Chapter Fifty Two
“Slade.” I called again, but there was no response. Of course, when I needed him the most, he chose to play a disappearing scheme on me. I was not going to have that.” Would you prefer I beg?”
This felt stupid; I was alone in my office, calling for my dead father’s ghost, but of course anyone stumbling upon this scene would find it very…unsettling.
“I can tell you need something.” The voice called. Slade was finally here.
“I thought I had finally lost you.”
“You don’t say that like it is a bad thing.”
“I mean, I need answers, but if I could stop seeing your ghost, then that is even better.”
“I should feel sad, but I’ve gotten accustomed to your manner of caring.”
I watched my father, once I feared this man; the whole world feared him. He was a walking, breathing terror, and now he was…nothing. I couldn’t help but feel a little pity for him, even if he had been the one digging his own grave from the very beginning.
“Do you by any means know a man called Logan Dimintri?” I questioned, watching his face pale, which was ironic as he was a ghost. He tried to mask his little slip with a smile, but I had already picked up on that. “So you do know him?”
“I do; he is a family friend.”
“Just a family friend? I mean, I thought he was my half brother.”
“Who told you that?”
“Are you even listening to me? I met Logan,
“You know better than to believe what he says.”
“I do, and that’s exactly why I came to you, hoping to get some type of explanation, but of course I know when you are lying, and you are now.”
“He is right,” Slade said after a moment of silence.
“Right about what exactly? Is it about the fact that he is my half brother or that you aren’t my father?”
“Both.”
“And when were you planning on telling me this?”
“Never. I was never going to tell you this because I accepted you. Your mother was quite the slut, as you already knew. Many years ago, she confirmed she was pregnant, then I had been having doubts about her; I believed I wasn’t the only man she invited to her bed, so when she told me she was pregnant for me, I didn’t believe her; for some reason, I knew it wasn’t mine. I had waited for her to give birth to the child; my plan was to request a test and if the child was not of my blood, then I would have to kill it. I was not ready to raise a weakling and a bastard, but then the test result was out, and just as I had thought, the child wasn’t mine.”
“But you kept me anyway.”
“That’s because the healers detected that you were of an Alpha Bloodline. I knew from the very day you were born that you would be a threat to me and everything I had built, still I kept you. I raised you as my own, and you grew up to be all what I imagined and more.”
“That’s why you weren’t willing to pass me the crown, isn’t it?”
It finally made sense now, I had thought he held onto the crown because he was afraid of letting go and having nothing to his name.
“Yes. I knew that there was a high chance that you wouldn’t be accepted by the goddess, and yet, here you are, the Alpha King, the favored brother.”
“This doesn’t explain how you knew about Logan.”
“Oh, he visited once; he spoke of his brother–you and some other bullcrap. I had offered him some amount of money to shut the fuck up; he didn’t accept it, though, only told me he would be back when the time was right. He never returned, and so there wasn’t an issue.” My father finished with a shrug, like this wasn’t worth the
bother.
