Chapter 1752: The Woman in the Painting
Pain flared in Jocelynn’s knees when her legs crumpled beneath her, but compared to the ache in her heart, she hardly noticed the impact on the cold, stone floor.
She’d known. Ever since the night Ashlynn returned from the dead to rescue her in the middle of her wedding, Jocelynn had known exactly what had happened to her sister after Ashlynn had married Owain Lothian.
Now, she found herself face to face with the sight of her sister in the aftermath of Owain’s fury.
Jocelynn’s eyes flinched away from the center of the painting because it was too painful to look at directly. Instead, her eyes slid around the edges of the painting, taking in the raindrops splashing on the cobblestones of an ancient roadway, the darkness between the dimly lit trees, and the way the angle of everything made it clear that the painter’s view of her sister had come from slightly above.
Eventually, however, Jocelynn forced herself to see her sister and the aftermath of her own treachery.
In the painting, Ashlynn’s skin was covered with so many bruises that it felt like she barely had any unbruised flesh at all. She clutched a sopping wet bedsheet to her chest that covered just enough of her body to protect her modesty but revealed almost everything else.
Ashlynn’s slender waist had turned a deep shade of mottled purple and red that extended all the way from her hip to the bottom of her bust. Her full, bow-shaped lips had been split, and dried blood clung to her chin along with the dirt and grime that the rain had yet to wash away. One eye was swollen nearly shut, and the arm that clutched the sheet bore a series of bruises in the shape of a hand.
Countless scratches and shallow cuts covered her skin from stumbling through the forest at night, and the water pooling around her feet had turned pink with the blood that flowed from those wounds.
And yet, despite that, despite a collection of wounds that would drive the greatest of knights to their knees in anguish and agony, she stood in the rain with emerald eyes that blazed in the night, refusing to be extinguished or see her life end.
"This is how I found her," Nyrielle said, holding herself back from the woman kneeling on the floor. "This is how you sent her to me..."
"How I, what?" Jocelynn said, turning to face the woman who had painted such a tragic scene.
"Come here," Nyrielle said, holding a hand out to Jocelynn. She didn’t stop at helping the young woman to her feet, but instead pulled her into a gentle embrace. "See her as I did that night," Nyrielle said, using a finger under Jocelynn’s chin to gently turn her gaze back toward the painting.
"Isn’t she beautiful?" Nyrielle asked softly. "Can you see why I fell under her spell that night?"
For a moment, Jocelynn’s trembling heart raced as her mind spun back to a different day, when Owain Lothian had brutally beaten Percivus’s acolytes and guided her hands as she stripped the Inquisitor’s robes away before stabbing him to death.
Owain had been enchanted by his own violence and his eyes had come alive in a way Jocelynn had only seen when he had a blade in his hand... for Nyrielle to call the results of Owain’s brutality ’beautiful’ made her stomach churn in revulsion while every instinct in her body told her to flee.
Another part of her, a quiet, flickering spark she’d thought had guttered out the moment Owain could no longer threaten her or anyone else, ignited once again with her heart. If this was how Nyrielle wanted to see her sister, battered and suffering, alone in the cold... If this was what she thought of as beautiful...
"You can’t see it, can you?" Nyrielle asked in a tone that said she already knew the answer. "It’s right there in front of you, but all you can see is the pain and the fury in your chest, feeble as it is, can only strike outward in search of someone else to blame..."
"You’re the one who painted her suffering and called it beautiful," Jocelynn snapped before closing her mouth with a click. Of all the people she should never, ever offend, one of the world’s most powerful vampires had to be near the top of the list, if not at the very top of it. For that woman to be her sister’s future bride only made it worse.
"I thought better of you, Jocelynn," Nyrielle said, pursing her lips as she looked at her sister-in-law. "You saw it before. You called my grandsire a hero, you said that my parents must have loved me, so when it comes to your sister, why can’t you see her beauty in this moment? Why can you only see her pain?"
Jocelynn’s mind came to a sudden stop, like a ship running aground. Her eyes flickered from the painting of Ashlynn to the covered paintings she’d already seen as she searched for the things that were the same.
It was the eyes, she realized. The emerald eyes in the painting were so detailed that she could see the shadow of a carriage reflected in her sister’s gaze. Those eyes held a burning determination that she’d seen echoes of in Torbin’s defiant last stand and the heartbreaking, unspoken goodbye of Nyrielle’s father, Baron Iarlaith...
But there was something different about Ashlynn’s gaze when she compared it to the other two, something she couldn’t quite describe because she’d never seen it from anyone else before, and she’d certainly never seen it in a mirror.
"Is it the courage that you see in her?" Jocelynn asked hesitantly. "Is that what drew you to her?"
"It isn’t just courage, Jocelynn," Nyrielle said. "My grandsire, my parents, all of them were very brave, and they were willing to die just to give me a chance to survive."
"But your sister is different from them," she explained, tightening her embrace as if to make sure that Jocelynn couldn’t run away from this truth. "My family was resolved to die for my sake. They accepted their deaths as the price they had to pay."
"But your sister," Nyrielle said. "Your sister was determined to live despite the pain of carrying on. All of that suffering, all of that agony, and still, she pushed onward. Can you see it now?" Nyrielle asked.
"Can you see the beauty in this moment, buried under the pain?"
