Mathieu (White Flame Trilogy) - By Paula Flumerfelt Page 0,126

otherwise.

Erik followed him downstairs, "Mathieu, I've wanted to tell you since I saw you in the Sky Pillar. Enak thought it'd be a bad idea until we saw what kind of person you were. I thought you were dead, Mathieu..."

"I don’t believe you or Enak, so it doesn't matter."

Erik frowned. "Damn it, it does matter. You're my son. My flesh and blood, the only piece left of the woman I love." He grabbed Mathieu's wrist, turning him around so they were face-to-face. "Quit walking away from me."

"Why? Let’s pretend I believe you, which I don’t. You were never there, Dad. I grew up in an orphanage, the outcast, because you and my goddamn weren't there. Because you two didn’t want me!" Mathieu bit back the rest of his anger, refusing to let this man see how deeply the emotional scars went on this matter.

"That isn’t true, Mathieu. When I left, your mother was pregnant with you. My family was…it doesn’t matter why I left, I just did. When I came home, expecting to find the woman I would marry and my son, I found Anita dead in the road. You don’t know how badly I want to look for you, but I couldn’t. I lost you once already, Mathieu; I won't do it again." Erik’s mouth was set in a hard line, but his grip on Mathieu was surprisingly gentle.

Mathieu wrenched his hand out of the man’s grip, shaking his head. “No, screw you. If you really were my father, you would have come to find me! You wouldn’t have just given up and said ‘I can’t’! A father is supposed to fight for his family, and you didn’t!”

“If I had thought for even a second that you were still alive, I would have come to find you! But I thought you, just like your mother, were dead!”

“I don’t believe you, you lying, pitiful excuse for a man!” Mathieu yelled.

Erik caught Mathieu by the front of his shirt and slammed him into the wall. Keeping his son pinned there, Erik reached into the pocket of his shirt and pulled out a small, flat holographic crystal also known as a traveling crystal. Erik swiped his thumb over it, looking into Mathieu’s eyes before holding it in front of his son’s face.

The flat surface of the crystal, which had previously been blank, was now the captured image of a young man and woman. The man was clearly a teenage Erik, smoking and smiling like an idiot with his arms around…Mathieu’s breath caught in his throat. The woman looked exactly…exactly like him. She had lightly tanned skin, long white hair, and those luminous purple eyes that so perfect matched his; she was also very clearly pregnant in the captured image, glowing with happiness and pregnancy. With shaking fingers, Mathieu reached up to touch her face.

“I told you.” Erik said quietly, letting his son go. “This was one of the last times I saw her. I loved her; hell, I still do.”

Mathieu turned away from Erik, taking a calming breath and trying to control his shakes. "...I-I can't deal with this right now, Erik." He went to the table in the center of the room, which doubled as a map of the combined countries. "Just…go tell Enak that I want everyone from the resistance here. And I mean everyone. Two days from now."

"…Alright." Erik said, doing his best to not reach out for Mathieu, and left him alone in the war room.

Studying the map table, Mathieu sighed. He needed to make a game plan. Not just about how to deal with the man who was now very clearly his father, but also the invasion. He needed to distract himself. Tracing his fingers along the mountains of Unith, he tilted his head. There were guard posts at the border between the Outer Zone and Unith’s border, but if they could just sneak past those, they could stick to less inhabited areas of Unith and only need to take a few strategic locations that would prevent troops from coming to aid the capital.

~*~

Mathieu looked around the war room that he hadn’t really left in three days. In the room with him were Erik and Enak, Jo and Lione, Darcia, Zanika and Zerieve, Kiev, Avanon, and Solomon. More people were downstairs, but here he had the key components in his plan.

Yesterday, everyone had arrived as he had asked. From there, he had been able to ascertain what kind of fighting power he could look forward to using.