Chapter 179: A Bite Worth Remembering
"Well, well. It seems our little healer has grown some fangs."
The voice was dry, amused, and way too calm for someone who had just pulled off a full-on high-stakes kidnapping. Cherion didn’t answer. Honestly? He couldn’t. He was too busy staring at the woman across from him with a face that basically screamed "Are you serious right now?" in at least three different languages.
He was in a bedroom. Not a dungeon. Not a torture room. Just... a bedroom that smelled faintly like pressed lavender and expensive, slightly aggressive gin. This was Marielle’s territory. The same person who had just dragged him through a dark hallway like he weighed nothing more than a sack of potatoes.
Cherion’s jaw was still a bit sore from the effort of clamping down on her hand earlier. He looked down and saw it, an angry half-circle of teeth marks imprinted deep into the back of Marielle’s pale hand. It looked painful. It looked like it should be gushing blood, and yet somehow, the skin was holding together
"I’m going to heal that," Cherion muttered, his voice still shaky from the adrenaline spike. He reached out, his fingers already beginning to tingle with that familiar golden glow.
"Don’t you dare," Marielle snapped, though she was grinning. She snatched her hand away, tucking it behind her head as she leaned back against a vanity. "This is a battle scar, Cherion. My first one earned from a ’harmless’ healer. I’m going to keep it. It’s a point of pride, really."
"Pride? Are you insane?" Cherion exploded, his heart finally deciding to slow down from a frantic gallop to a heavy trot. He shoved a stray lock of hair out of his face. "Just what the hell were you thinking? Do you want me to die of a heart attack? Because that’s literally how people die. You can’t just snatch someone in the middle of a dark hallway when they’re already on edge!"
He paced a small circle on the plush rug. This was the second time he’d been hauled off against his will since arriving in this place, and frankly, the novelty had fully expired. It wasn’t funny. It wasn’t some quirky northern tradition. It was just terrifying.
Marielle let out a bark of a laugh, reaching for a crystal decanter on her nightstand. "Seeing how you nearly took my hand off and kicked my shins into pulp back there, I’d say your heart is doing just fine. You’ve got more fight in you than half the guards downstairs."
"You don’t know that," Cherion huffed, feeling a bit of his dignity return now that he knew he wasn’t about to be gutted. "Youngsters these days have heart attacks all the time. Stress is a silent killer! I could have just dropped dead and then who would fix your brother’s curse?"
He let out a long, exhausted breath and dropped into a chair that looked way too expensive for someone currently emotionally disheveled. Under all the irritation, a wave of relief hit him. Okay. So not an assassin. Good.
Actually... Now that his brain was back online, he realized it had been a while since anyone tried to do anything to him. Ever since that night, when he saw Zarius in full terrifying wolf mode for the very first time, standing in the middle of a literal carpet of corpses, the assassination attempts had kind of... stopped, according to Flio, anyway. Maybe those people gave up. Or maybe they decided Zarius’s "condition" would take care of things for them. Or more likely, they just couldn’t get past the walking fortress known as Elios.
Marielle’s expression softened, just a fraction. She poured a generous measure of the amber liquid into a glass and sighed. "I apologize for the theatrics. Truly. But I couldn’t let you go to him. Not while he’s... like that."
Cherion glanced at the teapot Marielle had completely ignored. He grabbed it instead, pouring himself something floral and calming while she took a big swallow of alcohol.
"He looked so sad, Marielle," Cherion said quietly, the image of Zarius standing before that portrait burned into his mind. "The anniversary is in three days, right? I mean...of course he misses them.."
Marielle paused, her glass halfway to her lips. She let out a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. She gestured with her glass toward him in a little toast. "I see you’ve been doing your homework. You know about the date."
Cherion nodded, blowing on his tea. "Ezek mentioned it."
Marielle took a seat opposite him. The playful sisterly mask kinda disintegrated. Her eyes, usually that pretty violet, went... weird. Darker. Not even the nice kind of dark, more like someone dumped mud into the color and stirred.
"’Miss’ is a very generous word, Cherion. It implies there’s a void left by someone worth keeping."
Cherion paused, his cup hovering inches from his face. "What do you mean? If it’s not missing them, then what is it?"
"Reminiscing," she answered. "But not the kind people do over fond memories. It’s more like... a soldier studying the terrain of a battlefield where he almost lost everything. If I were him, I wouldn’t miss those two if they were the last souls in the afterlife. In fact, I hope the ground is heavy on them."
Ooohhh...okay?
In every story he’d ever read back in his old life, the so-called "Villain" usually came with one of two backstories. Like, there was a pattern. A very obvious pattern. Either, option one, you get the tragic, noble parents who died too early, leaving behind some heartbreaking legacy and a kid who spends the rest of his life asking why them, why so soon, why is life like this, very dramatic, very emotional.
Or, option two. The parents were just... terrible. Like, not even in a fun, complex way. Just straight-up awful people.
He glanced at Marielle, who was suddenly way more into her drink than before. And then there were her eyes. Yeah... No need to overthink it. Definitely the second one.
"They weren’t... good parents, were they?" Cherion asked, a little awkward. But still, he needed to hear it out loud. Needed to know just how bad it actually was, where the line was, if there even was a line.
Marielle’s grip on her glass tightened until he thought the crystal might actually shatter. "Good? My father didn’t see a son when he looked at my brother. He saw a tool. An extension of his own pride that he could sharpen or break at his whim. And my mother..." She trailed off, a hollow smile ghosting her lips. "She was the one who handed him the whetstone."
"What happened, Marielle?" Cherion asked, leaning forward. His voice was soft, devoid of its earlier snark. "I mean... If you don’t mind me asking. If it’s too much, you don’t have to."
Marielle stared into her drink for a long time. The only sound in the room was the occasional pop of the dying fire in the fireplace and the wind howling against the stones of the tower. She looked older in this light. Smaller.
"They tried to kill him, Cherion," she said quietly. "Our parents tried to kill their own son."