But there was one question he had for Xev. “Who’s your mother?”

Xev pointed to his vivid blue eyebrows—another part of his curse—and spoke the last name Nick ever expected to hear. “Azura. Firstborn of all evil, she seduced my father, Verlyn, in an attempt to control and manipulate him. I was nothing but a tool to her and a source of continual aggravation to my father, who despised me for binding him to her.” He swallowed. “Like you, I was born of two warring natures that constantly pull at me. But unlike you, I never chose good out of any kind of loyalty or decency to the Kalosum. Rather, I did it defiantly as a way of striking back at my mother, and making her regret and curse my conception and birth.”

“And what of your father?” Kody asked.

Xev laughed bitterly. “What of him?”

“Aren’t you loyal to him?”

His features turned to stone as he glanced away from them. “After what he and Caleb did to me, I have loyalty to nothing and no one. We have a mutual understanding. Verlyn never wanted to be my father. I never wanted to be his son.” But Nick didn’t miss the pain that lay beneath the dry delivery of those words. Their rejection had hurt Xev so deeply that he’d been left with the same choice Nick had faced with his own father.

Deny any want of love. It was easier that way. To pretend you didn’t care. That you didn’t need or want your father. But deep down in places you didn’t want to own up to, you knew the truth. It always cut and bled. An open wound that wanted what they would never give.

A single damn about you.

And that was why Nick couldn’t turn his back on Xev. Why he’d kept him here when everyone else told him he was an idiot for it. He knew that same pain too intimately to dole it out to someone else.

He and Xev were brothers in pain.

Brothers in heart.

Nick couldn’t throw Xev aside like everyone else had done him and leave him to rot alone. It just wasn’t in him to be that cold. His mother had taught him better than that.

Xev locked gazes with Nick. There was so much agony and need inside those hazel eyes that it was hard for Nick to see what he, himself, kept hidden from the world reflected back at him. “I told you when you brought me here, Malachai, that I have no understanding of kindness or love. You should have left me in my prison like all the Malachais before you. It’s where I belong. It’s all I understand.”

Nick heard those words that sent a chill down his spine. They were so similar to what his father had told him from the cradle. Put no one at your back unless you want them to plant a knife in your spine.

And yet …

He sensed something more inside Xev. His instincts told him that Xev wasn’t quite the badass he pretended to be. That there was a vulnerability deep inside him he denied. A need for acceptance that Nick related to. Maybe he was wrong. But every part of himself told him that Xev wasn’t quite as evil as the ancient wanted him to believe.