Page 42 of The Demon Prince's Accidental Mate
“I don’t know,” he said softly. “She never told me. There was no warning, no downfall. One day she was there, and the next, she was gone, leaving me with an infant you. She abandoned us to fend for ourselves.”
“And you took that out onme?” I snapped, suddenly angry. “You made my life a miserable hell, all because she left when I was a baby? God, you’re more pathetic than I thought.”
“You reminded me of her so much. That was the only thing she left. You. It hurt me. It hurt me bad.”
“So, you decided to what, hurt a baby,yourbaby, as some sort of sick, twisted revenge against her?”
I was crying now, the tears streaming down my face as I could no longer contain the pain, and the anger, that had filled me for so long. “You’re a piece of shit, Victor. I’m glad you’re going to rot in hell. I hope you know that.”
“I do.”
The admittance of his guilt was another stunning revelation. In another time, another place, I might have hoped it was a sign that there was some good left in him. Something worth trying to save.
But the onslaught of memories of the suffering I’d endured at his hands washed it away. Victor, kicking a young me because I hadn’t gotten out of the way in time. Batting me away when I asked for a hug after my first day of school and being told I was a distraction that cost him money. The yelling, the screaming, and the hitting that only grew more intense the older I got. The bruises that had to be hidden under my clothing, and the excuses when someone inevitably spotted them. All of that, and more, poured out.
“Lilith, I—”
“No,” I hissed. “You do not get to ask for forgiveness. You do not get to apologize. That is not something you earned. Just shut your mouth, and tell me everything about my mother. Who was she, where did she come from, and any reason you can think of that she might leave.”
He complied, and I listened, greedily drinking in the details of their life together before me. Of how they’d met while he was a tour guide at the Falls. How she’d encouraged him to do his own thing and open the bakery. How excited she’d been when they’d found out she was pregnant. All of it filled the vault that had been empty my entire life.
“I don’t know why she left,” he repeated at the end. “I just don’t. One night, I woke up to her sobbing. The next night, when I got up to go to the bakery, she wasn’t in bed next to me.”
“That’s it? Did you not call the police? Why would she just run away like that?”
“Of course I called the police,” he snapped.
Belial growled, and the golden bonds pulled tighter, bowing the imp over even deeper, drawing a pained grunt from the creature.
“What were they supposed to do?” he said. “She disappeared. There were no signs of a break-in. Absolutely nothing was missing. No clothes, no nothing. They surmised she committed suicide by going over the Falls, but that made no sense. Not Katrina. She wasn’t in that sort of headspace.”
“There was nothing?”
“Nothing except a symbol carved into the wall above her side of the bed,” he replied. “But the police could never make heads or tails of it. Nothing like they’d ever seen before, they said, so they dismissed it.”
“What symbol?” I asked. “Show me.”
Victor glanced over his shoulder at Belial. “Can I have a hand to draw?”
The demon prince shrugged, and the cord around the imp's right hand unwound, leaving him free to draw in the ground.
I watched intently as he started with a circle. Then, in the middle of it, he drew a pair of bird-like wings. Finally, a sword thrusting up through the entire thing, piercing the circle and the wings.
“That it’s,” he said, pointing. “That is the only thing left behind by your mother before she abandoned you. Are you happy?”
I stared down at it, trying to understand.
As I did, Belial leaned past Victor to get a look. Once he did, he inhaled sharply, looking up at me with shock.
“What is it? Belial, what does that symbol mean?”
Worry flooded through the link in my mind.
Worry … and fear.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Belial
