Page 8 of His Eternal Claim

“No,” I breathe. The memory of Zagreus’s hand on my lower back. The way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching. “He’s brutal, yes. He’s a monster. But he… he told me you were alive. I didn’t believe him. But he never lied to me.”

“He put you in the dark, Stina,” she counters, her voice rising. “He kills for sport, and he claims for power. He murdered the man you were supposed to love so he could own the woman he obsessed over. He is a dangerous man, and if Corvin hadn’t risked everything to bring you here, Zagreus would have eventually snuffed out the last of your light.”

I look down at my hands. The ring is gone, but the ghost of its weight remains.

The air in the room is thick, soaked with the scent of lavender. Every time she speaks his name, it is like a needle sliding under my skin, draining the warmth I once felt when I thought of him.

“How do you know all this?” I whisper. “He told me he loved me. He told me things I had no memory of. I feel… he knows me better than I know myself. I just… don’t know if he’s lying or not.”

My Mother takes my hand and squeezes.

“He told you what he needed to so you would stay,” she murmurs, her thumb tracing the hollow where my ring used to sit. “He took you and dismantled your life piece by piece. He burned the letters I sent you. He threatened the servants who tried to help me reach you. He wanted you to believe the world was empty so he could fill it with his own darkness.”

“But the way he looked at me…” I start, but she cuts me off with a sharp, brittle laugh.

“Obsession often looks like devotion to the person being hunted,” she says, leaning closer until I can see the flecks of gold in her eyes… eyes that look like mine, yet feel so foreign. “You don’t recall, dear. You don’t remember the nights you cried for home. You don’t remember the bruises he gave you, or how he kept you locked up.”

I shake my head. “I don’t… I don’t remember any of that.”

“Of course you don’t,” she scoffs. “The trauma, the things he forced you to witness… your mind broke to protect you. He used that against you. He fed you lies while your memory was a sieve, making himself the hero of a story he started with a bloodbath.”

She reaches up, her fingers brushing the hair away from my forehead with a tenderness that feels like a trap.

“He destroyed everything you were, Stina. Your art, your spirit, your capacity to love anyone but him. He ruined everything.”

A cold hollow opens in my chest. I want to argue, to bring up the memory of him telling me sweet lies, but the fog from the medicine is rising, blurring the lines between what I know and what she is telling me.

“You’re safe now,” she whispers, pulling me back into the suffocating embrace. “Corvin and I… we’ve spent years planning this. We won’t let him near you again.”

I close my eyes, and for a terrifying second, I can’t remember the colour of Zagreus’s eyes.

My Mother pulls me back into her arms.

I want to believe her. I want to sink into the lavender and darkness and never wake up. But beneath the fog of everything, a single image remains clear…

If he were the villain, why does the memory of his touch feel more like home than my Mother’s embrace?

Chapter 4

Intrusion

THE MAESTRO | Past

The sun is blinding, but it is nothing next to the heat crawling under my skin. My hands already smell like gun oil and the metallic tang of a life I took last night.

My Father’s lessons are simple.

Power is taken. Weakness is purged. Love is a leak in the boat.

And yet, here I am, leaning against a sun-bleached stone wall in the market, watching the greatest leak in my existence argue with a grocer over the price of a bag of sweets.

Selene is a whirlwind of limbs and sun-kissed hair. She’s eighteen, of age by the laws of men, but to me, she is still the girl who kissed my bruises and promised to stand in front of monsters.

And a hot topic in the council since the Viscontis have ties with the Vitales.

Vane Davenport, one of the council’s snakes, often brings her up, as if to see how I’d react. When I give him nothing, he mentions making her his daughter-in-law.

Fortunately, by the law of Cosa Nostra, no son or daughter of the Founding Families can marry outside the circle.