Page 108 of Rain of Shadows and Endings

Axel had pulled the small mirror from his pocket and was fiddling with it as he said, “Who would have had the means to hide her heritage? And why? Hiding her may have protected her for a while, but the moment her element appears in full strength at the Emerging Ceremony, the Pantheon would have turned into a battlefield to be the first to claim her.”

“Yes, but by that time, no one would have been able to claim her as a Source,” Luka countered. “Any heirs would have already chosen.”

“We all know that doesn’t mean anything,” Theon cut in. “Anyone with a Source can suddenly find themselves without one to make room for another.”

There were laws against such a thing, of course, but those didn’t necessarily mean anything either. An investigation was always done in the event of a Source’s death, and while the investigation was going on, if the lord or lady had already Selected another Source, that Fae was held for them until the investigation was completed.

“Then we come back to who has the ability to hide her?” Axel said.

“Whoever it is would have been around her from the beginning,” Luka mused. “They would have constantly been altering reports. Nothing like this was ever mentioned in any of the information we have on her.”

“But the Priestesses performing the assessments would know. None of them ever reported it either? It was never noticed that her reports were being changed? None of it adds up,” Axel murmured, flipping the mirror in his hand again and running his thumb along the smooth glass.

Luka was eyeing Theon in the rearview mirror. Theon knew he could see the tension in his features, the darkness starting to drift around him.

“What are you thinking, Theon?” Luka asked.

“That she has to have known this entire time and has said nothing.”

Axel twisted around again. “You cannot possibly believe that.”

“How could I not? How could she not know?”

“Her magic hasn’t emerged, Theon. It is bound until the Emerging Ceremony in a few weeks. How could she know?”

“She knows she can get past wards without issue,” Theon countered. “She’s proven that time and again.”

“That doesn’t mean she knows why she can do that,” Axel shot back. “Have you even asked her about it?”

Theon scoffed. “Yes. We had a rather heartfelt conversation about it in between all the bickering and power struggles.”

“You’ve made this a power struggle,” Axel retorted. “She gets along with Luka and I just fine when we are not being dicks to her.”

“Because she doesn’t view either of you as the ones to have ruined everything for her. You know what I ruined? Her ability to stay hidden.”

“You’re a delusional idiot,” Axel muttered, turning back to face the front.

“Am I? It would explain why she is so resistant. She thought she had succeeded until I found her in that alcove.”

“Don’t kid yourself, Theon,” Luka cut in. “You were always going to choose her.”

“There were four other options. I was going to choose Jayson.”

“Right. You were going to select a Fae whose name you can’t even remember,” he replied dryly. “You left Jaxson and the others as options to humor us. We are not dense.”

“And thank the gods I did choose her,” he snapped, his arm around her tightening a fraction. He wasn’t in the mood to argue about this yet again. The other options no longer mattered.

“What are you going to do now, then?” Luka went on, smoke beginning to furl from his mouth as he spoke. He was getting pissed. “Continue to try to force submission? Because that’s been going so fucking well.”

“No,” Theon gritted out, the darkness thickening around him and reaching for Tessa. He had to actively hold it back from drifting along her arms. “I will wait her out. Now that we know what she’s hiding, we can wait for her to slip-up. Reveal what else she is hiding.”

“She is not Father,” Axel drawled, lifting a hand as his own power worked to quell Theon’s. “You do not need to develop some elaborate scheme to draw her out.”

“Obviously we do if she has managed to stay hidden this long.”

“Luka?” Axel pressed.

The male was quiet for a long moment before he sighed. “I think we get through this trip. This dinner with Felicity. Give Tessa a day to recover from the assessment, and deal with this when we are back at Arius House.”

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