Cathedral (Cradle of Darkness 1)

Or… I remembered someone. But it wasn’t the long-lost previous version of Ethan I still pined for.

And my father had most likely done this to me. For sport maybe. To keep me complacent and sad, and hating the world for taking what I’d loved. But I was starting to think that I had never loved. That I was a pretty shell, a puppet, and a dupe so unworthy even Ethan Parker chose another over me.

Silent tears smeared my smoky eye and mascara, though my expression hardened as I considered.

What if nothing about me was real? What if everything, every part of what made me me was all made up by dear old dad?

“It won’t be easy.” Warm palm still resting at the dip of my back, Malcom thought to soothe me with a simple gesture.

Blue eyes, then red, then blue. Red again. I could not control what was churning in my scarred and broken brain. “I think I died that day, when my brain fell on the floor. Whatever I am now, I’m not that girl in the blue dress who ate her cat on accident.”

Reaching forward, Malcom pressed the hold button, stopping our descent. In a mirror-lined box where I could see myself from every angle, where I saw infinite facsimiles of myself and this male, he took my hand. Played with my fingers as if touching me in such a way were novel, exciting, that it soothed him. “You are capable of overcoming and thinking for yourself. Of growing up, of choosing to resist what you think you know and what you are afraid you know.”

Because I needed to hear Malcom say it again, I looked him dead in the eye. “Gerard was never real?”

“Not the version of him you cling to. And yes, I did have him shipped out to fight in the war despite his family’s attempts to keep him out of battle.”

“So my father didn’t lie when he told me Gerard never loved me…”

Malcom shook his head.

“What’s real? What isn’t real?” Breaking our stare, I looked at myself in those mirrors, at the long line of my face and back, over and over into infinity. “How many times have I figured this out?”

“You’ve come close, but never this close.”

Because Darius would have caught wind that his wind-up toy needed a tune up. What he’d do to me after this. What he’d tear and replace and rework… “I won’t go back to the Cathedral.”

“Listen to me, Jade.” Pulled forward into a cool embrace, touched in a way I think I’d been manipulated into seeing only with disgust, I tolerated and tested the waters as Malcom spoke. “Help me place Vladislov on the throne and all of us will be free.”

“And what makes you think he’d be any better than the devil we know?”

“Does it matter?” A hand cupped my cheek, pressing my face to his chest. An act so intimate and uncomfortable that I knew it was my father’s exploitation in my mind that made me cringe so. “He has his own agenda that has little to do with you.”

“Which would be?”

Strict as he’d always been with me, Malcom pulled back enough so that I might see his smirk. “None of your business.”

“Would I still have to”—I gesture upward to where the fundraiser continued—“do this? Let them fuck me? The quota?”

“No.” The resonance of his denial, of the rage I glimpsed in that simple answer. It made me nervous that it was all too good to be true.

So I tested Malcom, because nothing in my world, it seemed, could be real or trusted. “You’ll still give me Ethan.”

Glittering eyes flashed, more agitation of a different kind. “That was our agreement.”

I cocked an eyebrow. “Can you make him love me?”

“Yes.”

And I wanted that, I wanted that love I’d thought I’d had. That playful sort and laughter, the days in bed where he took pleasure of himself in my body. Like a drug. An impulse I couldn’t trust but needed to feed. “When?”

“And you can do as you wish with him, sweet Jade. That fool mortal or immortal is of no consequence to me. Our housecat, one you can fuck if you feel the need to purge that desire.”

And right there I grasped that Malcom understood exactly what was wrong with me. That after a lifetime of witnessing my rewrites, he knew me in a way I’d never possibly know myself.

The feeling, like most feelings these days, was unsettling. But it was also sanctuary.

“Who would I have been if…” Darius had not been my father.

Gentle, he tucked my hair behind my ear, massaging the lobe as he smiled. “A spoiled, rotten brat. Too beautiful for her own good and impossibly stubborn.”

I smirked and Malcom’s response was instant, brighter than any sun, and overwhelming. He kissed me.

Tongue tracing my lips so I might part them, fingers delving into my hair, Malcom took of that small smile, feasted on it, groaning into my open mouth. “Tell me, Jade, that you understand what this is.”