Page 181 of The Incendiary

When he stepped toward me despite my warning, I kept my word. I unclenched my fists, grabbed the nearest spoke in my wheel and blasted him backward into the craggy stone cave wall with the winds of Sussurro.

Simeon groaned and coughed before pushing himself slowly to his feet. While I stalked closer, he outstretched his palm while he pushed himself to stand with the other arm. “I understand if you’re upset with me.”

“Upset,” I repeated, breathless in my disbelief as I stood over him. “You think I’m upset?”

“I did what I felt was the only option.”

“You took my life away from me!” One hand fell to my chest, the other over my abdomen. “You took everything!”

“It’s impossible to miss a life you don’t even know you had!” The glass on the tables trembled, as if his own magic, catalyzed by anger, vibrated the air. “And do you think I took pleasure in it? Punishing my only niece, my sister’s only child, for the sake of all these strangers?”

I grimaced. “I think you might have, actually.”

“No.” Simeon scowled and shook his head. “He was not the only one who loved you. He was not the only one terrified of losing you for good.”

The sudden need to believe that Simeon might care rose up in me like a child’s need for her parent’s approval. But I wasn’t so naive anymore.

“What a way to show your love, Uncle,” I seethed.

“You don’t know everything, Aryella!” His voice shook, and his stare—a mirror into a past forgotten—lifted the hairs on the nape of my neck. “I have loved you since the day you were born! I stood beside your father as he held you, tiny and precious in his arms. I heard your first cry. I was there when your mother, my sweet sister, found you at three days old, stabbed through the heart by a man I had trusted and allowed near my family.”

“If this is you blaming yourself for it all, you won’t hear an argument from me.”

Shera nudged my side to remind me of her presence. Simeon’s eyes dropped there. His sneer fell, and his skin paled. “Is that what I think it is?”

“She is Shera.” My fingers brushed over her soft, silver head, now taller than my hip. “And she is an umbra.”

“And where did you get her?” His body grew stiff the longer he stared.

I smiled proudly. “Where do you think?”

His nostrils flared. What he had against umbras, I didn’t know, but I was pleased with anything that got under his skin. I thought I even saw a flicker of fear in his eyes as he assessed her.

“Of course, the bastard found her and gave her to you. Strays are always drawn to one another.” His expression soured with disgust.

Shera growled. I scratched her behind her tufted ears. I wanted to burn Simeon alive for that insult, but his knowledge was too valuable.

“His name is…” Pain unfurled behind my sternum. “His name was Gavin Smyth, and you knew I loved him.”

“You were children, both of you,” he scoffed, waving my words away like they meant nothing. “Infatuated, irresponsible children blinded by lust. He had no idea what it would take for you to survive in this world.”

“He proved you wrong.”

“I underestimated him,” he corrected me. “I underestimated his obsession, his stubbornness, just as I’d underestimated those qualities in his father who he made the grave decision of going to⁠—”

“He only went to Molochai because you turned him away!”

“And I could have done much worse than turn him away for even daring to come near you!” Simeon snapped. “But because you loved him, I let him go free. That, I did for you. He could have had a calm, comfortable life and loved again. But like his father, he let obsession consume him.”

“He was nothing like his father,” I growled.

“You didn’t know him, Aryella,” said Simeon. “You had mere weeks with him. You can’t possibly fathom the things he did, what he was capable of.”

“Do not speak to me of what I know!” This time, the vibration of power in the room came from me. “What I know is how it feels to wake up erased! To open my eyes from a long, dreamless sleep and feel like a shell of a person!” My throat burned, my words heavy with sorrow, and my body begged to curl up and hide. But I’d been waiting to tell my uncle what he had done to me, and I wasn’t going to stop now.

“My life felt… disjointed,” I continued, voice quivering in my chest. “I could feel something missing. Phillip and Oliver were dear to me, even Elowen, but they weren’t mine no matter how much I wanted them to be. When I reached for purpose, there was nothing, and I felt that emptiness everywhere.” When I tried to grasp the air in front of my face, my fist clenched around nothing. “Until him.”

“You couldn’t have remembered him, Aryella.” Wide-eyed, he lifted a hand in warning like he was daring it not to be true. “Even before, you barely knew him⁠—”