Page 51 of The Vespertine Treaty
The only warmth I had ever known was the day I turned ten, the day Poppy materialised—a small, trembling gift of gold fur and unending devotion, finally giving me a reason to wake up in the morning, other than Eliza.
Just as the oldest Valerius girl raised her hand again, a flash of chaotic magenta light sliced through the corner.
Aemelia, a year younger and a complete stranger, stood with her blonde curls flying, her small body trembling not with fear, but with pure, righteous fury.
"Leave her alone, you bloody fools!” Aemelia screamed, her voice cracking.
The surprise made the older girls falter. Aemelia didn't have a weapon, or even a functional familiar yet, but she surged forward, throwing herself between us. She took the next blow, a loud, cracking sound as her head hit the stone.
She didn't cry. She just looked up at the bullies, blood trickling from her hairline, her stormy grey eyes blazing with defiance. "Go ahead. Hit me again. I'll just tell everyone what cowards you are. Hitting the Blighted girl and her friend? How brave."
They scattered, their victory spoiled by the sheer audacity of her intervention.
Aemelia didn't look at me for approval. She just grabbed my hand—her grip warm and sticky with adrenaline—and pulled me up, leading me away.
Later, sitting in the infirmary, stitching my ripped tunic with clumsy, shaking fingers, she didn't offer pity. She didn't ask what was wrong with me. She just offered a quiet, furious vow:
"We're not like them, Ophelia. We're better. They have power, but they're empty. We have scars, and that means we survived."
Every time I returned home to the chill of my mother's disapproval, Aemelia was there. She never judged my fragility; she just handed me the needle and thread and helped me mend. She was my sister, my fierce protector, the one pure light in a broken world.
I blinked, the memory fading but the warmth remaining.
I stood up from the piano bench, leaving the ghosts of the music behind.
The most powerful echo was in the dining hall, a cavernous space with a massive table that could seat a hundred. The room was heavy with the lingering scent of cruelty and authority.
I felt the sharp, punishing sting of Cain's father—the cold, dispassionate anger that filled the room like smoke. I felt the hollow emptiness of every meal, a silent ritual of pain and control where a boy sat alone at the end of a long table, learning to eat silence.
As the raw echo of that paternal cruelty washed over me, the bond around my core tightened—a faint, chilling squeeze that confirmed his attention had been drawn to my deep intrusion. A shudder ran through my body.
Perhaps, he wasn't born a monster,I thought, the truth settling in my gut like a stone.Perhaps he was a monster made.
The male I was now bonded to, who had effortlessly destroyed the thousand-year-old lilies, was nothing more than a broken boy who had been taught that emotions were a weakness to be punished.
Friedrik’s voice, now tinged with genuine sorrow, was a quiet echo from the shadows of the hall. “Monster made. Yes. It’s the Alistair legacy, isn’t it? Every one of them starts out decent, and then the cruelty gets bred in. Like training a dog to fight.”I must have said that out loud.
I had expected to find a villain. Instead, I had found a ghost.
And in that moment, in the cold of the Alistair estate, the naive, deeply-scarred girl inside me—the one Aemelia had sworn to protect—whispered a terrifying question.
Could I, with my Empathy, be the one to heal him?
The answers to that healing, the knowledge to dismantle the monster, had to be in the books he forbade me to touch. I knew, with a certainty that chilled me to my core, that the forbidden library was the only thing that mattered.
And I knew I had to get in one way or another.
CHAPTER 20
CAIN
The silence of the Alistair estate was not merely an absence of noise; it was a physical presence, a cold, oppressive weight I had spent my entire life cultivating.
I was in my study, a room built for a king but designed for a recluse. The walls were lined with books bound in the hide of Void-beasts, smelling of dust and dead magic. The only light came from the cold, enchanted flames in the hearth, which cast long, dancing shadows that looked too much like grasping fingers.
I was still dissecting the memory of the Grand Banquet, the memory of Ophelia’s rebellion.
I felt the dull, residual throb of the rage she had sparked when she almost made a scene in front of the Consortium. They would have treated it like a blood sport—a chaotic spectacle that would have cost me weeks of calculated political manoeuvring. I had been seconds from dragging her to her room, and locking her there, leaving my mark all over her milky skin, from assertinga brutal control that would have satisfied my Death-Toucher lineage.
