“Alexander has it all,” Gerard said. “It’s hard to explain what you were like as a child, my boy. You were so…so very…”
“Golden,” I muttered as my stomach heaved, thick and queasy.
“Yes!” Gerard nodded emphatically. “He was—he still is—so golden!”
Alex glanced down, as if trying to spot some sort of difference between him and us.
“Golden and strong and resilient. I created the perfect specimen—a mind full of kindness and infinite capacity, a heart of goodness and love, a body of persistence and power. I created a better god than any that reside in the Sanctum!”
Alex looked horrified. “Father!”
Gerard’s blasphemy echoed sharply in the room, sending a shiver down my spine. I could hear Kosamaras as clearly as if she’d just whispered into the curve of my ear.
You and that boy will create things, terrible things. Things terrible enough to bring down even the gods.
I thought back to only hours before, when Alex and I hadbeen nothing more than a tangle of limbs and ravenous hungers, gasping, grasping, and crying out with need and ecstasy. Desires filled. Appetites sated. My mouth now tasted of ash.
She’d meant Viktor.
Not Alex.
Not Alex, who had no trace of power within him.
Not Alex, who was warm and mine and so very human.
Pontusplease,not Alex.
Alex held up his hand, studying its lines, as if they might show him exactly who he was. “But…I can’t do anything like my brothers do. What power am I meant to have?”
Gerard glanced at his legs meaningfully.
“What?”
“You lived,” he whispered breathlessly. “You don’t remember that day but…haven’t you ever wondered how far you fell?”
“A handful of stairs, only two or three. Mother said I just landed wrong, so very wrong and—”
Gerard shook his head. “Alexander, you went over the balcony.”
Alex blinked in disbelief. “That’s not possible. That’s at least—”
“Forty feet. Forty-two, actually. I measured it myself. Forty-two feet onto the marble floor below. I saw it happen. You were like a meteor plummeting to earth. We had to cut away the section where you landed. It had smashed to bits.”
“The Laurent crest,” he murmured with understanding.
I recalled the rose-gold chips that made up the large mosaic in the entryway. It stood out starkly from the cool gray marble, as if it hadn’t been part of the original design.
It hadn’t.
“We couldn’t find any stone that matched just right, so I toldthe contractor to make something beautiful in its place. Every time I walk over that crest, I’m reminded that my son is alive. Wonderfully,impossiblyalive. Because of me. Because of what I did.” He swallowed, beaming with pride. “I created a god. An immortal.”
The air in the room had taken on a hushed, reverent quality.
“And what of Julien and Viktor?” I asked, daring to break it. “What did you create there?”
Gerard had the decency to look away, ashamed. “Something different entirely, I’m afraid.”
“Different?” Alex whispered skeptically.
