It isn’t my defiance of him at the arena. It isn’t even the escape of the Strikers, although that may have been the catalyst.

It is simply what I said to him in the privacy of that small room in the middle of the night. Because the expression in his eyes right now is the same expression I’d seen on him that night—a wild, nearly terrified rage.

Maybe you’re just scared to die.

I look back at him and let all my pain and rage flow. How can you do this, I say to him, and still say you loved your own mother?

He looks at me. This is his father in him. Because I know what it feels like to lose her, he replies. And I know what that does to you.

Then he releases me and waves at his soldier to help the prisoner to her feet.

In a daze, I look on as the soldier offers a hand to the prisoner, and when she flinches away from him as she cradles her damaged arm and hand, he grabs her good elbow and forces her back to her feet. Is Caitoman dragging my mother to her feet right now? Or is he continuing with his torture of her, doing more than what he promised his brother he would do? He is capable of anything.

The woman remains hunched, swaying from pain, as the soldiers begin to usher her away, back to whatever wretched prison they’ve taken her from. And all I can imagine is my own mother doing the same, bent with agony and blood, being led back to wherever they are keeping her.

Mayor Elland watches them go, her own face bleak, whatever thoughts churning through her mind held tightly back as she forces herself to stay calm. All she can do is cast a disappointed look toward Constantine. He makes a point to ignore her gaze, but I can see that it bothers him. The words about his mother have stayed with him.

And as I crouch there, consumed with my own fear and fury, I notice something about the soldier that Constantine had brought here. The one wearing Caitoman’s ring.

The ring features the sun and its flares carved in gold around a band. It flashes once in the light and my eyes go to it. In that moment, I remember Raina’s ring, a similar sun ring that she’d worn when we first arrived back in the capital.

No, it wasn’t a similar ring. It was the same ring.

The exact same ring that Caitoman had now given this soldier.

We are guided by light and fated by the sun.

It suddenly occurs to me that General Caitoman was the one who had ordered the switching of Constantine’s guards after the assassination attempt.

That he had publicly called out Constantine’s weakened state during the banquet on the Sun Dial, so all would see the Premier fallen on the steps. I’d thought it real concern at the time, brother for brother.