Author’s POV:
"It’s all fine. I will gladly make the three women be fated to my sons. I mean, Jessica and Kesha have already done their part of the sacrifice. I’m pretty sure Charlotte will be on board. She doesn’t have a mind of her own either. And I’m sure she’s as evil as a monster. She will gladly sacrifice her mother, even after crying for days," Darcy said in one breath.
That was when she asked the Grey women one question.
"But I want to know something. How the heck did Azura feel the mate bond with my son?" she asked. And the Grey women started to laugh from the other side.
"Darcy, you cannot have all the power. You need to realize that in order for you to have everything you want, you will have to give something back."
The words made no sense to Darcy. She had no idea what kind of secret language she was speaking. She was having a hard time understanding it.
"Can you please be clear? What do I need to pay for it?" Darcy said. And the Grey women chuckled again.
"Don’t you think there’s someone who has been standing with you all this time?"
That was all it took to remind Darcy that someone had been helping her without asking for much—far less than one would expect.
"Oh!what do you want from me?" As soon as Darcy asked that, the Grey women chuckled again.
" I want one of mine to be your daughter-in-law." As soon as she said that, Darcy began to frown.
"Wait, what are you talking about?" Darcy questioned.
"Azura is my daughter." The minute those words escaped the Grey woman’s lips, Darcy began to lose her mind. Her hands started to tremble.
"No, of course. I’m just—it’s just too much for me to say. Why didn’t you tell me all these years?" Darcy, for one, had always known the Grey Woman to be deceptive.
"Because I knew you hated her. So I kept telling my daughter to stop thinking about it. And then I lost her. I should have been angry with you. But I thought maybe—maybe you were traumatized. Maybe you were so bothered by everything around you that you didn’t understand what you were doing. That day when you took her out of the hospital to toss her into the well, I was broken too. But we had built such a connection that I couldn’t harm you or punish you for it. I thought my daughter was in the wrong. Why did she go and live in the same mansion I taught her not to go near? Once she was there, I approached her and told her to leave. She didn’t listen to me. So that was what she got for getting herself tangled with the cursed brothers."
The more the Grey Woman spoke, the more Darcy realized how loyal she had been. Otherwise, she would have punished her long ago.
"Did she kill her twin siblings at once or was it... I just want to know what happened," Darcy asked.
"Okay, fine. So one day when she was very little, probably nine, her twin siblings used to bring in their prey, like they used to call them. Then they would kill them together. That was the fun game they used to play. I caught them once and stopped them. They promised they would never do it again. But then they did it again. And again. And again. Azura loved them a lot—until she realized she had to stop them. Because now their target has become one of your sons, Emmet. They were so infatuated with him. And Darcy, you cannot say I didn’t warn you that one of your sons would bear the most pain from the others. That was Emmet, the one who forgets. So all the evil found its way to him. Azura, she was only twelve at that time. She had only seen Emmet once in the woods. But she did it for him. She killed her beloved siblings for him."
As the gray women explained how much Azura had done for Emmet, Darcy began to nod her head.
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