Naevia is off the divan the instant they enter the parlor, descending on Selah with a sharp cry of relief. For a brief moment, Arran can appreciate that she must have been terrified to know that her daughter was missing. Certainly he had been.
It’s too soon, the voice had said, the one in the back of his mind, ridiculously. Too soon for the cold blue anger that came with the letter to tell him that Alexander Kleios was dead. Not Selah, said the voice. Not this again.
But then Naevia turns her gaze on him and there’s nothing there but fury. “What were you thinking?” she snaps. “She could have been killed.”
“Well, she wasn’t,” he snaps right back, to his own surprise as much as anyone else’s. “She was never in danger. Just running off in her own daydreams like she always does.”
“You should have come directly to me.”
“Linet and I had it handled.”
Naevia laughs, but there’s no mirth in it. “And what a fine job you did. That fool sentry let her charge, the Imperial Historian, disappear from her sight. That is dereliction of duty. That is failure of the highest degree. At least she had the decency to find me and own up to it eventually.” This is news. Arran feels himself go cold and stiff. But Naevia isn’t done. “You, on the other hand . . . I thought you knew better.”
“Mima—”
“Be quiet, Selah.”
“Mima.”
“I’ll deal with you later.”
“No,” says Selah, and pulls away from her vise grip. “You’ll deal with me now. Because, like it or not, daughter or not, I’m also your paterfamilias.”
Pulling rank on him is one thing. Pulling it on her mother is another entirely. Arran’s brows shoot upward, but Naevia’s face betrays nothing at all. “Very well, then,” she says, low and calm, and he wonders if Selah can sense the danger she’s wading into. He doubts it. “Paterfamilias. What do you have to say for yourself?”
Selah glances at him, just for a moment, before squaring back to her mother. “I’m sorry for worrying you,” she says, the ghost of some impassive, authoritative thing taking over. “It was irresponsible of me, given the circumstances. But Arran isn’t my keeper, and I’ll thank you to keep your tone civil. Your anger’s with me, not with him.”
If she actually thinks that, she’s more naive than even Arran realized. He’d find it sweet, if he weren’t too busy being angry.
Mouth quirking with the unsaid, Naevia looks like she wants to laugh again. “Selah,” she says instead. “You may be head of the familia now, but you will always be my daughter. I will never stop worrying about you.”
“Fine,” says Selah, with a cool clarity to match Naevia’s. “You’re entitled to your feelings. But you’re not entitled to take them out on people who don’t deserve them. And you’re not entitled to have me followed anymore. No more curfews. No more bodyguards.”
“Your father’s assassin is still at—”
“I will tell you where I’m going. And that will be enough.”
For a moment he thinks Naevia is going to slap her. She doesn’t, but he can see the pain of struggle behind the decision. Nothing is more important to her than familia, and the structure it draws around their lives. Nothing. Not even, apparently, her own pride in the face of her only child’s newfound power trip. So he watches her struggle, and watches her curl her lip, and watches as at last she curtly nods.
He should leave, if he has any sense of self-preservation, now Selah’s made him so firmly the villain of Naevia’s night. But anger is still bubbling in his spleen, and they aren’t finished here. Whatever Selah may think, he knows who the real authority is in this house.
“What about Linet?” he makes himself ask.
There’s annoyance in Naevia’s face when she turns back to him, but surprise is writ there, too. “Who?”
“The sentry.”
“What about her?”
His nostrils flare. “Where is she?”
“The Institute Civitatem, of course.” She shrugs, and the bottom drops out from his stomach. “I sent her back.”
Enyo Dietrik had told him, once, about what passes for reeducation in the civic centers, and the floggings and the rapes don’t even begin to cover it. Humiliation. Sterilization. Lack of food, lack of sleep. Medical experiments. Servae who come out of reeducation are never fit for much more than unskilled labor, the barest hint of who they once were and who they might have become. He hadn’t asked her how she knew this, but her father is a praetorian prefect at the Ministerium of Defense, and the way her face had gone hollow and gray was enough to know that it was true.
So the bottom drops out from his stomach, but it’s Selah who sucks in a sharp breath. “Mima, you didn’t.”
“Of course I did. A sentry who fumbles her duties that badly has no place in this house.”
Selah says nothing to that, just flits her gaze over to him, and Arran finds no satisfaction whatsoever in the low horror he finds there behind her eyes. He shouldn’t have had to tell her. She should have already known.
Then the horror shutters, giving way to something dull and blank, and without so much as a word Selah turns on her heel and leaves the room.
He really, really should leave, too.
“You have to bring her back,” he grits out instead.
Naevia looks unimpressed. “I don’t have to do—”
“Tell them it was a misunderstanding.” A muscle is working in his jaw, and he doesn’t care that his voice is steadily rising, on the brink of crossing the tenuous line he’s never dared approach.
Arran has never raised his voice at her before. She’s his stepmother, yes, but that doesn’t mean any actual parenting was ever hers to deal with. That was on Dad, or Gil. She took his monkey antics in stride when he was a kid, and more often than not ended up on his side during stupid arguments over new plays or the local clavaspher league. But if their relationship looks easy from the outside to someone like Selah, it’s only because Arran has never given Naevia a reason for it not to be. He never wanted to find out what would happen when he tested the boundaries of her patience, and he never thought anything would ever change that.
Nothing could, except the iron blood coursing through his veins. Nothing, except the way it pounds now between ribs and heart, something wild rising in his chest, something swift and dangerous that’s been percolating since the day Dad sat him down at ten years old, sunburnt and expectant, and explained exactly what it means that he is familia but not family. Nothing, except standing here and knowing that to someone like Naevia, Linet and her children are more faulty tool than fully human, and the only difference between him and them is the accident of who his dad decided to fuck.
A master politician, Naevia betrays nothing in the face of insurrection. “It’s done. Even if I wanted to bring that crim back into this house, she’s been turned back over to the Imperium. I have no more say in what happens to her—and neither does Selah, before either of you get any ideas.”
“They’ll destroy her. Take her kids away.”
“And in all likelihood those children will be better off for it.”
“She made a mistake,” he says, sharp and loud enough to echo up to the arching beams, because his ease in this house has always been a carefully cultivated act. “A mistake that wasn’t even really hers—Selah ran away because she got bored. That’s on her. But you’re the senator of Luxana. If you actually wanted to help her, you could. If you actually gave one shit about—”
“Enough.”
Her voice is ice-quiet, and despite himself Arran finds his feet rooted to the floor, jaw slammed shut. Some habits die hard deaths, and Arran has always kept his habit of self-preservation well-nourished where Naevia’s concerned.
“Now, you and I have always had an understanding, I think,” she says, quietly crossing the room to where he stands. She doesn’t even seem angry, and that makes it all the more chilling. This, apparently, is what happens when you cross the line. “I always welcome honest conversation. But you are having an attitude right now that I can’t allow. I may not be your patron, but with your father gone, I realize it now falls to me to steer you, because Terra knows Selah’s not going to do it. To identify where he allowed sentiment to muddy the waters. It’s kinder in the long run, and better for everyone when there’s no confusion about who they are. This is your home. We all abide by a social contract within these walls. Your part in that is unorthodox, I do realize that, so I feel it’s important right now to make clear that you may not question my judgment. Ever. Not mine, not Selah’s. A broken social contract creates danger in a home. Do you understand that?”
Arran keeps his gaze fixed somewhere in the vicinity of her right shoulder, twisting his mouth, the words caught in his throat as he breathes deeply through his nose. In, then out.
He should say yes. Give in to that habit of self-preservation. Keep his anger to himself, where she can’t find it. Tell her that he understands, that even though he has his father’s jaw and his father’s eyes and his father’s height, that despite all this he understands that everyone has their place, and he knows where he belongs.
“Arran. I’m telling you this for your own good. Tell me you understand.”
He should say no. He doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand how she can’t see it.
But of course she can’t. Who would willingly see something when their entire way of life depends on never seeing it at all?
“Yes,” he says, and finally meets her eyes. “I understand completely.”