Chapter 351
“Why do you think we sent him away?” she pleaded, her eyes wet with tears. “Why do you think his father agreed to that hellish camp? We weren’t punishing him. We were trying to save him. To break the beast before it killed us all.”
I stared at her, seeing the twisted logic of a woman who had let fear rot her heart. She truly believed it. She believed her own grandson was a monster.
I ripped my arm from her grasp.
“You didn’t send him away to save him,” I said, my voice cold with realization. “You sent him away because you were too weak to love him. You took a child’s accidents and spun them into a fairytale to justify your own cruelty.”
“It is the truth!” Gigi insisted, reaching for me again, but I stepped back.
“The only curse on this family is you, Gigi,” I said, turning my back on her. “And I won’t let you poison him anymore.”
“Ask him!” she screamed after me as I walked toward the garden gate. “Ask him about the girl on the stairs! Ask him about Seraphina!”
I didn’t stop. I didn’t look back. But her words hooked into my skin like barbs.
The girl on the stairs.
I marched out of the sanctuary, my heart pounding not with fear of Dallas, but with a fierce, protective anger. Gigi was desperate — throwing mud at a wall, hoping something would stick.
But as I left the scent of moonflowers behind, a cold knot formed in my stomach. Dallas had secrets. I knew that. But surely the monster Gigi described was nothing more than a ghost story told by a guilty conscience.
Surely.
Dallas
The security monitors in my office hummed — a low, electric sound that usually faded into the background. But today, it was the only thing keeping Ragnar from tearing this tower down stone by stone.
On the screen, I watched my grandmother grip Adella’s arm and steer her toward the private study. Adella’s face was pale, her jaw set in that stubborn line I had come to adore, but I could see the tremor in her hands. Gigi was poisoning her — pouring twenty years of fear and superstition into the ears of the only woman who had ever looked at me without flinching.
“She is hurting our Mate,” Ragnar snarled in my mind, pacing the cage of my ribs. “Go to her.”
I stood up, the leather of my chair groaning under the sudden shift in weight. But as I reached for the door handle, a ghost from the past paralyzed me. The image on the screen — the dark wood of the study door — dissolved into another memory. Polished mahogany and the scent of cloying, artificial roses.
Twenty-two years ago.
I was ten. The grand staircase of the Marshall Estate loomed like the spine of a beast. I stood at the top, clutching a toy soldier, watching Seraphina climb toward me. She was beautiful in the way a viper is beautiful — sleek, colorful, and deadly. She was my father’s mistress, the woman who whispered in Kaelen’s ear that I was broken, that the Dark Star prophecy meant I would devour them all.