Jo swallowed hard, her piercing blue eyes falling to the floor.
The memories were a heavy, suffocating weight she had carried for almost twenty years.
“The next Merge is supposed to be between my younger siblings, Lucas and Olivia,” Jo explained, her voice tight.
“They’re twins. They’re turning twenty-two soon, which means my father will force them to go through with it.”
Aleksander tilted his head slightly, his expression unreadable.
“And why do you want to stop this Merge? It is your coven’s most sacred tradition.”
Jo let out a shaky, bitter sigh.
“Because I already lost four of my siblings to this tradition. When it was my turn to Merge, it was supposed to be with my twin brother, Malachai.” She wrapped her arms tighter around herself.
“But Kai was a Siphoner. My parents knew he was dangerous, and they didn’t want to pass the leadership on to him. So they kept trying to have more children—eventually having Luke and Liv—just to ensure Kai would never be the leader.”
Jo looked up, her eyes bright with unshed tears and lingering terror.
“When Kai realized what they were doing, he went crazy. He killed four of our siblings just to get back at them.”
A tense silence fell over the room.
Lexi frowned, her stomach twisting at the thought of a brother slaughtering his own family.
Lucy looked at the floor, already knowing the tragic history of the Parker family.
But Aleksander didn’t look sympathetic.
Instead, a slow, knowing smirk touched his lips.
“Are you leaving things out, Josette?” Aleksander questioned, his tone dangerously smooth.
Jo blinked, caught completely off guard.
“What? No. What do you mean?”
“I mean,” Aleksander began, taking a slow step toward her, “that the human mind has an amazing ability to hallucinate, to rewrite history, or to cover up for what people desperately want to believe. It is a defense mechanism to absolve oneself of guilt.” He stopped a few feet from her, his dark eyes piercing right through her.
“So, forgive me, but I don’t believe your twin just randomly woke up one day and had a psychotic break.”
Jo’s posture instantly stiffened, defensive anger flashing in her blue eyes.
“You didn’t know him! Kai was psychotic from the start. He was broken, he lacked empathy, he—”
“I will judge that for myself,” Aleksander interrupted, his voice dropping into a resonant, booming command that left absolutely no room for argument.
Before Jo could protest, Aleksander raised his hand.
He didn’t chant.
He simply tapped into the ancient, boundless reservoir of his magic.
Instantly, Aleksander’s dark eyes rolled back, turning entirely, blindingly white.
Lexi took a small step back, watching in awe as the air around Aleksander grew heavy and electric.
He was casting a massive scrying spell, tearing through the fabric of time and space to look directly into the past.
He saw the beginning.
It wasn’t bad.
Joshua and his wife had loved their newborn twins.
They had even named the boy Malachai—Hebrew for “my messenger” or “angel.” For the first few years, he was just a boy.
He smiled, he played, he loved his sister.
Then came the day he touched his father, accidentally siphoning his magic.
The revelation dropped like a guillotine.
Aleksander watched as the boy’s life instantly turned into a living hell.
The unconditional love vanished overnight, replaced by disgust and fear.
Joshua and his wife looked at their son not as a child, but as an abomination.
No matter what Kai did, no matter how hard he tried to please them, he was treated like a disease.
It didn’t stop with the parents.
The coven whispered.
His younger siblings, following their parents’ lead, started mocking him, calling him a freak, an unnatural mistake.
Aleksander watched the relentless, daily psychological abuse chip away at the boy’s sanity.
And through it all, he saw Josette.
The golden child.
She didn’t join in the abuse, but she didn’t stop it, either.
She simply looked the other way, ignoring the torment of her twin brother, acting as though nothing was happening to maintain her own peace.
Aleksander watched Kai cling to one desperate, fragile hope: The Merge.
Kai believed with everything he had that if he could just complete the ritual and win his own magic, his family would finally accept him.
He would finally be whole.
But then, the final crack.
Aleksander watched the moment Kai discovered the truth—that his parents had purposely kept breeding, creating Luke and Liv solely to replace him.
They were never going to let him Merge.
They were never going to accept him.
He was born into a family that wished he was dead.
Aleksander blinked, the blinding white fading from his eyes as they returned to their normal, dark brown.
The heavy magical pressure in the room vanished.
He looked down at Jo, his expression completely cold.
Jo physically recoiled, taking a stumbling step backward under the weight of Aleksander’s freezing, absolute stare.
All the warmth and easy charm he had brought into the room just moments before was completely gone, replaced by the terrifying, unforgiving judgment of a god.
“You left out quite a few important points in your tragic story, Josette,” Aleksander said, his voice dangerously quiet.
Lexi and Lucy immediately shifted their attention, their eyes darting from Aleksander to the pale, trembling witch.
Up until this exact second, they had both believed Jo’s narrative—that Malachai was simply a born monster who slaughtered his family in a temper tantrum over power.
But seeing the absolute disgust etched onto Aleksander’s face, they both instantly realized Jo had hidden something massive.
Aleksander took a slow, deliberate step toward her, stripping away her victimhood piece by piece.
“You left out how your parents completely, systematically abused a four-year-old boy, both mentally and physically, simply because he showed signs of being a Siphoner,” Aleksander stated, his words hitting the quiet room like physical blows.
Jo squeezed her eyes shut, a shaky, ragged breath escaping her lips as the buried guilt clawed its way to the surface.
“You left out the part where his own siblings joined in on the abuse, calling him an abomination in his own home,” Aleksander continued relentlessly.
“You left out the part where the entire coven treated him like a walking disease.”
He paused, tilting his head slightly to force her to look at him.
“And worst of all, you left out how you—his twin sister, the golden child—turned a completely blind eye to his suffering. You watched it happen every single day and did absolutely nothing.”
Lexi stared at Jo in open shock.
As a vampire, she knew cruelty, but the idea of an entire family and community dedicating years to torturing a defenseless child sickened her to her core.
Lucy crossed her arms tight over her chest, her jaw clenching as the sickening truth of the Gemini Coven’s pristine reputation came to light.
“Every little piece of abuse, every sneer, every punishment chipped away at his sanity,” Aleksander said, his voice dropping into a dark, disgusted cadence.
“Until he clung to one single, desperate delusion: that if he could just get his own magic through the Merge, his coven and his parents would finally love him.”
Aleksander let out a harsh, bitter laugh that held absolutely no humor.
“But they were never going to let him Merge. They bred Luke and Liv specifically to replace him. To throw him away permanently.”
He stopped right in front of her, his dark eyes blazing with cold contempt.
“But yeah,” Aleksander finished, his voice dripping with heavy, biting sarcasm.
“That didn’t go as planned, and he just went crazy. Like there was absolutely nothing your family did to push him there. Everything was just Kai Parker being a psycho right from the start.”
The room fell into a dead, suffocating silence.
Jo couldn’t form a single word in her defense.
A tear slipped down her cheek, completely exposing the ugly, horrifying truth she had spent the last two decades desperately trying to outrun.