Page 117 of Phantom Flower

“Until the void inside her grew too big. Until she could not take it anymore. She left a note. Did you know that? It said she hoped I would find someone who could love me the way she had tried to love you.”

I swallowed. The memory of finding her still burned behind my eyes.

“Our marriage was an alliance,” my father said flatly. “You know this.”

“I know.” My voice cracked. “But she still loved you. Maybe not the kind of love that makes poets write sonnets, but she loved you in the only way she knew how. She believed in you. She defended you to me when I was too young to understand why you never smiled at her. And I…” I let out a shaky breath. “I always told myself that maybe, in your own way, you cared for her too. That beneath it all there was something. Respect. Affection. Anything.”

I could have sworn I saw my father’s eyes soften, but then I blinked and it was gone.

“But I was wrong,” I said. “Because if you had even an ounce of respect for her, if you had honored even one single thing she believed in, you would never have done this to me.”

I took another step forward.

“You think me being with a man is some kind of weakness. Some pathetic phase I’ll grow out of. But he’s not a phase. He’s a human being. He has a heart that somehow decided to beat for me, even after everything I’ve done to him. He has a soul that I would burn the entire world to protect. And you…” My voice was shaking. “You wanted to crush both of those things right in front of my eyes.”

The images slammed into me again, the ones where Rei was bleeding on the floor.

“Do you have any idea what that did to me? Do you know the kind of terror I felt? I had to watch the person I—” I stopped. The word I wanted to say lodged in my throat. “I had to watch him bleed because you decided my feelings were inconvenient. Because you thought I would eventually choose the empire over him.”

“If you continue this,” he said, sounding so cold, “you cannot be my heir.”

I think he expected me to fold. He expected me to lower my eyes and say the words he wanted to hear.

Instead, I met his gaze and let my choice fall from my lips.

“Then I won’t be.”

He did not expect that. My father’s knuckles were white where his fists rested on the polished mahogany. For a second I thought he might actually stand up and strike me. Instead, he leaned back in the leather chair that had once belonged to his own father, the one my mother used to polish every Sunday.

“You are really so foolish,” he mocked, “to choose him over an empire.”

I did not care if I was foolish.

He turned his head slowly toward Alexei.

“Don’t think you’re not replaceable, Dimitri,” he said. “Alexei can replace you. He’s blood. He’s been trained the same way. He knows what loyalty to this family looks like.”

Alexei did not move or show any expression, but I saw the way his fingers twitched.

“Then let him,” I said.

My father’s lips thinned into something that might have been a smile on anyone else. On him it looked like a blade being drawn.

“Very well then, Alexei,” he said, turning fully toward my cousin. He straightened in the chair, the same way he did before every important announcement. “From this moment forward—”

A gunshot exploded through the room.

I felt the vibration in my chest before I even registered what had happened.

Alexei stood exactly where he had been, arm extended, the barrel of his gun still smoking. He was staring at the man who had just been about to name him heir.

My father’s head had snapped back. A single perfect hole sat between his eyes. Blood and brain matter sprayed across the leather chair and the wall behind him in a grotesque fan. His body jerked, then slumped forward onto the desk. The pen he had been reaching for rolled off the edge and clattered to the floor.

Alexei lowered the gun.

“No thank you.”

My eyes widened.