Chapter 13

The sight of him hit harder than the memory itself.

For two years, my father had lived inside me as voice, scent, fragments of touch, and the soft distortions grief allows itself. But now he was there in violent, impossible clarity—broad shoulders bent in the rain, mud soaking through his trousers, his hands open in front of Marian like a man offering up the last thing he owns. Desperation had hollowed his face. Fear had stripped him bare. And all of it was for me.

The chamber and the memory overlapped so completely I could not tell where one ended and the other began. Tears blurred my newly returned sight before I had even learned how to use it. My father—the man I had spent chapters of my life hating, grieving, resenting, and defending all at once—had begged for me. Whatever else he had done, whatever fear had twisted him later that night, this moment was real. He had tried to put himself between me and the blade.

In the memory, Marian smiled down at him with the same cold delight she wore now. “Too late,” she said. Rain slid down her face like tears she had never earned. “You should have handed her over when you first learned what she was.”

“She is my daughter,” my father said. Even in memory, the words struck like a blow. “I won’t feed her to your Alpha. I won’t let you make a weapon out of her.”

My breath tore out of me. The old story inside my chest—the one built from betrayal and silence and my father’s last terrible choices—split open under the force of this one. He had failed me. He had tried to silence me. But before all of that, before fear rotted him from the inside out, he had fought for me. Love and ruin, tangled together so tightly I no longer knew where one stopped.

Sight kept crashing into me in brutal pieces. Light. Stone. Water threading silver along the carved channels in the floor. The enormous circle of the seal, pulsing with a pale, hungry glow. Marian kneeling at its edge, blood bright against the stone. And farther beyond—goddess—my mother.

She was thinner than I had imagined and stronger too, if such a thing was possible. Chains bound her wrists and throat, silver and old iron cutting across skin too pale beneath the chamber light. Her dark hair hung damp around a face I knew at once and did not know at all. I had her mouth. Her cheekbones. The shape of her eyes, wide now with fear and love and a grief so fierce it looked almost holy. For one raw heartbeat, seeing her was like seeing my own life returned to me in a language I had forgotten how to read.

“Mum,” I whispered, and this time it was not guesswork, not longing thrown blindly into the dark. It was real. She flinched as if the word had pierced straight through her.

“Little moon,” she said, and her face broke on the words. Then the moment shattered under urgency. “Sila, listen to me. Do not get lost in the memory. The seal is still taking shape around you.”

I turned, and there he was.

Ty looked nothing like the boy I had held onto in memory, and exactly like him. Taller. Harder. His face had sharpened into something more dangerous over the last two years, every line cut with command and old restraint. A pale scar traced his jaw. His eyes—goddess, his eyes—were fixed on me with so much naked fear and love that my newly returned vision blurred again almost immediately. I had wanted my first sight of him to feel softer than this. Instead, it felt like being struck in the chest with every version of us at once.

He saw the recognition hit me. I watched it land in him too—hope, terror, awe, all of it cracking briefly through the steel he wore so well. “Sila,” he said, and my name in his voice matched the expression on his face so perfectly it hurt.

I saw it now—the guilt he carried like another skin, the exhaustion beneath his strength, the way love for me lived in him not as softness but as something stubborn enough to survive being broken. It did not absolve him. It did not erase what stood between us. But sight made honesty crueler. I could no longer pretend his love was a thing I had imagined because I needed it too badly.

The memory seized me again before I could breathe around any of it. Rain. Forest. Marian’s hand lifting the silver blade. My father still on his knees. Then Ty breaking through the trees, younger and wilder, his face raw with alarm as he shouted my name.

Everything moved too fast. One rogue lunged for me. My father rose at the same time—not toward me, but toward Marian, as if he had finally understood that begging had failed. Marian panicked. The blade meant for my throat slashed across my face instead. Fire exploded through my eyes. I screamed. Ty hit the first rogue. My father grabbed me, not to silence me this time, but to drag me backward out of reach. Then Marian shouted something I had never fully remembered until now.

“You promised she would come quietly!” Marian screamed at my father.

The words hit like another wound. My father had bargained with monsters. Maybe to buy time. Maybe to find another way. Maybe because terror had already made him stupid before it made him brave. But whatever plan he thought he was playing, Marian had never intended mercy. She had only ever intended possession.

I saw it then—the part memory had protected me from. My father shoved me behind him just as Ty lunged for Marian. One of the rogues drove forward. Ty twisted to meet him. My father turned too fast, blade in hand, trying to strike the rogue. Ty’s claws caught my father across the throat in the same motion he used to save me. Shock crossed both their faces at once. Then blood.

The truth ripped through me so hard I staggered inside the circle. Ty had killed my father. But the image was nothing like the one Marian had wanted me to live with. It had not been execution. Not vengeance. Not even direct hatred. It had been chaos, protection, and one fatal instant where love and violence became impossible to separate.

“Sila.” Ty took a step toward the edge of the circle, then stopped when the seal flared under his boots. His face had gone white beneath the chamber light. “What do you see?”

I laughed once, and it came out half-sob, half-shock. “Everything,” I said. “Too much. Not enough.” I dragged a shaking breath into my lungs. “You were telling the truth.”

Something in Ty’s expression broke open at that—not relief, not exactly, because nothing about this was clean enough for relief. But some terrible knot of dread in him loosened just enough to show the devastation underneath. Marian, on the other hand, went very still. Her eyes narrowed. She had wanted my grief sharpened into a weapon she could aim at him. She had not wanted nuance. Cruel people never do.

“Then look deeper,” Marian snapped. Blood streaked her wrist and hand, bright against the stone. “Go on, little Luna. Watch the part after. Watch what your mother did when your father fell.”

The chamber obeyed her cruelty. Another memory tore open. My mother emerging from the shadows too late, already wounded, already bleeding power. Her face in the rain was younger than the one before me now, but the same eyes, the same mouth, the same terrible love. She dropped to the ground beside me, touched my face with shaking hands, and whispered words I could not understand. Light burst from her palms. Darkness flooded mine.

I saw it happen. Not heard. Not guessed. Saw. My mother had taken my sight with her own hands while I screamed and bled and reached for a world that vanished under her touch. Knowing why had mattered. But seeing it? Seeing the choice she made with my face in her hands? That was a different kind of wound entirely.

“I know,” my mother said, because she could read the devastation on my face now. “I know what it looks like. But if I had not sealed your sight in that moment, the hunger would have entered through what you had already awakened. You would not have survived the night as yourself.”

My emotions hit the seal like a thrown torch. The pale light around the circle darkened at the edges, then flared violently. Water surged up the carved channels. The thing beneath the chamber moved with new hunger, feeding on pain, on revelation, on every raw feeling cracking open inside me.

“Hold your will,” the guardian commanded. “The first bond has begun but not closed. If you surrender now, it will learn your face and your memories both.”

I straightened by force alone. Tears blurred my mother, Ty, the seal, all of it into light and shadow. But now that I could see, I understood something brutal and simple: sight did not make truth easier. It only made hiding from it impossible. I lifted my chin toward the circle’s heart. “You do not get to turn my pain into your doorway,” I said through shaking teeth.

The seal’s surface rippled like black water. Then a figure rose inside it wearing my body, my face, my new-opened eyes—only emptier, colder, smiling with far too many secrets. It tilted its head at me the way I might have once tilted mine at a stranger’s cruelty.

“Now that you can see,” it said in my voice, smiling wider, “look at the mark on your mother’s throat and ask yourself who really put her in chains.”