Chapter 138: The Unfolding Truth XVIII

Third Person POV

The hallway was long and the sound of Kai’s boots said so.

Each step came back to him off the stone floor, sharp and clean, bouncing off walls that had been standing long enough to stop absorbing anything from anyone who passed through them.

The ceiling was high. The windows along one side let in the early morning light, pale gold and new, cutting across the floor in long even strips.

Dust floated in the beams, unhurried, the kind that settled in places where nothing moved fast enough to disturb it.

This was not a hallway that belonged to a small house.

Everything about it, the height of the ceilings, the width of the corridor, the weight of the stone under his feet, told a person exactly who had built it and exactly who was meant to walk through it.

Not servants, nor visitors. Not people who had to think about whether they belonged.

Kai walked without slowing down.

Because this was his. All of it. Every stone and every window and every strip of morning light across the floor.

He had been gone long enough to forget how that felt.

The door at the far end was heavier than the others. Dark carved wood, worn smooth in the places hands had touched it for years.

As he got close, it swung open on its own, not because of anything magic, just because the man stationed on the other side knew the sound of those particular boots on that particular floor and had been listening for them since word came that Kai was back.

Two guards stood inside, one on each side of the door, faces blank, hands clasped, eyes forward. They did not look at him. They did not need to look at him.

The door closed behind him with a low, heavy sound.

The room was wide and high and warm from the fire burning in a hearth large enough that a grown man could step inside and stand up straight in it.

The floors were dark stone, polished to a shine that had taken years to achieve and would take years to lose.

The windows along the far wall were tall and let in the same pale morning light from the hallway, but more of it, and it fell across the center of the room in a way that made everything look important.

And at the center of it all, on a chair that had enough size and weight and intention behind it to be called exactly what it was, sat his father.

Dark hair, grey at the temples now. The jaw was sharp, familiar in the way that Kai’s jaw was familiar because they had come from the same place. His eyes were green, the same shade, but they had been looking at difficult things for longer and it showed.

They were harder. Older. Patient in a particular way that came from spending years making decisions that could not be unmade.

He was not smiling.

Kai stopped in the middle of the room. He did not lower his eyes. He did not bow. He stood where he stopped and looked at his father and waited.

His father looked back at him.

Neither of them spoke.

The fire crackled. The morning light came through the windows. The guards by the door existed without making any sound at all.

The silence stretched out between father and son and neither of them moved to end it.

Just then, the door to the side of the throne opened.

The sound of it broke the quiet before anyone came through it, and then she came through it, and the quiet was gone entirely.

His mother’s hair was black and pinned up, a few strands loose around her face the way they always were by mid-morning. She was not walking.

She was moving too fast to call it walking, crossing the room at a pace that her shoes were not quite keeping up with, and her eyes found Kai the moment she was through the door and something happened to her face that had nothing to do with composure.

She crossed the room and did not stop.

She hit him first, both arms going around him before he had fully processed that she had reached him, holding on with the kind of grip that came from two weeks of sitting by a window not eating properly. He felt it in his ribs. He felt how tight it was and what the tightness meant.

His arms came up around her slowly.

She pulled back just enough to look at his face. Her eyes were already wet, her cheeks flushed, and she looked at him like she needed to verify that he was actually there and not something she had imagined.

Then she hit his chest with her fist.

"How could you do this to your mother?"

Not hard. Just enough to land. Enough to say what words could not fully say.

"Do you not have any manners?" She hit him again, same spot, same weight. "Why would you do this? Do you want me to die? Huh?"

Her voice cracked on the last word. She was crying properly now, the kind of crying that had been waiting for something to release it, and standing in front of him after two weeks of not knowing where he disappeared to.

"Do you even see me as your mother?"

Kai looked down at her. He lifted his hands and held her face in them, his thumbs just at the edges of her cheeks, and bent his head toward hers.

"I’m sorry, mother." His voice came out quiet and lower than he intended. "I didn’t mean to hurt you this way."

She pulled back and hit him again.

"Why would you leave without telling me anything?" Her voice was wobbling all over the place and she was not trying to stop it. "Did you want to kill me? Did you want to kill your own mother, child?"

"Mother."

"Answer me."

"I’m so sorry." He pressed his forehead to hers. Held it there. "I didn’t mean to. I’m sorry."

She stayed there against him, still crying, and he let her. He held her face in his hands and kept his forehead against hers and did not move, did not rush her, did not try to quiet her down.

He just let her be angry and relieved and everything else she had stored up while she sat by the window and waited.

If she needed to hit him again, she could hit him again.

Then he heard the door opened.

Both of them came through at the same time, which was the only way they ever entered a room.

Two girls, somewhere around seventeen, with the same face sitting on two completely different people. Same blonde hair, same sharp cheekbones, same green eyes that landed on Kai and assessed him in a single second.

One wore a dress. Dark fabric, simple, well-fitted. Her hair was long and loose and she walked like someone who had been taught how to carry herself in a room and had actually decided that was useful information.

The other wore trousers and a tunic. Her hair was cut shorter, sitting just at the jaw. Her hands were in her pockets and she walked like someone who had received exactly the same lessons about carrying herself in a room and had decided they did not apply to her specifically.

They stopped at the edge of the room and looked at him.

"Sup, Kai?" they said. Together. Without planning it.

He looked at them and did not answer.

The one in trousers tilted her head. Ellisa. Always Ellisa, with the head tilt and the look that meant she was already three sentences ahead of whatever she was about to say out loud.

"You nearly killed Mom," she said. Very casual. Very unbothered.

Alisa, in the dress, crossed her arms. "You could have at least sent a letter. One letter. Do you even know what a letter is?"

Kai looked at the two of them for a moment. Then he turned back to his mother, who was still wiping her face, still catching her breath.

"I’m back," he said.

A pause.

"And I brought someone with me."

His mother’s hands stopped moving. She looked up at him. The tears were still on her cheeks but something else was coming through underneath them, rising quickly, replacing the grief with something brighter and more careful at the same time.

"You found your mate?" she said. Almost a whisper.

Kai’s jaw moved.

"Where is she?" His mother’s voice lifted. She was already looking past him, already looking at the door, already deciding what she was going to say. "Where is she, Kai? Bring her in, bring her in, why is she standing outside..."

"She’s not my mate."

The brightness in his mother’s face did not disappear. It just went very still.

She looked at him.

"Then who did you bring, Kai?"

The twins exchanged a look. The kind that happened in the space of about half a second and carried a full conversation inside it.

Kai turned toward the door.

"Come here, Helen," he called.

The door opened.

She stepped through slowly, one hand letting go of the frame as she cleared the doorway, like she had been holding onto it from the other side. The dress she was wearing was black and simple and fit her properly, the kind of thing that did not need anything else.

Her white hair was pinned up, most of it gathered and held at the back of her head, but the color was impossible to miss even from across the room, pale and bright against the dark stone walls, a few strands loose around her face.

She stopped just inside the door.

Her grey eyes moved. Slow and careful, taking in the room in pieces.

The throne and the man on it who had not moved or spoken since she entered.

The woman with the damp cheeks and the careful expression. The fire. The morning light through the tall windows.

The two girls stared at her.

She did not move further into the room. She stood where she had stopped, her hands clasped in front of her, and waited.

Ellisa had already taken a step forward before Alisa grabbed her arm.

"Is that real?" Ellisa said. She was whispering but not doing it well. "Is that her actual hair?"

"Will you stop," Alisa said through her teeth.

"But look at it." Ellisa pulled slightly against her sister’s grip. "It’s all white. Every single strand. I want to touch it."

"Ellisa."

"Just a little touch. Just the ends."

"If you take one more step I will tell Mom about the kitchen."

Ellisa stopped.

Their mother was not listening to either of them. She was looking at Helen with an expression that had not finished deciding what it was yet. Not cold. Not warm. Watching.

The way a person looked at something they needed to understand before they could respond to it properly.

The man on the throne still had not moved. His green eyes had not gone to Helen at all. They were on Kai, steady and waiting, the eyes of a man who had been patient for a long time and could keep being patient for a while longer if he had to, but preferred not to.

Helen stood under all of it, the staring twins, the mother’s unfinished expression, the father’s silence, the room’s bigness, and her hands were clasped so tightly in front of her that her knuckles had gone slightly pale.

She did not look at the floor. She kept her grey eyes moving, level and steady, not flinching from any of the faces looking back at her.

But her hands were giving her away.

"Alisa," Kai said. He had not looked at the twins. "Ellisa."

Both of them straightened up slightly.

"Don’t even think about it."

"We weren’t doing anything," Ellisa said immediately.

"We were just going to welcome her," Alisa agreed.

Kai looked at them. His green eyes settled on both of them without blinking, without expression, without any of the softness that usually sat in them when he looked at his sisters.

Neither of them moved.