CHAPTER 7: HER MOTHER'S NAME
1178 Words
"Sit," Damaris said again, quieter this time, no command left in it at all. "Please."
I sat, mostly because the pleasure undid something in me that the earlier order hadn't.
He didn't sit across from me. He stood near the window still, arms crossed, putting the width of the room between us like it was load bearing, like the whole structure might come down without it.
"You're being careful," I said. "With the distance."
"I'm always careful."
"Not like this. Not with me. You usually stand close enough to make a point. Tonight you're standing like the floor between us is the only thing keeping something from happening."
"Perhaps it is."
That answer landed harder than I expected, and for a moment neither of us said anything, the silence doing more work than either of us seemed ready to do out loud.
"I owe you an explanation," he said finally.
"For what."
"For how I handled that."
"You handled it the way you handle everything. Efficiently."
"That's not a compliment, the way you said it."
"It wasn't meant as one."
Something almost like a laugh moved through him, gone before it reached his mouth. "Fair."
"Was he wrong," I asked. "Kade. He said, You don't know what happened, or why. Are you going to tell me you did?"
"I know the pact. I know what it allows and what it doesn't. That's not the same as knowing what either of you were feeling at that moment, and I don't need to know it to understand the danger."
"Maybe the danger isn't the point."
"The danger is always the point. That's the entire purpose of the pact, Ivy. It was never about controlling who you love. It was about making certain none of the five men sworn to protect you ever had a reason to choose you over the rest of the world watching for a reason to end you."
"That sounds like a speech you've given before."
"It is."
"To whom?"
"To myself, mostly. Late at night, when giving it to myself was the only way to remember why I agreed to any of this eighteen years ago."
"Why did you agree to it? The pact. You could have hidden me some other way. A different kind of protection that didn't require five men to spend their lives rationing themselves around a girl they were never allowed to actually know."
"Because a different kind of protection wouldn't have been held. Loyalty built on duty alone breaks the first time duty becomes inconvenient. I needed something that couldn't break, not without costing all five of them everything at once. Blood pacts don't bend. People do."
"So you built a cage and called it devotion."
"I built the only thing I trusted to survive eighteen years of enemies looking for exactly the kind of weakness a normal arrangement would have given them."
The honesty of that caught me off guard, more than the words themselves, the plainness of how he'd said it, like a man setting something heavy down after carrying it too long to remember what his shoulders felt like without it.
"You don't usually talk like this," I said.
"No."
"Why tonight?"
"Because tonight I watched a boy I raised nearly cost himself everything for one second of wanting something he'd spent six years refusing to let himself want, and it reminded me how easy that particular mistake is to make."
Something in the way he said it, a particular mistake, made my skin prickle with an awareness I couldn't yet name. "You say that like you've made it yourself."
He didn't answer right away, and the silence stretched long enough that I started counting my own heartbeats just to have something to do with the waiting.
"I've made every version of it," he said finally. "For longer than you'd believe."
"With who."
"That's not a question I intend to answer tonight."
"You just told me you've spent eighteen years giving yourself speeches about restraint. That's not nothing, Damaris. That's not a passing comment."
"No," he agreed. "It isn't."
"Then who."
"Ivy."
"Don't do that. Don't say my name like it's supposed to end the conversation. You started this. You're the one who walked in here and decided tonight was the night for honesty. You don't get to open that door and shut it the second, it leads to somewhere you didn't plan for."
"That's precisely what I told you the pact was for. Doors that shouldn't open."
"This isn't the pact. This is you, standing three feet away from me, refusing to finish a sentence you already started."
He exhaled slowly, the kind of breath a man takes right before he says something he's spent years avoiding. "You're not wrong."
"Then don't stop."
"I'm trying to decide if stopping is still possible."
"It isn't. Not anymore. You have already said too much for either of us to pretend otherwise."
Something shifted across his face, resignation maybe, or relief. I couldn't tell which, the two were feeling closer together than they should have at that moment.
He looked at me properly then, the way he had in the gathering hall, longer than duty required, and something in his expression cracked just slightly at the edges, like a door left open by accident instead of on purpose. The lamp light caught the grey at his temples, the lines at the corners of his eyes that I'd always read as weariness from running a pack, never once as something more personal than that.
"You have her eyes," he said quietly, so quietly I almost missed it entirely. "You've always had her eyes. I used to be able to look at you and see nothing but a child who needed protection. That stopped being true somewhere along the way, and I don't know exactly when, and I have spent every day pretending I hadn't noticed."
My chest went tight. "Her eyes."
He didn't answer.
"Damaris. Whose eyes."
"You've asked me that question your entire life, in one form or another. Who was my mother? What was she like? Why does no one ever speak her name in this house? I always had an answer ready that told you nothing at all, because the truth was never mine to give you, not without giving away half of myself along with it."
"You're giving it away now."
"I'm aware."
"Then finish it."
The clock somewhere in the house ticked on, indifferent to the eighteen years balanced on the next few words, and I realized I was holding my breath without having decided to, waiting on a name I already half suspected and still wasn't ready to hear out loud.
He closed his own eyes for a moment, like the name itself cost him something to hand over, like saying it out loud made it real in a way that silence had let him avoid for eighteen years.
"Elena's," he said, so low I almost didn't catch it, more warning than confession, aimed less at me than at himself. "You have your mother's eyes."
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