He nodded. “She wanted me to understand how much my father loved her. How much she meant to him.” He slid his gaze back to Dancer. “By those eyes, I know Dancer broke his pledge to my mother and slept with you.”

“Darice…”

He held his hand up to stop her words. “It’s okay, Sumi,” he said grudgingly. “I might be young, but I understand why he did it. No one, not even Dancer, can fight the stralen when it strikes. It’s the most powerful emotion any Andarion can ever feel, and they have no control over it when it hits them. It overrides everything about their normal personality. But be careful. My mother said that it can be so intense that it used to terrify her whenever my father had it. It produces an extreme form of jealousy that makes them highly possessive, even violent toward the one they love. Controlling and domineering. That’s why she told me about it. It usually runs in families, through the father, and there’s a good chance I could have it, too.” Abashed, he glanced away from her. “It’s why she used to sedate my father. She was trying to find some way to mitigate its effects so that he wouldn’t hurt her.”

Sumi gasped at what he was saying. Especially given some of the past verbal attacks he’d made against Dancer. They had been overly harsh, especially given this revelation. “You knew she drugged him?”

He nodded. “They weren’t illegal drugs. She told me that she got them from a doctor. And my father didn’t give her a choice. She said it was so bad that she couldn’t even speak to her best friend without my father flying into a jealous rage over it. He even put Pera in the hospital just two weeks before he died.” His look pierced her with its sincerity. “Even though she loved him, she was afraid for her life, Sumi. It’s why she didn’t have children with my father until after his death. She didn’t want him to hurt them in a fit of anger.”

Sumi felt ill at what he was describing. It’d been just that kind of nightmare that she’d barely survived with Avin. “Is that why she’s refused your uncle’s pledge all these years?”

“Yes. When she married my father, she didn’t know he had the gene. And stralen is something only felt by the male and has no relation to or bearing on how the female feels toward him. Only how he possessive he feels toward her. She said it’s why she thought Fain’s human wife had left him. That he probably had it, too, and had hurt her because of it.”