Page 58 of Avaritia
How rude. I mean, I wasn’t. Sometimes, I did yoga to make myself feel better about the utter neglect I subjected my body to, but it brought me no joy.
Some humans ran actual marathons, some humans had Real Housewives marathons. The universe required balance.
“But I think we’ve learned a lesson from this experience, hm?” Sebastian continued. Had he always been this condescending? How had I not seen it? “Once we’re back home, you can focus fully on wedding planning while I’m at work. Maybe make an appointment to have that birth control removed,” he added with a wink.
I laughed weakly. What the actual fuck was happening? How far was he willing to take this lie? I’d been hoping Sebastian would underestimate me, but it appeared I’d vastly underestimated him.
“Did your mom come with you?” I asked, attempting to look around him to the door. It wasn’t like there was no precedent for it. Deb had shown up at the hospital with him when my appendix had burst, grumbling about what an inconvenience the whole thing was and how it never would have happened if I didn’t consume seed oils like she was always telling me not to.
Sebastian swallowed thickly, looking down at his shiny lawyer shoes. “She passed. Six months ago.”
God damn it. Did I have to act like I missed her? I wasn’t sure I could pull that off. Meryl Streep couldn’t have made that performance convincing.
“Oh. I’m sorry. I don’t… remember that.”
Sebastian smiled sympathetically. “No, of course not. We’ll have to figure out where your memory issues begin. It seems like… a few years ago.”
“Years? Really?” I asked, hoping I looked wide-eyed and unnerved, when mostly I was amazed at the gall of this asshole.
“We’ll figure it out, Eri. Don’t worry,” he added hurriedly. Eri. God, it had been a full decade since anyone had called me that. “I imagine you’re feeling quite conflicted hearing about Mom’s passing. She, um, wasn’t very good to you. Actually, a lot of my relationships have changed in the past few months. I didn’t realize how much control she’d had over the way people saw me.”
No fucking kidding.
“Did my relationships with people change too?” I asked, semi enjoying this now I was getting into character. It was like I was LARPing an alternate timeline version of my own life.
Sebastian stammered slightly before finding an answer. “Um, well, I guess you haven’t been as involved with the Hunters for a while—which was Mom’s fault—but you can come back now. Things have been a little up in the air recently, but they’ll welcome you back. The Denver Council branch is here—they’re excited to bring you home. Where you belong. Finally. And that’s what I want too. Obviously. Since we’re engaged.”
He was beet red in the face now, and my entertainment with this whole farce increased astronomically. It was a good thing Sebastian was a deskbound property lawyer; he’d get eaten alive in a courtroom.
“Of course you want me home, we’re in love,” I replied with a saccharine sweet smile. “I’m just confused about why I went hiking by myself. And why I haven’t been involved with the Hunters. And what did you mean by things are ‘up in the air’?”
“I shouldn’t have mentioned that. You’re recovering. You don’t need to be thinking about all that stuff right now.” He’d shored himself up, and I doubted he was going to be sloppy enough to make another slip anytime soon.
Which meant there was no more benefit to be had from this conversation. I needed to reassess.
“I’m so tired,” I whispered, letting my head loll weakly back onto the pillow.
“Of course.” Sebastian straightened. “You’re on a lot of painkillers, you need to rest. I’m staying at a motel just around the corner. Why don’t I come back in a few hours? Technically, I’m still working while I’m here…”
“Sounds good.” I plastered on a fake smile, trying to imagine Theon ever willingly leaving me while I was lying in a hospital bed, drugged up to my eyeballs on pain meds, and coming up short.
Sebastian stood up with a charming, soulless smile, leaning over to press his papery dry lips to my forehead. If there’d been any real food in my stomach, I’d have probably thrown up.
“I know you’re hurting right now, Verity, and I wish I could take that all away. But this is a new beginning for us, okay? We’re going to do things differently this time. We’re going to be so happy. Letting you go… on that hiking trip, I mean”—he cleared his throat—“was the worst thing that ever happened to me. I’ve lived with so much regret ever since. But everything is going to be perfect from now on, okay? I love you so much. I always have.”
With one last, alarmingly earnest smile, he let himself out of the room, leaving me alone.
And I realized that in all the worst-case scenarios I’d been brainstorming about his motives, I’d left out one particularly horrifying one.
Sebastian might actually want me back. He might actually love me, or at least think he did. His sincerity might have been real. Without the overbearing mother in his ear telling him that her precious baby boy could do better, I was suddenly not a bad option. It probably helped that he thought I had a football field-sized hole in my memories, that he could populate with whatever he wanted me to believe was real.
Not that I needed the warning bells and flashing neon light screaming ‘he doesn’t really love you’ on repeat—I already knew that. I knew what love was. I loved Theon. There was absolutely no universe where filling his head with false memories to suit my purposes was an acceptable option, let alone the go-to.
Fuck Sebastian and his finished basement. I had a life to get back to in the shadow realm. A cat who depended on me. A husband—sort of—who I needed to feed with my super-powered vagina and stop from plotting a revolution. I was busy.
Now, I just needed to figure out how the hell I was going to get back home, and the sneakier the better, because this unemployed shadow duchess sure as shit didn’t have health insurance, and I suspected being airlifted out of a canyon wasn’t cheap.
This was bullshit. I didn’t want to lie here like a damsel in distress, hoping Astrid would figure out a way to rescue me. I’d been nothing but a liability since I arrived in the shadow realm, and I was planning on not continuing to be a liability when I got back there. The least I could do was figure this bit out on my own.