Deception (41 page)

“What McEntire incident?” I ask.

“Commander Chase from Baalboden was in town for his annual state visit, and things were already tense because he and James Rowan didn’t like each other much. There were areas of the Division for Technological Advancement that literally went into a lockdown while the Commander was visiting because James Rowan was afraid of spies and treason. A day after the Baalboden people left, it was reported that Marcus McEntire’s newborn son had disappeared. Marcus claimed that the boy died, but he couldn’t produce a body. Said he’d already buried the boy. Everyone suspected that the Commander took the baby as a way to gain access to the Division for Technological Advancement, since Marcus ran the entire operation. But when years passed and nothing happened, people forgot about it or decided maybe Marcus was telling the truth. Maybe little Logan died.”

I look at Jeremiah. “This is a coincidence. I was born and raised in Baalboden. My father died before I was born. Tell him.”

He takes a deep breath and says, “I can see the resemblance, but as far as I know Logan is right—he’s from Baalboden.”

Darius snorts. “Look at his
eyes
. Those are Marcus’s eyes, and you know it. He’s the right age, has the right name, and is the spitting image of his mother except for having his father’s eyes. I don’t believe in coincidences.” He turns to me. “Who raised you?”

The world tilts beneath my feet, and I grab the back of the nearest chair to steady myself. “My mother. She told me my father died. She was already pregnant, and he died. She wasn’t a liar.”

“She wasn’t your mother, either.” Darius shakes his head, and I can’t tear my gaze away from his shock of red hair, which quivers with his every movement.

My pulse is a deafening hammer pounding at my head. “This is ridiculous.”

“Nineteen years ago, the Commander took his annual trip to Rowansmark. I wasn’t head groom yet, so I stayed behind. But that year, my job changed.” Jeremiah looks in my eyes. “That year, the Commander returned home, accused the few who’d accompanied him on the trip of treason, and executed them immediately. That’s how I became head groom.”

“It’s not like executing people without cause is something the Commander never did. It doesn’t mean he was trying to cover up a kidnapping,” I say, because someone has to reach for logic and reason. “My mother—”

“Your mother had recently lost her husband and hadn’t been assigned a new Protector yet. She’d been grieving inside her home for several months, unseen by all but the older neighbor who checked on her sometimes and brought her food. When she reappeared, she had you. Everyone assumed she’d been in confinement due to pregnancy. But I don’t know, Logan.” Jeremiah’s eyes lock on mine. “I never had cause to think about it before now, but you
do
look a lot like Julia McEntire. She used to make it a point to visit the Baalboden staff when the Commander visited Rowansmark. At least she did for a few years. I never knew why she bothered, but maybe she was looking for you. You’re the right age, the right name . . . plus the Commander always treated you like you didn’t belong in his city. Darius is right. That’s too big of a coincidence.”

Something hot and vicious scrapes my thoughts, begging me to call him a liar. Demanding that I make him stop. That I keep the few precious memories I have of my mother—the only mother I ever knew—sacred. Untouched by this . . . travesty.

This truth.

The Commander’s last words, hurled at me as he took the fake Rowansmark technology from my hands and sentenced me to death, ring with unforgiving clarity in my memory.
“You’ve outlived your usefulness to me. To all of Baalboden. It’s been nineteen years of waiting for my investment to pay off, and I can’t wait to rid my city of the stench of you.”

No wonder I was ostracized for a crime I didn’t commit. Treated like a pariah. Like I alone was unworthy of Baalboden’s protection. To the Commander, I was nothing but an investment. An interloper he couldn’t wait to be rid of.

“Why?” The word falls into the space between us, fraught with betrayal.

The sympathy on Jeremiah’s face is like salt on a wound. My mother, with her infectious laughter and her single-minded dedication to keeping me safe, even if it meant risking her life. My mother, whose necklace I’d passed on to Rachel as a symbol that she was now my family.

My mother, the liar. The grand pretender building a life with a child she had no right to call her own.

“Why let me keep my real name?” I have to push the words past my lips.

Jeremiah shrugs. “Your mother’s surname was Billings, but she told everyone McEntire was your middle name, and that’s all we ever heard you called. I guess after she died, and you spent years as an outcast, none of us remembered to attach Billings to the end of your name anymore.”

“And why did being Logan McEntire of Rowansmark make me worth kidnapping?”

Darius says, “Marcus is a senior member of Rowansmark’s military council and heads the Division for Technological Advancement. He’s a brilliant scientist. Second to none.”

“Logan is brilliant, too,” Jeremiah says quickly.

I turn away. I don’t want to hear myself compared to this man I feel nothing for.

“Nineteen years ago, Marcus was working on an invention that would call and control the creature you call the Cursed One. Once completed, the invention would give James Rowan unbridled power, something the Commander could never allow,” Darius says.

I grab a quill from the table. Crushing it in my hand, I let its sharp edge press against my skin as something in me, some final piece that survived the heartbreak of my mother’s death, the terrible loss of Oliver and Jared, and the horror of watching Baalboden burn, shatters.

“Marcus was a loyal man living in a city-state that values patriotism and self-sacrifice above all else,” Darius says. “Bribery wouldn’t work. Threats against his life wouldn’t either. He’d fall on his sword in the grand Rowansmark tradition before dishonoring his leader by giving the technology to Baalboden.”

“So the Commander found his weakness.” My voice is a liar steadfastly refusing to reveal the wreckage beneath my skin. I’m not my mother’s son. Not my father’s either. Not really. I’m the ultimate pawn in a game that started long before I was born.

“We all figured the Commander struck a deal—your life in exchange for the completed invention. It’s not like Marcus could go to James Rowan for help. In Rowansmark, loyalty and patriotism to the city-state come before individual lives. James Rowan wouldn’t have attacked Baalboden to rescue you, and he would’ve immediately removed Marcus from the Division of Technological Advancement, thereby ensuring Marcus could never betray his city by trading technology for you—”

“He had to agree.” I know what it’s like to have my back against the wall because the Commander holds all the cards. A single, tenuous thread of connection unravels out of the tapestry of lies I was fed as a boy and stretches toward the man who spent nineteen years working on an invention meant to ransom my life.

“No wonder our people are being murdered in some twisted example of Rowansmark pain atonement,” Jeremiah says, and I silently curse him as Darius’s eyes grow large. That’s not a piece of information I wanted Lankenshire to have. “Remember that huge bounty Rowansmark put on Jared Adams because they thought he stole something from them?”

“Kind of hard to forget something like that when I’m in love with his daughter.” I draw myself up and stand straight and tall, like finding out my entire life was a lie means nothing to me.

“I assume Marcus gave the device to Jared thinking the Commander would then let you return home. But obviously James Rowan learned that the device was missing. That would be a stain on Marcus’s honor. He could only remove the stain by returning the device and then surviving his pain atonement.”

“You’re suggesting that my”—I can’t bring myself to call him my father—“that Marcus is the one who slit our guards’ throats, started the fires, and poisoned our people. . . .” I shake my head. “Why? Why work so hard to save me only to turn around and try to destroy me? It makes no sense.”

“Maybe to him it does,” Darius says. The avid interest in his voice turns my stomach. This might be an interesting family drama to him, but this is my
life
lying in pieces all around me.

Jeremiah speaks slowly, as if feeling his way carefully through each thought. “He must have dedicated himself to ransoming you, his son. Nine years after the Commander took you, we heard that your mother had committed suicide. He must have dreamed of a life with you. Introducing you to Rowansmark society. Telling others the glorious tale of how he defeated the Commander at his own game and rescued his son at the same time. I’m sure he was tracking the device. It’s what you would do, isn’t it?”

I nod.

“But then Jared didn’t deliver the package. And someone in the Department for Technological Advancement realized the device was missing. Marcus must have thought all was lost. Rowansmark would recover the package and the Commander would make good on his threat and kill you for Marcus’s failure.”

“Only Rachel and I got to the device first,” I say, and my heart thuds heavily against my rib cage as I realize the truth. Somewhere along the journey back to Baalboden, my father must’ve caught up to us and watched us from the shadows. The knowledge is a violation—a forcible unveiling of moments I thought were mine alone.

“And the first thing you did with the invention was bring it back to the Commander.” Jeremiah’s voice holds no condemnation, but I flinch anyway.

“We never planned to give it to him! We built a fake. We wanted to destroy the Commander’s hold on Baalboden.”

“But from the outside, it must’ve looked like you’d been raised to be the Commander’s son instead of Marcus’s. And a Rowansmark man wouldn’t question signs of absolute loyalty and patriotism.”

I stare at Jeremiah as sick horror crawls up the back of my throat. “And you think my father is the kind of man who would use that assumption as an excuse to murder innocent people?”

“No, and I don’t think it’s your father who’s doing it. Not directly. I’d recognize him if I saw him, and he isn’t here.”

“So all we really know is that someone from Baalboden is helping someone from Rowansmark deliver a sentence of pain atonement against me. Which is exactly what we knew before I walked into the room. We’re back at the beginning,” I say. Without any additional information, everything we’re discussing is speculation anyway. I need facts. Plausible theories. I need to look every single Baalboden survivor in the eye and search for a flicker of secret knowledge that shouldn’t be there.

And I need to find a way to accept the fact that the heartbreaking loss and destruction we’ve suffered over the last six weeks is truly because of who I am and what I’ve done. I don’t know how to wrap my mind around that without it crushing me, but I must.

But first, I need Rachel. With the foundation I’ve always depended on suddenly cracking beneath my feet, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather be than by her side. She might not be able to make any more sense of this than I can, but her blunt honesty and absolute love for me will go a long way toward leading me to solid ground again.

“I need those maps,” I say. “Tonight.”

Turning on my heel, I leave the room before either of them can say a word.

Chapter Forty-Nine

RACHEL

I
press the fingernails of my left hand against my right forearm. Thin white crescents on blackened crimson. Somewhere beneath this wound—beneath my skin—redemption flows. I just have to dig deep enough to find it.

My hands shake. My fingertips are colorless and cold.

Guilty.

Alone.

Broken.

I strain to feel it. The weight of my crimes. My heartbreak. I want to reverse my choice—take back the part of me that made me human—but I’ve pushed the grief so far away from me, I no longer know how to find it. All that’s left inside of me is silence, dense and absolute. A poison that promised peace but delivered hell. It fills all my secret spaces and pushes at my skin until something, somewhere, has to give.

Gripping the wound with shaking fingers, I slowly slide my nails against the jagged seam of broken flesh. A thin line of crimson wells up. The pain hits a second later, sharp and stinging, and I’m
grateful
.

Finally.

Something real. A tiny piece of the hurt I should be feeling. A small slice of the punishment I know I deserve.

The blood beads together, swells, and plummets down my arm and off my fingertips in shining red drops.

A harsh sob tears through me, choking me with its ferocity, and I slash another line of crimson into the wound.

The pain crawls up my arm, and my tears slide off my face to mingle with my blood on the soft white blanket covering me.

I can feel this. Why can I stand to feel
this
—this small, petty thing—but I can’t stand to feel the loss of Dad and Oliver? The horror of killing Melkin? The still-gaping wound of Sylph’s death?