The first thing he felt when he saw his mother was not relief.

It was betrayal. It rose inside him like a blade twisting slowly between his ribs, sharp and suffocating, until the air in his lungs felt too thin to breathe. For years—most of his life—he had carried the certainty of her death like a scar carved deep into bone. He had imagined her grave a thousand different ways: lonely hillsides swept by wind, weathered stone worn smooth by rain, a name he had never been able to say aloud without feeling the ground shift beneath him.

He had mourned her.

Forgiven her for leaving him behind in a world that had turned cruel the moment the rebellion failed.

And now she stood before him. Alive.

The chamber on Hedotis was warm with sea air drifting through the open windows, the distant crash of waves against the cliffs filling the silence that stretched between them. Sunlight spilled across the stone floor, gilding the woman standing only a few paces away—her dark hair threaded with silver now, her posture calm in a way that suggested years untouched by the war that had shaped him.

Xaden felt the shadows in the room stir, restless things drawn to the violent storm unraveling in his chest.

She looked older, yes. Time had softened some of the sharpness of her features, but there was no mistaking the woman who had once held his hand when he was a boy too young to understand the weight of the world waiting for him.

The woman who had left him behind.

“You’re alive,” he said at last, the words dragging from his throat with a roughness that surprised even him. His voice sounded unfamiliar—lower, edged with something dangerously close to breaking.

She didn’t answer. That silence hurt worse than any blade.

Because while he had been growing into the man standing here—fighting, surviving, watching the kingdom execute the children of rebels—she had been somewhere else entirely.

Living. Breathing. Free.

Anger rose slowly beneath the grief, thick and bitter.

“Do you have any idea,” Xaden said quietly, his gaze locking onto hers with a steadiness that masked the chaos inside him, “what it’s like to bury your mother when you’re barely old enough to remember the sound of her voice?”

The shadows pulsed faintly against the stone walls.

“You let me believe you were dead.”

Each word landed heavier than the last, carrying the weight of every brutal year he had survived without her.

Before she could answer, the door behind her creaked open. Soft footsteps crossed the room.

Xaden barely noticed the movement at first, too consumed by the storm unraveling through his veins.

Then the girl stepped into the sunlight. And the world tilted.

She couldn’t have been more than a few years younger than him. Dark hair fell around her shoulders in loose waves, catching the light in the same ink-black shade he had seen reflected in mirrors his entire life. The lines of her face were painfully familiar—the sharp cheekbones, the quiet strength in the set of her jaw. Riorson. There was no mistaking it.

Recognition struck him with a force that stole the breath from his lungs.

His sister. The baby his mother had taken the night she vanished. The child he had long ago mourned alongside her, believing them both lost to the same grave.

She stared at him now with wide, uncertain eyes, confusion flickering across a face that mirrored pieces of his own past so perfectly it made something deep inside him ache.

Of course she had taken her. If his mother had chosen to survive—chosen to build a life far from the war that had devoured everything he loved—then of course she would have carried the baby with her.

But she hadn’t taken him.

The truth of that settled heavily into his chest, colder than the sea wind drifting through the open windows.

Xaden looked between them—between the mother who had abandoned him and the sister who had grown up in the life he had been denied—and felt the fracture inside his heart deepen.

All those years believing he had lost them.

When the truth was so much worse.

They had simply left him behind.