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"How did you get Hadiza's pendant?"

My heart slammed to a stop at the mention of her name. I froze as my lungs closed in on itself.

What...

My eyes settled on him. Even as the tray of drinks slipped from my hand, it never strayed.

All night, all he'd been was someone who held a connection a painful part of Avondré's past, but to hear him mention her name shook the very earth I stood on. My chest rose and fell as he turned to me, eyes wide.

"How... how do you know my mother?"

The words spilled from my mouth even as my ears rang continuously. And it seemed time had frozen on that quiet moment when his eyes widened even more as he took me in or more importantly, my words. I felt numb with each passing second that I stared at him. How... did... he?

It finally made sense then. The way he'd, first of all, looked at me when I introduced myself to him, trying to get him to go with me to meet Avondré. It was like he was forcing himself not to think about something whilst trying to see if there was a correlation between me and something. Could it have been related to my mother? Was that it?

With a sharp sudden conviction, I moved to go closer to him, the space between us seemed too far apart for the situation at hand. But the instant I moved, gravity gave way beneath me and the air swirled around me. Weight pushed my body up, and I instantly wrapped my hand around his neck before I could even comprehend what had happened. My breath released sharply as I looked up at Avondré's wide eyes that matched the first rise and fall of his chest against my body.
As they looked down at me, they softened.

"What...?" I tried to ask, but once again it seemed all words had failed me again that day.

"You were..." he paused, controlling his breathing against my body before he pulled back slightly to drop me, letting my feet touch the ground before he released me. He coughed slightly to the side, and my heart sank as I squinted at him. Was he actually okay? Had carrying me put too much strain on him? What...?

All my questions dissolved and my lungs remembered what it meant to function again once he turned back to me, with his eyes soft with so much care and concern. He nudged his head to where I had been standing before he carried me. I turned and noticed all the glass shards littered around the floor.

"Oh." I blinked, staring at the mess.

"You were about to step on those."

I released a breath, shutting my eyes to keep the tears stinging behind them away. I was really losing it. For the past two years, every other person from back home had been careful enough to keep her name off their lips and so hearing her name from the strange man had pulled the rug - I was standing on - from underneath my feet.

Taking in a deep breath, I smiled up at Avondré, whose brows were drawn in as he stared intensely at me. "Thank you."

His eyes scanned mine, searching with questions of their own, but we both didn't have the answers we were searching for. It seemed there was just one person who did. And as if he reached the same conclusion that I did, he took a step back and linked our hands, giving it a comforting squeeze before we both turned to Stephon. He'd been watching us, me, with a glazed look in his eyes.

Avondré took over, leading me in the opposite direction of the glass shards. Letting me sit down before settling down himself. It took Stephon a minute, his eyes still locked on me, before he sat down himself.

"You want to explain what's going on here?" Avondré snapped, making me flinch slightly, and he murmured a quick apology my way. Not bothered about the fact that his father's eyes looked like they were storing a fountain in them.

Stephon blinked and gulped hard, sniffing." Right. I, er..." he turned away from me slightly and then back again. "You're Hadiza's daughter? Hadiza Boss," he muttered like he was testing her name on his lips. Like he'd totally forgotten how that sounded for a really long time.

But that didn't help the way my heart clenched at the mention of her name again. My heart thumped loudly against my chest.

The question needed no more clarification. He knew that much and so I didn't respond. Not that I could at that moment. My eyes were ringing and I couldn't grasp my hands on any form of reality that was ongoing besides him and the fact that he knew her.

"Who is she to you?" Avondré's voice snapped into my brief state of confusion, letting the faint sound of the music pull me slightly back to the world and around me.

Stephon grimaced as turned away from me to Avondré. His entire face turned in on each other, as his chin quivered. It was pure, unfiltered guilt written all over his face. An expression Avondré not only recognized but seemed to realize the reason Stephon had it on. He stiffened by my side and his hand in mine suddenly turned cold.

"She was the one?" he choked out, his voice chirped and higher pitched.

Stephon lowered his face, unable to gaze at his son any longer.

My chest tightened, sweat trickling down every surface it could form a habitat in. Turning, I narrowed my eyes at both of them with my forehead creased. "What?" I mumbled in a shaky voice. I tried to clear my throat, but I couldn't really focus on how uncertain I was, not when it seemed there were answers to questions I didn't know. "She was the one who what?"

It was Stephon who looked at me then. It seemed Avondré's stiffened self was so abashed by the truth he'd just discovered. He couldn't even look at me or comfort me. Not anymore, even though he hadn't dropped my hand.

"Hadiza was..." he paused with a gulp before continuing, "... she was the one... the one I was in love with when I married Mikayla, Avondré's mother."

My entire world crashed down as I slumped back against my chair, dropping Avondré's hands, the contact piercing through me.

No.

In love with?

I released a sharp breath. What... what the hell was he talking about? My mother was never in love with anyone. No, she'd had me as a product of a one-night stand. The mistake of an action that she'd gone through to get over...

I sucked in a breath, scoffing as my eyes widened, staring at Stephon in a new light. I looked at the necklace on the table, remembering how she'd always look at it.

She'd wanted to get over miseries. And for whatever reason, it had never occurred to me that the misery was being in love with a man bound to another woman.

My lungs had begun to close in on each other.

If he loved her, why then had he married Avondré's mother? Why did he put my mother through all that?

And even as those questions troll my head, I couldn't ignore the knots that formed in my stomach at the thought of Avondré and what he must have been thinking about, regarding my mother and me. My fists closed in on each other.

"Did you..." I started with my eyes still glued to the necklace. "Did you give her that when you left her?" I asked because it just felt too cruel to ask him why he left her. And yet I couldn't look in his direction. I didn't think I could have handled looking at that face in that instant.

"I didn't... I didn't give that to her," Stephon replied, his gaze had dropped to the table too with his face squeezed in on each other, once again. It was like certain memories swirled behind his glazed eyes. Memories he'd blocked for a really long time. "We met because of them," he added before looking up at the both of us with distant eyes of sadness. "Just like the both of you."

My heart thumped in my chest, eyes wide open as I spun to Avondré despite my previous reserve.

Had he bonded so much with his father, he had told him that?

But from the way, he went completely still and his facial muscles slackened, I knew he was just as stunned as I was.

So how did Stephon know? And what the hell did he mean my mother, and he had met the same way? What...?

"What do you mean, you met like we did? Have you been spying on us?" Avondré cracked, his voice heavy and thick.

Stephon sat up straight, sniffing. Ever but of emotion he'd had on previously gone into the wind and replaced with a firm determination. "No," he said. "I haven't been spying on you. I just met you when she came to me, Avondré. Not a moment before, but," he paused and turned back to the pendants, glaring at them. "I'm familiar with those gemstones, and I can probably deduce what happened."

"Good," Avondré huffed. "So that means you have the answers that we need, don't you? So what are you waiting for? What are they? The pendants... gemstones? Why did they have us being pulled together? Why..."

"Which means," Stephon sharply interrupted, and for the first time since we'd met him that night, he didn't back down at the glare Avondré sent his way. Rather, he continued, "I know for certain that you need no more answers tonight."

"I don't think you have any right to be the judge of that."

"Maybe not, but it's in your best interest."

Avondré let out a scoff. "My best interest?"

It was a back and forth between the two but as much as I wanted answers like Avondré did, there was a look that I couldn't place my hands which Stephon had that let me know how serious he was about keeping the information to the next day.

"Why?" I asked, pulling his attention to me. "What difference does waiting till tomorrow make?"

"All the difference in the world," he replied and turned back to Avondré who was glaring at him whilst adjusting the scarf around his neck, his hands resting back against his chest. "If you met today, like I think you have, then you would want to spend as much time as you would love to with each other. Or not. No matter what, when you come to the temple tomorrow, I'd be there waiting. But it can't be tonight." He stood upright after.

What is he...?

Then he froze, stopping for a minute, before he looked up at me, a bit of his emotions coming back. "How is... how is Hadiza doing?"

My throat clogged and there was no stopping the stream of tears in my eyes then as I went back to that room two years ago when I had to watch the life leave her eyes.

"She's dead."

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𓆩♡𓆪 𝕎𝕆ℝ𝔻 ℂ𝕆𝕌ℕ𝕋: 1826

𓆩♡𓆪 𝕋𝕆𝕋𝔸𝕃 𝕎𝕆ℝ𝔻 ℂ𝕆𝕌ℕ𝕋: 18860

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