Total pages in book: 43
Estimated words: 38865 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 38865 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 194(@200wpm)___ 155(@250wpm)___ 130(@300wpm)
Sithren sighs, and some of the tension leaves his shoulders. “Thank you,” he says. “I know the temptation to leave her and get yourself free must have been there.”
“It was. More than a temptation. You owe me something much more than a beating, Sithren. You owe me answers.”
“It is too late for this,” he says. “I will beat you now and explain in the morning.”
I think this is his attempt at humor.
“What happened to your harem, Sithren?”
“I do not wish to speak about it.”
“Tethys does. She’s decided I am her way out. I think she’s going to keep coming to me, one way or another. You may as well tell me what has happened. If I am your captive, I may as well understand.”
My words are manipulative and yet true. I need to know what’s happening here, and he needs to tell me because he is apparently unwilling to wrangle the hellion he sired into any form of control.
“Very well. Keep the clothing on. But be aware you may no longer wish to be wearing it when I tell you the truth.”
I look down at the clothes. “Are they cursed or something?”
“Perhaps. This is a secret I will not share with anybody outside these walls. You must understand, to the greater world, to everybody, I have a harem of hundreds.”
“And you seem to have. But where did they go? Tethys is desperate to find her mother.”
“Come with me,” Sithren says. “Let me show you where her mother is.”
He leads me through the house, through walled rear gardens, and then out into a great yet similarly walled field at the rear of his property. It looks very pretty in the moonlight, shining with bright plaques laid out like a constellation on the well-trimmed grass. It is so pretty that at first I do not know what I am looking at. There’s something tickling me at the edge of my mind, something trying to push through the general confusion.
Sithren leads me through the shining plaques until he reaches one in particular. “Eris,” he says. “Mother of Tethys.”
It all falls into place at that moment. I am in a graveyard.
The irregularities in the shining plaques are not because the field has been laid out in a constellation. They are because some of the graves are much smaller than others, and the end result is an irregular regularity.
“A poison,” he says. “Brought by an enemy and introduced into my home. Virulent enough to destroy those exposed quickly. I lost everybody in three days. Everybody besides Tethys. She was elsewhere at the time. When she returned, they had all been buried and she decided that her mother had run away, rather than admitting to herself that she had passed.”
I draw in a deep breath. Dinavri politics is known for being brutal and bloody. The story itself does not surprise me, but the massive familial cost is punch to the gut. I can only imagine the pain endured here by all concerned. There is so much life lost, so much potential wasted. I don’t know what to say. I should be telling him I am sorry for his loss, making sympathetic sounds. But that’s not what comes out.
“What happened to the enemy?”
“I skinned him and submersed him in sea water for thirty days and thirty nights, and that was only the beginning,” Sithren says, sparing me the rest of the no doubt gory details. “The attack itself remains secret from most of society. It would be a great weakness to admit that I am a man with no mates and only one remaining child. I would become a target, and if I became a target, then society itself would be at risk of destabilizing. Our culture works because strong men lead large families and make alliances. A lone father is nothing.”
“Why did you not just rebuild the harem?”
He looks at me and I see hurt in his glittering eyes. “You still believe that I am the animal your Authority has declared me to be. You do not understand. These women. Our children. I loved them all deeply. Their loss was not as nothing to me. They were not replaceable. I have never had any desire to start over. This was my family, and now my family is gone. Tethys will come to terms with that one day, in her own time.”
I feel a deep and almost overwhelming pity for him. He has lost greatly and grieved more than I can imagine. I can understand not wanting to take another mate after the loss of the love of one's life. I imagine that is multiplied many times over.
“Then. Why…” I pause to swallow, sensing that I should not verbalize this question. Why me? Why the hell am I here? Why is he keeping me in his house, fucking me, coming inside me, risking new life? Is he really manipulating me? Or…