Father's Impossible Choice

Chapter 2

 They let me back in faster than I expected. Maybe Marlow said something. Maybe it didn't matter anymore, once a name like Ravaryn got involved.

 My father was already sitting when they brought me in, and something about the way he looked up — hopeful, like maybe I'd come back with good news — made what I had to say so much worse.

 "Dad." I sat down across from him and put the card on the table between us, face up, like it was evidence of something. "Valen Ravaryn came to see me."

 His whole body went still.

 "He wants me to marry his son. In exchange, he says he'll get you real representation. The best in the state, he said. A real chance."

 I watched it land on him, watched his face do something I hadn't seen it do the whole time I'd been growing up. Not the lying face. Something worse. Fear that wasn't for himself.

 "No." He said it flat, immediate, like there was no room in it for discussion. "Absolutely not. Seraphine, no."

 "Dad, they're going to convict you. Every lawyer in this city already told me that. This is the only—"

 "I don't care." His voice cracked, rose. "I don't care if I spend the rest of my life in a cell. Do you understand me? I would rather rot in prison than have you anywhere near that family."

 "You'd rather I lose you completely?"

 "I'd rather lose everything than lose you the way they take people." His hands were shaking against the table, cuffed together, and he leaned forward as far as the chain would let him. "You don't know what they are, Seraphine. You don't know what that name means."

 "Then tell me." My voice came out sharper than I meant it. "Tell me what it means. Because right now I'm the one standing in that lobby with nobody explaining anything to me, and you're the one who flinched the second I said Vivian Cole's name, and I need you to actually talk to me instead of just being scared at me."

 He opened his mouth. Closed it. I watched him fight with something behind his eyes, some decision he'd apparently made a long time ago and was now regretting.

 "Dad."

 "There are things I never told you." His voice dropped so low I had to lean in to hear it. "Things about your mother. About before you were born. I thought I could keep it buried. I thought if I never said his name again it would just—stay in the past, where it belonged."

 "Whose name?"

 "Seraphine, listen to me. Whatever Valen Ravaryn offered you, it isn't a kindness. That family doesn't give things away. They collect people. They collected—" He stopped himself so hard it looked physically painful, like biting down on his own tongue.

 "They collected who, Dad?"

 "I can't." He shook his head, fast, like he could shake the words back down. "Not here. Not like this. If I tell you now, in this room, with guards standing right there—"

 "Time's up," one of them said, stepping forward like he'd been waiting for an excuse.

 "No—wait, please, just give us five more minutes—" I was already standing, reaching for him like reaching would slow anything down.

 "Seraphine, promise me." He was being pulled up out of the chair, and his voice cracked wide open, all the control gone out of it. "Promise me you won't sign anything. Promise me you'll walk away and let me deal with this myself."

 "I can't promise that."

 "You have to—"

 "I can't lose you, Dad. I can't." My own voice broke on it, ugly and loud in a room that wasn't built for anything but efficiency. "I already lost Mom. I'm not doing it again. I'm not."

 They were dragging him toward the door now, and he twisted back one last time, and whatever composure he had left just came apart.

 "Whatever happens," he shouted, his voice bouncing off the cinderblock walls, "never trust the Ravaryns. Do you hear me? Never trust them, Seraphine, no matter what they promise you, no matter what he says to you—"

 "Dad—"

 "Never trust them!"

 The door slammed shut behind him, and the sound of it seemed to hang in the room longer than it should have.

 I stood there in the sudden quiet, my hands pressed against the table, staring at the chair he'd been sitting in like it might still hold some answer he hadn't gotten to give me.

 Never trust the Ravaryns.

 He knew something. He knew something specific, something with a name attached to it, something that had followed him for twenty-some years and finally caught up to both of us in a plastic chair with a table bolted to the floor. And he'd rather take that secret into a prison cell than let me hear it.

 I picked the card back up off the table. Valen Ravaryn, embossed in a font too clean and too expensive for a man who'd just threatened someone's entire future like it was a business proposal.

 I thought about walking away. I really did. I stood in that hallway outside the visitation room for what felt like a long time, turning the card over and over in my fingers, trying to find some other option hidden in the corners of it. Some version of this where I didn't have to choose between the two worst things that had ever happened to me.

 There wasn't one. I'd already spent a whole night calling every attorney I could find, and every single one of them had said the same thing in different words: there is no saving him without this.

 My father wanted me to walk away and let him disappear so I'd be safe. But I'd spent my entire life watching him give up things for me — sleep, money, a version of himself that existed before Mom died — and I wasn't going to let the very last thing he asked of me be the one thing I actually did.

 I called the number on the card before I could talk myself out of it.

 Valen answered on the second ring, like he'd been expecting it exactly this fast.

 "I need paperwork," I said, before he could say anything smug. "Whatever you need me to sign. I want to see it today."

 "Of course." No surprise in his voice at all. He'd known. He'd known before I did, probably, standing in that lobby with his card between two fingers like a man placing a bet he already knew the outcome of. "I'll have everything sent to you within the hour."

 The papers arrived faster than I thought was possible for something that was about to rewrite my entire life. A courier in a black car, a folder thick with legal language I barely understood, a pen that felt too heavy for what it was about to do.

 I read maybe half of it. I signed everywhere there was a flag.

 Valen came to collect the documents himself, standing in my apartment doorway like he owned the air in it, scanning the signature pages with the kind of satisfaction he didn't bother hiding.

 "You've made the right decision," he said.

 "I don't need you to tell me that."

 "No." Something almost like amusement crossed his face. "I don't suppose you do." He tucked the folder under his arm. "The wedding will take place in three days."

 "Three days." My stomach dropped somewhere I hadn't known it could still reach. "That's not enough time to—"

 "It's enough time for what's required." He was already turning to leave, unhurried as ever, like my entire life rearranging itself around his schedule was the most ordinary thing in the world to him. Then he paused in the doorway, and glanced back at me almost as an afterthought.

 "I should mention," he said, "my son hasn't been informed yet."

 I stared at him. "What do you mean he hasn't been informed?"

 "I mean exactly what I said." He straightened his cuff, unbothered, like he was talking about a dinner reservation instead of a man's entire future. "Caius doesn't yet know he's getting married.”