Page 25 of Broken Souls

She hesitates for a moment, her eyes wet, her lips tight. Then, “The type of love that will break your curse is the type that will utterly destroy you if they get hurt. I have to divide my love across multiple children. Have had to choose between who to save first… Totryto save… And you’ll have to make those same choices as Boss. You can’t ever know what love is. Our responsibility does not allow it; you can’t break over one death when you have others to watch out for. I’m sorry.”

“But you loved Caden enough to start a blood bond.”

Her shoulders sag, and she is the oldest I have ever seen her. “I loved him as much as I knew how. But I was given to him when I was a child. He named me. Owned me before I even knew the meaning of that word. Of any word. And then he was all I knew. After what Antonio did to me… I latched onto him because he was all that remained of my old life. All my brothers and sisters were dead. And my mother had raised me to love him before that. She’d built him up as this great prince… this great honor…

“I did love him. I still do. I gave him everything I had; it just wasn’t enough. I never learned to love him like he loved me.”

“But he was Boss and a firstborn,” I counter.

“And he loved me as an obsession, only giving his love as long as I was his. The love I cursed you with is one without restriction, without conditions. You love regardless of how they love you, how they treat you. If Caden loved me like that, he never would have cursed me when he learned –”

She stops.

Hugs herself again.

There is a difference to her silence this time, though, less guilt directed at me. Whatever she’s hiding, it is her secret, not mine.

But I am not ready to give her the trust of my ignorance again. Not ready to let her keep her secrets.

“When he learned what?”

“Varius, please, don’t push this.”

“You lied to me for decades. You lied to me about what Iam.”

She turns to me and drops her arms. Then she lifts her chin. “I did it to protect you. I am not sorry for that, and I will not suffer for doing what I thought was best to save my child. I am simply sorry you have to deal with the sins of your father. That you have to keep a secret so big from the people you care about.”

My body stills.

If T found out…

He’d hate me so much, he’d side with the wolves.

Antonio might be breeding hybrids, but he’s doing it to use them, to torture them. He’s not treating them as if they are humans.

Volatile energy burns up inside me as more pieces of the puzzle slot together.

“One of them already knows,” I say. “Someone’s been blackmailing Micha for the ledger. Now why would any of my brothers do that when their crimes are in there too?” My gaze turns venomous, my blood to ice. “Unless they want to use it as an in into another Family. Give us up in exchange for their favor and a high position in their ranks.”

“No one would trust them if they betrayed their own.”

“Antonio doesn’t need to trust them to use them.”

Her jaw clenches as she glares at me, and for a moment, I see the Reaper of the Sired, the one who took on Aleric’s gang all on her own, right in the heart of their territory, and nearly succeeded in killing them all. I see the future Aleric said we could have had she been allowed to lead.

She forced peace on this broken city.

What more could she have done if she had been trained from birth? If she had been seen as something more than a breedmare?

“Antonio,” she spits, “will not deal with him. He wants nothing for this family but for us to suffer for what I did to him.”

“And yet, he lets Talon into his brothels when no other witch can enter.”

“Your brother is not trying to steal the ledger,” she hisses. “It won’t give him any leverage over what he already has in his head.”

I bite my tongue, unable to deny the accuracy of that statement even in my anger. Talon has his fingers in nearly every section of the Family. He might not know everything that’s in the ledger, but he has more than enough to take to Antonio.

All my brothers do.