Page 188 of Fallacies

I’d be concerned for the injury if it weren’t for the slow smile spreading across his face. “I knew you’d grow into those gangly limbs of yours,” he says.

I forget the risk of the ward entirely, half-laughing as I rush forward and claim the hug I’ve waited twenty years for.

When he shifts the chains around his wrists, reaching his joined hands up to pat my shoulder, all of our memories come flooding back. Ones that used to hurt too bad to relive, so I would push them down.

His lessons with me in the library and the garden maze he’d chase me through. The dozens of questions he’d always answer when I was just starting to become curious about the world. The stories he’d tell me of my mother and how bright she’d been in his life. In everyone's life.

For what little time we had, it had always been him and me.

I screw my eyes shut when they begin to burn.

Losing my father never made any sense. He was there one minute and gone the next. I watched him go, saw what happened, but it still muddled my young brain. How could someone so unshakeable and important just…vanish?

Finding my dad is sort of like losing him. He was gone one minute, absent from my entire life, and now suddenly he’s here.

His palm cups the back of my head just like he used to do when I was a boy. As if twenty years haven’t passed without him. As if it doesn’t matter how different I look, how much I’ve grown, it will always be the way it was—him and me.

“I’m so sorry, Dad.” Sorry for what happened to you. Sorry for whatever you’ve endured—even if it wasn’t my doing. Sorry for not finding you sooner.

He laughs then, but I can hear the choke of emotion he’s trying to hold back. Pulling away from my hold, his eyes crinkle with his smile. “Sorry for what, Cal? This is the best day I’ve had in years.”

I trace his gaze as it falls—to the ground between us—and that’s when I notice that both of his feet are in the courtyard.

The ward.

I look over my shoulder at Devon, his expression shifting from shock to triumph, eyes comically wide. The revelation kickstarts my heart. A deep thud beating against my ribcage.

She fucking did it.

Of course she did it.

“Well,” my father claps me on the shoulder, “what are we waiting for?”

I avert my attention back to him as he gestures to the shadowed tunnel beyond the door. With dawn nearly upon us, a red-grey light spills into the servant passage, illuminating what I’ve been fighting my whole life for. The very thing I’ve been after all these years.

So many eyes blink back at me—the hall so crowded that I can’t even see where the line ends. Our people. Weary and thin but not broken. Hope in their eyes despite it all. Alive. Ready.

When I look back at my dad, he’s grinning at me. “Where’s home, Cal?”

44

Lucina

By some miracle, we made it through the Estate without issue.

Well, without major issues.

Salem has killed three guards already, silencing them just before they were able to shout for help and alert whoever’s still inside the Estate.

Now he’s standing with his back to us, guarding the end of the hall while I help an older woman, about May’s age, to the back of the line.

The Sol are halfway through the small servant tunnel, an entrance I found down the narrow hall beside the dining room. It leads straight to the front of the Estate, and the line of them had been filing in just fine up until a few minutes ago, and now it seems to have stopped.

With the line at a standstill, there are about fifteen or so that are still exposed in the hall.

The woman who’s leaned up against me grunts, pulling my attention. She’s too thin to hold herself up properly, but she’s walking as fast as she’s able. All of them are, but they’re skin and bones, lighter than leaves, and the support they do have is brittle.

The sight of them simultaneously breaks my heart and lights a fire in my gut, anger rocking me so violently to my core that I can’t even look at them for too long.