Page 79 of Guardian of Exile

Her exhaustion only became more apparent as she drew closer, tight lines pulling at the corners of her eyes. Nyx was struck with the thought that she looked too young for those lines, and also younger than Nyx would have expected her to be, having a son of Tristen’s age. She couldn’t be more than in her early forties. Doing the math in her head, Nyx figured she’d either aged extraordinarily well—which was unlikely, given how otherwise rundown she looked—or she’d been about sixteen or seventeen when she’d had Tristen.

Belas managed a brittle smile for them, and Nyx had the thought that she must be blinding when she was happy. It was easy to see how her entire face would light up. Nyx also suspected she hadn’t been happy in a very long time.

“What can I get you?” Her voice had a musical lilt to it that didn’t fit in a place like this. She didn’t seem like she was made for harsh places or people. She didn’t seem like the kind of woman who could sell her son.

She looked at Tristen expectantly. His head was dipped down and he lowered it further, ensuring the hood of his cloak revealed nothing of his face. Belas’s expression, which had already been guarded, turned more so.

“He’s shy,” Nyx said.

“Not to worry,” Belas said tightly. “We get a lot of shy in here.” Shy, in this case, clearly implied prefer-not-to-be-remembered, likely for nefarious reasons.

In the end, Nyx ordered for them both, choosing drinks at random. The fruit platter she picked with intention, asking Belas to leave out the starfruit. Over the past few days of eating in the Drahl household, Nyx had noticed Tristen didn’t like it, and she watched Belas’s face. A shadow passed across the woman’s eyes. Was she remembering her son hadn’t liked them?

Belas walked away as soon as the order was taken. Tristen hadn’t said a single word. When the food came, he didn’t touch it, only sipped at his drink. He also didn’t talk. He watched, his hand clenched tightly around his glass, his eyes tracking Belas’s every movement, her every interaction.

But though he observed, he did not once interact. She also didn’t think he was seeing the same things she was. The way it seemed Belas’s exterior was a shell that had been forced to become hard too fast, and thus become brittle, as if the slightest blow would shatter it. The way she glanced at the door every few minutes, as if expecting someone to walk through it. The way every time she did, the woman behind the bar shook her head, her expression a mix of pity and disgust.

They sat for two hours, watching. They ordered two more rounds of beers that Nyx made Tristen drink, because someone had to drink them to justify their continued presence, and Nyx couldn’t magically sober herself up like he could.

Every time Belas came to check on them, Tristen tensed, his body readying for action, only he didn’t know which action to take.

Finally, after Belas walked away from them yet again, he said, “She seems so normal.” His voice was wistful. “Like I remember.”

Nyx didn’t say anything. She’d argued with him a lot over the past few days about how to handle this moment. This meeting. So she knew if she suggested he just talk to his mother, his back would go up.

“Is that what yours was like?” When he read the confusion on her face he clarified, “Your mother. You said she wasn’t a good person. But was she with you? Was she just…normal with you?”

Nyx shook her head. “No. She was never normal with me.” Though it had taken Nyx a long time and a lot of books to understand that fact. She hadn’t had any outside frame of reference to compare her life to. “My mother…she never loved me. She never even pretended to.”

Nyx had thought Viktor loved her, when she was little. Then she’d grown old enough, learned enough about Hidden magic, to understand what Elena had done to him. And Nyx was grateful she’d had her illusions, early on. Grateful that, in her formative years, she had at least believed an adult had cared for her. She didn’t want to know what kind of person she might have become if she hadn’t had that.

“Mine loved me,” Tristen whispered. “I thought she loved me. I guess she loved money more.”

That, to Nyx, was another piece of this puzzle that didn’t fit. If Belas had sold him, why was she working in a place like this? Yes, people could be bad with money. Lottery winners went broke all the time. It was possible Belas had squandered it all. Or maybe the people Belas had given Tristen to had double-crossed her, and she’d been left with nothing. There were a lot of maybes, a lot of different possible scenarios. But with the singular exception of Kaden Moor, Nyx had always been good at reading people. She’d had to be, had had to understand her mother’s every shift in expression to know what was or wasn’t safe to do or say. And she didn’t read Belas Veld as a cold-hearted bitch. She read her as broken.

The bar door opened. As always, Belas’s gaze went to it. As always, she deflated when whoever walked through clearly wasn’t who she was hoping for.

“She’s waiting for someone,” Tristen said, finally stating the obvious.

“It looks that way,” Nyx said cautiously, not sure where he was going with this. They’d already been here for a couple hours, and he was no closer to saying anything to his mother.

“I want to see who she’s waiting for.”

Nyx swallowed her tongue on what she wanted to say, and instead asked, “Why?”

“It might be the people she sold me to.”

Nyx took a deep breath. “It’s been fifteen years,” she said gently. “It’s highly unlikely she’s still in communication with them.”

All of the nervous energy he’d had since entering the tavern turned into steel resolve when looked at her. “I am not leaving until I find out who she’s waiting for.”

They remained at the tavern for several hours until Belas finished her shift, then quietly followed her out and down the street, Nyx quietly slipping them under a Hiding as soon as they hit a moment without witnesses. The days on Raveras were shorter than on Earth, and night was swiftly starting to fall. Belas went straight from the tavern to a small building complex that put Nyx in mind of a boarding house from the eighteen-hundreds.

Tristen looked like he was going to follow her in, but Nyx stopped him. “Are you going to talk to her?”

He shook his head.

“Then you’re not following her in.” If Nyx had hoped that would make him break and decide to talk to the woman, she was disappointed. Resigned, Nyx led them to the alley behind Belas’s apartment. She wove the Drahls, Evra, and Kaden in as exceptions to her Hiding and reached for her anchor in Amelia Drahl’s home, a portal spinning into existence.