Chapter 6
I wanted to dismiss it.
Say childhood memory was unreliable.
Say Gideon was lying.
Then he produced photographs.
Me at Blackthorne.
Age four.
Age nine.
Age thirteen.
Different years.
Different stays.
Some I remembered as visits.
The first I did not.
In one photograph, Wesley stood beside me.
Thirty-four years younger.
He looked almost kind.
That made it worse.
“What did you do to me here?”
Gideon frowned.
“Educated you.”
“What did you tell me about my mother?”
Silence.
There.
Same method.
Not identical.
But close.
My mother, Elena Bellandi, hated the Old Table.
She believed children should not be raised by committees.
My father disagreed.
Their marriage nearly broke over it.
During my first stay, I cried constantly for her.
So the elders told me she had agreed I needed discipline.
Maybe she had.
Maybe not.
Then Gideon admitted one line.
“We told you good daughters stay where their fathers place them.”
I laughed once.
Cold.
Of course.
I had spent my adult life believing my ruthlessness came from being born strong.
Maybe some of it was training.
Not destiny.
Training.
“That is why you think Hazel belongs here.”
Gideon shook his head.
“She belongs to Bellandi.”
“She is Bellandi.”
“No. Lucia.”
His voice lowered.
“She belongs to something larger than you.”
There it was.
The sentence every controlling structure eventually says.
The child is not yours.
The child is ours.
I walked toward the small silver ring.
Picked it up.
Then placed it back.
“No.”
Gideon’s face tightened.
“Your father would disagree.”
“My father disagreed with himself constantly.”
He almost smiled.
Then I noticed another photograph beneath mine.
My brother.
Julian.
Dead at nineteen.
I froze.
Julian had hated Blackthorne.
I remembered that.
He called it the old house where people forgot how to laugh.
“What happened to him here?”
Gideon’s expression changed.
Finally.
Fear.
May you like
My brother’s death had always been called a car accident.
Suddenly Blackthorne had entered the story.
