“Think on it a moment, Mia,” he said. “Pretend that Antonius claimed his throne. That Darius stood at his right hand. And watered with the blood of a thousand innocents, all their dreams flowered to reality instead of turning to ashes on the wind.”
Scaeva picked up a black pawn, held it out upon his palm.
“What would have become of you?”
The imperator let the question hang unanswered a moment. A maestro before the crescendo.
“You’d have been married off to some marrowborn fool for the sake of political alliance,” he finally said. “Squeezing out pups, tending the home fires, and feeling the fire inside your own breast slowly die. Naught but a cow in a silken dress.” He held the pawn up between his fingers, turned it this way and that. “Because of me, you are solid steel. A blade sharp enough to cut the sunslight in six. And still you find it within yourself to hate me.”
Scaeva gave a soft, bitter chuckle as he looked her in the eye.
“All you are? All you have become? I gave you. Mine is the seed that planted you. Mine are the hands that forged you. Mine is the blood that flows, cold as ice and black as pitch, in those veins of yours.”
He leaned back on the divan, black eyes burning into her own.
“In every possible sense, you are my daughter.”
Julius Scaeva extended his hand, gold glinting upon his fingers. Upon the wall, his shadow did the same.
“Join me.”
Mia’s laughter bubbled in her throat, threatening to choke her.
“Are you fucking mad?”
“Some might say,” Scaeva replied. “But what possible reason do you have left to want me dead? I killed a man who claimed to be your father. But he was a liar, Mia. A would-be usurper. A man perfectly willing to risk his familia for the sake of his own failed ambition. I killed your mother, aye. Another deceiver. Willing to share my bed and cut my throat before the sweat had even cooled. Alinne Corvere knew the stakes she wagered supporting … nay, encouraging Darius’s gambit. Her life. Her son’s. And yours besides. And she weighed them all lighter than a throne.”
The shadowviper slithered across the ground toward Mia, licking the air. Scaeva spun the gravebone stiletto upon the table, his eyes boring into hers.
“I have never lied to you, daughter,” he said. “Not once, throughout it all. When I ordered you drowned, you were worthless to me. Jonnen was young enough to claim as my own. You were too old. But now you’ve proved yourself my daughter true. Possessed of the same will as I: not only to survive, but to prosper. To carve your name with bloody fingernails into this earth. Darius sought to become a kingmaker? You can truly be one. The blade in my right hand. Whatever you desire will be yours. Wealth. Power. Pleasure. I can do away with those gold-grubbing whores in the Red Church and have you at my side instead. My daughter. My blood. As dark and beautiful and deadly as the night. And together, we can sculpt a dynasty that will live for a thousand years.”
On the wall, his shadow reached out farther toward her own.
“You and your brother are my legacy to this world,” he said. “When I am gone, all this can be yours. Our name will be eternal. Immortal. So aye. I ask you to join me.”
Scaeva’s words rang in the hollow spaces in her head, heavy with truth. Her shadow hung like a crooked portrait upon the wall. But though Mia herself remained perfectly still, slowly,
ever so slowly,
it raised one dark hand toward his.
All her life, she’d thought of her parents as flawless. Godlike. Her mother, sharp and wise and beautiful as the finest rapier of Liisian steel. Her father, brave and noble and bright as the suns. Even as she’d learned more about who they were from Sidonius in the cells beneath Crow’s Nest, it never seemed to dim their reflection in her mind’s eye. It hurt too much to admit they might be imperfect. Selfish. Driven by greed or lust or pride and willing to risk everything for the sake of it. And so she kept them unstained. Untarnished. Locked in a box forever inside her head.
Father is another name for God in a child’s eyes.
And Mother is the very earth beneath her feet.
But now, Mia remembered that turn in the forum—the turn Darius Corvere was hanged. A girl of ten, standing