I must confront him about his actions now.
Steeling myself for a rough conversation, I walked to the door and opened it.
My father strode into my room without waiting for an invitation. “You’ve been gone for…” He stopped when he spotted Damiel—and Damiel’s jacket hanging in my open closet. He turned his hard eyes on me. “I need to speak with you at once, Cadence.” His gaze flickered to Damiel, then back to me. “Alone.”
“He’s staying.”
My father’s gaze again shifted between me and Damiel. “I see you did not heed my warnings.”
He definitely didn’t look happy that I’d let Damiel into my life—and my heart.
“You warned her about me, Silverstar.” Accusation was woven through Damiel’s words.
My father’s face was as hard as granite. “Your reputation speaks for itself, Dragonsire.”
“So it does,” Damiel said. “But did you warn Cadence about me because of my reputation, or because I reside outside your sphere of control?”
My father’s jaw tightened. “I warned her about you because people who get sucked into your sphere of control generally end up dead.”
“What would you have me do to traitors?” Damiel said drily. “Congratulate them for a job well done and then send them on their merry way?”
“My daughter is not a traitor.”
“Of course not. And she has nothing to fear from me.”
“Damiel has my back, Dad.” I struggled to keep my voice steady, to not explode with emotion. “Which is more than I can say about you.”
And so I confronted my father with everything that I knew. How he’d been controlling my life. How he’d planted ‘friends’ around me to report back to him. And how he’d tried to marry me to one of his spies.
“It’s complicated,” he said when I’d finally unloaded everything on my chest.
“Well, then, it’s a good thing you raised me to be clever.”
“I am not spying on you, Cadence. I am trying to protect you.” He shook his head. “So the same thing that happened to your mother doesn’t happen to you.”
“My mother?” A sudden rush of curiosity drowned out my anger’s fire. “Who was she? And what happened to her? She wasn’t really a witch, was she?”
“No, your mother was not a witch,” he confirmed. “She was an Immortal.”
“A descendent of the Immortals?”
“No. An actual, original Immortal,” he told me. “She was one of the last surviving ones. She came here to Earth to escape the hunters who were trying to kill her. I found her out on the plains of monsters one day, wounded, unconscious. I didn’t know what she was or what I was getting myself involved in. If I had, I might have left her there for the monsters. But by the time I realized all this, it was too late. I’d fallen so much in love with her that I would have done anything for her.”
My brows lifted. My father had never spoken much of my mother. And he’d certainly never expressed any deep feelings for her.
“What happened to her?” I asked him.
“She was being hunted across the known universe, so I didn’t tell anyone about her, not even my colleagues at the Legion of Angels. I couldn’t risk it. I thought that if no one knew about her, if no one saw her, she would be safe. So she and I made a home, in a sanctuary deep in the wilderness. Surrounded by monsters and yet safe from them.”
“The Silver Shore,” I realized.
“Yes. That was our secret sanctuary. The place I returned to whenever I could. You were born there. You and your mother were safe for a while.” His expression grew dark. “But eventually, the hunters found her. They can track Immortal magic. She had an amulet that masked her magic, one that could blend into her, become a part of her. It hid her from the hunters’ magic. I later learned that she hadn’t worn the amulet in months. That’s how they found her.”
His voice cracked. My father, who had always been as tough as a diamond and as strong as a mountain, was breaking.
Seeing his pain for the woman he had lost, for the mother I had lost—it brought tears to my eyes. “Why did she ever take off the amulet?”
“She had only one amulet. She must have known the hunters were getting close because one day she asked me to take you to the water so you could watch the birds you liked so much. I didn’t know she’d given you her amulet, that she’d blended it into your body to hide you