Loki watched his daughter in facination. Seona was showing the girl her memories but wasn’t actually telling her anything. She was giving her the necessary clues to figure it out on her own.

“Mamá’s cueva,” he heard her breathe.

He looked around in surprise. The scene had changed to the inside of Seona’s cueva. It was the first time he’d been to her home.

“It looks just like she described it,” he heard Akira murmur from beside him.

He turned back to her and found the girl no longer at his side but at the side of her mother.

“Puerin Gold,” she whispered as the scent of tea began to fill the cueva.

“How’d you know that?” he asked surprised.

Akira smiled.

“It was the only tea my mother ever drank and great grandpa would always bring a sachet of it when he came visiting,” she told him. “He was the one who taught me how to make the best cup of tea. He died while I was being tortured by the nuns. They didn’t even let me go to his funeral.”

“You were close to him then?” he asked.

Akira shook her head.

“Not really,” she sighed. “He lived outside the Empire with my grandparents. They really didn’t visit us much. Mamá said they barely had enough time to come to our baptisms. I mean, farfar and farmor were and probably still are the king and queen of Denmark.”

Loki’s eyes widened. Seona was royalty, which made Akira and her siblings royalty as well. The fact that she was his daughter made her a demigod along with being Danish royalty.

“Mamá really hated the fact she was royalty,” Akira told him, unaware of his surprise at her revelation.

It was no wonder she didn’t mention it.

“She was actually the heir to the throne until she met my father,” she continued. “Because he wasn’t royalty or nobility, she had to forfeit her right to the crown when she married him. It didn’t matter that he actually was nobility where he came from; they didn’t see him as nobility because he came from the Empire and nobody knew anything about it at the time.”

Loki stared at her in shock. Seona had to give up her birthright just so she could hide the mistake of her pregnancy. Even if he had been able to marry her back then, she’d likely still have given up her claim to the throne because he wasn’t technically royalty or nobility. The question remained: would they have been happy?

“Was your mother happy with him? Your father, that is?” he asked lowly.

Akira glanced at him over her mother’s head.

“She never complained about their marriage but to me it always felt a bit forced,” she replied slowly. “She…I always felt that she didn’t love my father the way she loved the man she drew in her secret room. They rarely argued and when they did it was always to do with me. I was a constant reminder to both of them I think. For my mother, I was a reminder of the man she lost. To my father, I was a reminder of the man my mother would always love more than him. In her own way, I believed she grew to love him. But her heart always belonged to the man in the pictures she drew.”

Loki felt his breath catch in his throat. They had both been trapped in loveless marriages that they couldn’t escape. But the reminder of their love was this beautiful girl, no woman, standing in front of him. Looking at her next to Seona’s memory, Loki could see the similarities between them. Akira was tall in stature, close to 6’ tall, while her mother stood at barely 5’4”. Akira had inherited her mother’s long fingers, though hers were not near as delicate as her mother’s. She had his high cheekbones and like him, her nose was a bit crooked. She had her mother’s thin, bow-shaped lips and sported dimples that she must have inherited from his mother. Her eyes alternated between hoary and azure much like his own eyes, though his were different shades of green. Overall, she resembled him the most. The moment he realized this, he wanted nothing more than to wrap his daughter in his embrace and never let her go. That’s when a second realization hit him square in the gut knocking all the air from his lungs. He had cursed his own daughter. How could he have been so cruel? How could he have been so blind? How had he forgotten the child he and Seona had concieved that night in Spain? For the second time in his life, Loki fell to his knees and wept.