Page 196 of Cherish

“The Bloodletter?” I repeat even as denial races through me instinctively. “My grandmother would never—”

“Yourgrandmother?” Her eyes lock onto mine. “Your grandmother is the Bloodletter?”

“My grandmother didn’t build this place. Jikan, the Historian, did. He wanted to—”

“Jikan? Is that what she told you?” She laughs, a cold and callous sound that bounces off the marble and sends shivers of fear racing down my spine.

“Shedidn’t tell me anything. Jikan did.” Did he lie to me? Although, thinking back to Jikan’s exact words… He said the prison was a mistake, but I can’t remember him actually saying he built it. “Why would he let me think he built it?”

“Because he’s in love with her,” Hudson says, and I swing my gaze to his.

There’s a part of me that wants to disagree, to argue it’s impossible. I mean, surely I would have sensed something.

Except…except maybe I did. I can’t help but think back to the conversation before we played chess, about how she would outlive my grandfather one day—but not Jikan.

And fuck it. Just fuck it. Every time I start to think I know what’s going on in this world, someone else—someone who’s been here for a thousand years or more—comes along and drops a bombshell that yanks my feet right out from under me. And this is one hell of a bombshell.

Jikan? And my great-great-great-and-so-on grandma? Seriously?

The thought is mind-boggling…

As is the thought of the Bloodletter creating the Shadow Realm.

“Why?” The question bursts out of me as I move pieces around in my brain, trying to figure out what’s happening here. Or, I should say, what happened a long time ago. “Why would she do such a thing?”

“Because her sister is a jealous hag. She tricked me into giving her the shadow poison to save my children.”

“Tricked you?” Hudson lifts a brow.

She waves a hand and drops another chandelier next to him—which pisses me off but doesn’t make him so much as blink.

“I didn’t know what she was going to do with it,” the Shadow Queen insists. “I didn’t know she was going to use it to poison an entire race of people. All I wanted was to be with my children forever.”

“Even if it meant taking someone else’s child away?” I murmur. Because I’m slowly starting to understand what happened.

She made a deal with the Crone—one that resulted in her turning over shadow poison so that the Crone could make a deal with Cyrus to poison the Gargoyle Army in exchange for giving him her and the Bloodletters’ children to turn himself into a god. But the Bloodletter didn’t react the way the Crone could have ever foreseen—because the Bloodletter loved her child, and the Crone wouldn’t know love if it bit her in her ass.

“The Bloodletter was forced to hide her child’s power from Cyrus—her child who would have been immortal but was now a mortal human—and send her away so Cyrus could never find her—but nor could she,” I whisper to no one in particular. The words twist in my stomach like knives, and my tear-filled gaze meets the queen’s. “Her child died never knowing how much her mother loved her, how much she sacrificed for her.”

I shake my head at the hopelessness of it all. “And then my grandmother—a mother enraged at the loss of her child, a wife enraged at the loss of her mate, a queen enraged at the loss of her people—went looking for revenge.”

It was the Shadow Queen’s—and the world’s—bad luck that she was also a god with all the power and none of the caution needed to temper her quest for vengeance with mercy.

“I never meant for Ryann to die,” the Shadow Queen says, and I gasp at the first mention of my great-something-grandmother’s name.

“Ryann.” I test the name on my tongue, a tear tumbling down my cheek. “Such a beautiful name.”

The Shadow Queen’s chin lifts. “I’m not a monster. I was devastated at the very idea of losing my own children. The last thing I would ever want is to take someone else’s child from them.”

“But you did,” I say, holding her gaze until she looks away. She took my grandmother’s child, and in doing so she cemented this vicious circle of death and retribution, sorrow and cruelty.

I swipe at the moisture on my cheeks and close my eyes, take a deep breath in an effort to process everything I’ve learned in the last few minutes. And when I exhale and open my eyes, I don’t see a woman hell-bent on destruction and death.

Instead, I see a mother destroyed by the desperate quest to save her child’s life, a woman subsequently destroyed by the loss of that child due to her own actions. And while I’m not a mother myself, and while there is nothing the Shadow Queen can do to make up for the pain she caused my family—and my people—I have to wonder if she’s suffered enough. I have to wonder when all of the fights and the wars and the deaths and the prisons and the vengeance and the destruction and the pain, so much pain every step of the way, are enough.

No one can argue that what the Shadow Queen did wasn’t wrong. Was it justified in her own mind? Yes. Does that make it right? Absolutely not.

But what my grandmother did was wrong, too. Did she also justify it because of her own unending grief? Yes. Doesthatmake it right? Not even a little.

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