wanted to hurt me. He’d never wanted to—my vision washed crimson, rage and grief and shock nearly suffocating me.
“You murdered my father! You didn’t want to hurt me, you didn’t—you’re out of your fucking mind, Benedict!” I lunged at him, bending down and grabbing him by the collar and twisting, shoving him back against the side of the bed. “You killed him, and you knew everyone thought it was me. Tavius said it was you, he was right, and I thought he was insane.” I shook him, slamming him against the edge of the mattress. “My father loved you, he wanted you to be his heir, I know it, whether you’ll admit it or not!”
Benedict didn’t resist me. He didn’t touch me. He let his head fall back against the bed, hair all tumbled around his shoulders, and gazed at me with eyes as bleak and desolate as anovercast winter sky.
He could have stopped me. Even unable to stand, he could have found the strength to overpower me, and we both knew it.
That was what brought me up short. I let go of him.
And then I couldn’t hold myself up any longer, and I dropped to my knees beside him, sitting on my heels with my hands falling limp into my lap.
“I know he did,” Benedict said at last.
I remained perfectly still, too exhausted and miserable to reply or move or do anything at all. Benedict had killed my father. Someone, possibly also Benedict, had killed Fabian. Tavius had tried to kill me. Benedict had killed Tavius. Surely I’d wake up and find myself back in my own bed, with a resurrected Fabian opening the curtains and telling me how irresponsible I’d been to sleep past seven while having such strange dreams.
“He meant to push a law through the council that would have allowed him to name me as his heir.” Benedict paused, gasping, and his eyes slid half shut. Sweat dripped down his neck. The curse had him fully in its grip, and the potion had weakened him critically. “He—they were going to—no, don’t interrupt me! I can’t die without telling you. I should have long ago, but I didn’t want to—Lucian, this is going to hurt you more than anything, but it’s the truth. He’d started to believe you were plotting against him, that you wanted the throne. He was going to—arrest you. For treason.”
Benedict paused, eyes searching my face.
And then his jaw went hard and tight as he found what he’d been looking for: the moment I fully understood.
It hit me like a physical blow, and I tumbled backward, landing hard on my ass.
No one my father had arrested for treason had ever escaped the gallows. Once he convinced himself that someonehe’d trusted had turned against him, he never changed his mind.
Old friends. Family. Vassals whose families had loyally served ours for centuries. It didn’t matter.
His own son.
My father had intended to kill me. Not outright, not with a sword thrust through the stomach or even a slit throat in the darkness. But with an accusation, and an arrest. A long imprisonment, visits, opportunities for me to deliver impassioned pleas for mercy and protestations of innocence. He’d have drawn it out until he’d removed every trace of doubt from his mind—after all, even if I had been innocent when he arrested me in the first place, I’d have turned against him during my incarceration and interrogations, wouldn’t I? He’d have had no choice.
And he’d have killed me.
Benedict had saved my life when he murdered my father, as surely as if he’d appeared on the scaffold, thrown me over his shoulder, and carried me away from the headsman.
And then he’d protected me from knowledge that would have broken me.Why the fuck do you think I left?When he’d asked me that the night of Fabian’s death, I’d laughed at the implication that he’d gone away to avoid being put on the throne in my place.
But he’d been telling the truth. He’d killed my father to avoid being put on the throne in my place, and then left Calatria and his position and his friends and his beloved army, everything he cared about, to remove himself from any possibility of being used against me and shoved onto the throne after all.
And also, perhaps, because it would’ve become untenable for him to stay without telling me the truth.
And if he told me the truth, he’d have broken my heart—much as he’d done now.
Incredible, really, how much it could hurt to discover that the parent I’d already known didn’t love me, didn’t respect me, and didn’t trust me had…neither loved, respected, nor trusted me, only to an even greater degree than I’d imagined.
Benedict’s lies and obfuscations, the way he’d watched me stew over it, and grieve, and worry, and wonder, had probably been unconscionable. Unforgiveable. Oddly, it angered and distressed me far more than the actual murder.
But I believed, all the way down to my bones, that he’d done it with the intent to spare me. Dying men rarely lied. And while I might shout the palace down later, and it’d be a long time before I trusted that he’d learned to tell me the truth—I would forgive him.
Eventually. If he groveled enough.
“I don’t hate you,” I whispered.
No, I didn’t hate him. I didn’t know what I felt—about anything. Every bit of knowledge and every emotion I’d ever possessed had been shaken up and swirled around, flying about like a flurry of snow, blinding and chaotic and disorienting. I did know I wished I could topple forward onto his chest and feel his arms around me, sure and warm and strong, and wait there until everything made sense again.
