Sewn & Scarred (The Fated Creations Trilogy #3)

Chapter Fifty-SevenWyott

Chapter Fifty-Seven

Wyott

I t didn’t make sense.

Not that my father was alive at all, not that he was a Vasi, and especially not that he was with Vasier this entire time.

“You need some rest,” Cora said softly as she led me up the stairs to our home, but I only half heard her.

I had to concentrate to understand where I was, what was happening around me. To hear the words of my mate, let alone anyone else.

I felt like my head was underwater. Sounds filtered in through the waves around me and my chest tightened from my inability to breathe.

It didn’t make any sense.

“You need to change,” she said, and I felt her pat at my pants, and shake off the sand that was there.

She sat me at a chair in the dining room—when had we walked into the house?—and left the room.

I saw him die.

Which was why when I looked to Maddox and begged him to tell me the truth, I was convinced that he would laugh and shake his head. That he would say that of course I was wrong. That of course that man wasn’t my father, just another man with the same hair color as me. That my mind was playing tricks on me, that my mind wanted my father alive so badly—Vasi or not—that it took my father’s face and plastered it onto that Vasi’s, if only to see my father one last time.

But when Maddox had gone silent, when his face fell and he shook his head, I knew. I knew that I had been wrong, but not about whether that man was my father.

That he ever died in the first place.

And my mind had played a trick on me, but it wasn’t today. It was all those decades ago when I hid behind that boulder, watching the Vasi kill all the Kova we’d traveled with.

I had watched as they ripped heads from shoulders and tore hearts from chests.

And I had watched when they’d saved my father for last, when they set him on his knees so that he faced me. I thought I could see clearly.

But the truth was that Vasier had been standing half between us. His back was to me, as he covered my view of my father’s body, so I could only see his cringing face.

I played the memory over in my head even though it hurt. And I was sure that I would remember seeing Vasier’s hand plunge into my father’s chest, hear his heart ripped out and the final beat of it in Vasier’s hand.

But I didn’t.

If I truly focused, watched it unfold as I had back then, the truth was that I only saw Vasier reach forward, and my father jolt back, a cry on his lips.

But then Vasier paused, and I’d always assumed it was torture. It was when he taunted my father, when he boasted about killing my mother, after all. But maybe it was something else, too. Because then he looked down at my father, lowered his voice, and said something to him that I couldn’t hear over the race of my own heart in my chest and the chatter of the other Vasi as they cleaned up the Kova bodies.

Then Vasier pulled away, and my father fell to his side.

But I’d never seen his heart on the grass, nor in Vasier’s hand.

Because that was when Vasier turned toward me, when I hid behind the boulder and he came to give me the message for Kovarrin.

And when Vasier walked away from me, when I peeked over the top of the boulder again, I saw the Vasi dragging my father’s body, leaving the other Kova behind.

I’d always wondered, in the back of my mind, why they’d bothered to take his dead body and not the others, but I had assumed it was to torture Kovarrin.

Now, the truth was clear.

He took my father’s body because he wasn’t dead. Vasier wanted him to become a Vasi, so that my father would give him all the inside information on Kovarrin, on Rominia, without Kovarrin knowing that the information would be shared.

My father never died, and I never saw him die.

I put myself back there now, felt the way my heart and thoughts raced. I’d been a little boy. I was so scared—of losing my father, the only parent I had left, and of dying myself—that my fear blinded me. Shaded my perception until I saw Vasier reach for my father’s chest, heard his hand plunge through.

My mind had filled in the gaps of my greatest fear, as Vasier must have pulled his hand free and left my father’s heart intact.

And all these years, I’d been lost in my grief over it. When all these years, I should’ve fought to get him back.

I should have paid more attention.

I should have known.