Chapter 53: Red Through Blue (1)
Elliot’s POV
“Who am I, if not myself?”
–– Elliot Starfall
My gaze moves—tight, controlled—like I’m bound by invisible strings. A marionette. I follow the stoic expressions of the figures beside me. They wear the colors of their kind: blues. Noble. Untouchable. I feel the stirrings of anger, but I know it doesn’t come from my heart—not mine. Not me. It’s something foreign. Not a flame that burns from within, but one fed from the outside, stoked by invisible hands.
It isn’t my hatred. It’s this body’s.
There’s a tension here that doesn’t belong to me, a barely restrained frustration humming just beneath the surface. Recognition—or the lack of it. Nervousness, too, laced with caution as the man at the head of the table stares at me. No—at Aston. The name makes sense now. The hanged man from my vision. The body I’ve been trapped inside.
The man—my supposed father—sits tall under the golden light of ornate chandeliers, his sand-colored beard gleaming like crushed coins. Calmly, mechanically, he slices into his meat—blue and raw—and lifts a piece to his mouth. The juice runs down his lips, staining them the color of his blood.
“How has your recent transfer of the reds in your possession been?” he asks.
The words roll out with such casual cruelty I nearly forget to breathe.