Shade snorted. “That was a ploy to make you both react. But it’s true that Constantine has known my grandmother’s location. Dakota told him, as did I—again, to win his favor. However, he can’t use the information because of where she created the paradigm.”
I smirked. “Yes, the Hell Fae realm isn’t typically fond of visitors. I’ve always wondered how Zen convinced them to allow her to hide there.” She must have engaged in a deal with Lucifer. From what I understood of the old fae, he was fond of those.
Kolstov and Zephyrus looked at me for a moment, then the latter shook his head.
“Okay, so what changed?” Zephyrus demanded. “Why would Constantine choose to act now and not before?”
“The bonds,” Shade whispered. “They didn’t exist before. Not for you. Not for Kolstov. Not like this.”
“She always undid them,” Kolstov replied, his voice gruff. “In my suite.”
“Yes,” Shade confirmed softly, his gaze going to a stunned Aflora. “You carried through with your threat in various ways, sometimes that day, sometimes a few days or weeks later. But it always ended the same way. And it took me seven catastrophic events to realize what you needed. What we needed. And it’s finally done. We’re finally… here.”
Silence fell, all of us consuming that information in our own ways.
I already suspected most of this, had dreamt of many different instances that just felt too real to be fantasy. Aflora detonating… then nothing.
“You never let her finish,” I realized out loud. “That’s why there’s no end.”
“Not exactly,” he replied. “I… I watched her lose herself… and I saw what it would do to her in the end. All those lives taken and destroyed, by her hand…”
“She destroyed herself afterward,” I said, swallowing thickly. “That’s what you foresaw.” Or perhaps not him, but Zen.
He dipped his chin once, confirming. “Every time.”
“I would never… I could never…” Aflora shook her head, looking between us all. “Don’t ever let me do that.”
“We stopped you tonight,” I reminded her. “Which I’m guessing has never happened before.”
“The catalyst for her eruption changed,” Shade said. “Constantine has always found a way to provoke her, but he’s never used Kols.”
“Because Kolstov always sided with Constantine,” I translated.
“Yes,” Shade replied.
Kolstov shook his head adamantly. “I would never side with him.”
“You have and did,” Shade assured him. “Several times. Zeph, too.”
“Bullshit,” Zephyrus retorted.
Shade sighed. “She severed the bonds. Which took a great deal of power. And the experience changed us all in varying ways.”
“Because severing bonds requires sacrifice,” I said, something my father had to know yet never told me. However, it made sense to me now. “It’s soul magic. Undoing it…”
“Hurts,” Shade finished for me. “It hurts. A lot. Which you already know.”
“I never unraveled our bond.”
“But you built a cage around it and blocked yourselves from feeling it,” he replied. “You know what it takes and what it can do.”
I stared at him for a long moment, slowly understanding his statement. “It changes you,” I said, repeating what he’d already said. “Makes you not recognize who you used to be.”
All these years, I thought it was my father’s training that had altered me on a fundamental level. But that wasn’t it at all.
Closing off our link, ignoring half of my spirit, was what morphed me into a darker person with a desire for vengeance. Experience helped, too, but it went so much deeper than that.
“It’s like killing off half of your soul,” I breathed.