Chapter 293 You looked at me like you’d never seen me before
“Meaning what, exactly?” Seraphine didn’t turn around to face him. Her voice came out flat and careful in that way people get when they already know the thing they’re about to hear is going to hurt pretty bad.
Voren didn’t hurry through it. He let the words sit there and settle properly.
“The first time I came to the city, I was there to learn everything. Business stuff, investments, how to actually build something that would last a long time. You were so excited when I left. You had this whole list of requests.”
A low breath escaped him, something caught between a laugh and a sigh. “Buy me this, bring me that, don’t forget the thing from that one store over there.” His hands slowed down in her hair.
“I spent four whole years out there, away from the pack, learning all I could, building up my life, stacking everything together. Starting businesses that would actually mean something real for us. That’s what I was planning for your eighteenth birthday. Everything I was doing, all of it, was for after that point.”
Seraphine stayed quiet. She wasn’t moving an inch.
“And then?” she asked, her voice low and controlled. But her hands had curled tight into the fabric of his shirt in her lap.
“And then something happened.” His voice didn’t break but it got a lot heavier. “And by the time it did, Marigold’s mother was already there in the picture.”
Seraphine stared straight ahead at the wall, her chest rising and falling slowly, her mind reaching out for a memory she couldn’t quite grab, like pressing your hand against thick glass and not being able to push through no matter how hard you tried.
“Why can’t I remember any of this?” she whispered. More to herself than to him. “Why does it feel like someone just took those parts away?”
Voren set the dryer down slowly. He didn’t answer her right away. He just looked at the back of her head, at the curve of her shoulders, at the way she was holding herself together the same way she always had when something hit her somewhere deep inside.
Like she was used to hurting quietly without making a big scene about it.
His expression went through something complicated — grief and guilt and something that looked almost like firm resolve, all of it moving through his face at once before it settled back into stillness.
“That’s what I need to tell you,” he finally said. “All of it. From the very beginning, no holding back.”
Seraphine turned to look at him then, and her eyes were the eyes of someone who had been carrying around a heavy question for so long that the weight of it had just become a normal part of how they walked through the world every single day.
“Then talk,” she said quietly. “Because I want to know everything there is to know.”
Voren leaned back against the headboard, his eyes fixed up on the ceiling, and started telling the story from the very beginning, the way you do when you’ve gone over it in your head so many times that it’s carved deep grooves into your memory.
“My first visit to the city was pretty short. Just a few months, that’s all it was.” His voice stayed even, but there was this old hurt buried underneath it, packed down tight after all this time.
“I came back with all your gifts. I’d been thinking about you nonstop while I was out there, picking out stuff you requested and more, actually excited to see the look on your face when I showed you.”
Something flickered behind his eyes for a second. “But when I got back, you looked at me like you’d never seen me before in your entire life.”
Seraphine’s eyes went wide. She searched inside herself for that memory and came up with nothing, just this blank wall where the whole moment should have been. But deep in her gut, she knew he wasn’t making any of this up. There was no act in his voice at all. Just the flat tone of someone laying out facts he’d made peace with a long time ago.
“You wouldn’t take a single thing I brought back for you,” he went on. “You told me straight up that you weren’t accepting anything that didn’t come from Ravyn, that only his gift mattered to you.”
The name dropped into the room like a heavy rock hitting the floor.
“You said I tried to look like Ravyn, but you can tell the difference and you don’t want me around you. You picked up golden fishes when I took you to the lake side at the Grimroot pack the first time I took you there secretly, promising you’d keep it for us but it was nowhere. You didn’t even remember it when I asked you.”
Seraphine had no remembrance of ever stepping foot into the Grimroot pack and now she could understand the reason for Voren’s complicated emotions whenever they faced each other.
So that was what that video about the golden fishes was all about. She made promises she didn’t keep because she could not remember any of it.
“I tried to talk to you, to ask what I’d done wrong.” Voren’s jaw tightened a little. “But you wouldn’t even give me that much of a chance, spending most of your time with Daisy instead, and begging for Ravyn’s attention, it was honestly disgusting to my soul.”
“Before all that happened, you used to donate blood to Daisy, and I just hated the way she used to look at me. A few times, she wanted to talk to me, but I never gave her a chance.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, the memory still all tangled up inside him even after so many years had gone by.
“Nobody could explain what was going on. Nobody had any real answers for me. And Ravyn…