✓ | 𝐁𝐑𝐎𝐊𝐄𝐍 𝐌𝐄𝐌𝐎𝐑𝐈𝐄𝐒, Volturi Kings

ᴄʜᴀᴘᴛᴇʀ ⁴²

Let my people go.

The phrase hit me harder than I would have thought. We had watched that movie almost twenty times together. The Prince of Egypt was by far my favorite movie of all time. No other opening song could compare. Edward chose his words carefully, meticulously planning what he would say to me in that letter. This one phrase was a direct hit to what I was, what I could have become if I had never met my mates.

My life could have ended up so much worse if I had never met my mates. A life without them and my new family was just not a life worth living. Wasted. I would have been wasted. My talents would have also been wasted. I likely would have met them once Bella's child was born. God, what could have happened then?

I knew that if someone had seen Helios from afar, they would have thought that he was an immortal child. He would have been killed. Although, the Romanians would not have been found out yet. My son could have been alive, but he would have been raised to be a monster, a killing machine just on the basis of his gift alone.

The Olympic coven would have likely had to face off with my mates. I would have chosen no side in that dispute. My mates are my mates and even if I didn't know who they were at heart like I do now, they still had that bond with me.

Edward was playing me as if I was some kind of wicked pharaoh. He did always like to think that he was a moral person and a man who tried to be as holy as possible. It was terrible. Even I could see that when I was friends with him. Playing me off like that filled his own ego, as Moses was sent by god to free the Hebrews from slavery.

I was no slave master and my covenmates were not enslaved.

Morality was something that hit me a little bit different. Of course, I knew my adopted father to be one of the most moral people I had ever known in my lifetime, but other people in this coven had their own sense of morality. Esme, who was well matched in morality, would never harm people if she didn't have to. Actually, I never would harm anyone unless they attacked first. Attack was not the first thing on my mind when I saw someone I hated.

In my own ways, I was moral.

Over the past 18 years I have met people who show both moral and amoral traits. There is no light and dark, animal vs. human blood. The world will never just be this or that, black and white, night and day. Things had their own ways of coming together and being both. No villain had no redeemable qualities, just as no hero had no flaws.

It was what made us all human. It gave us our own humanity. A theoretical humanity, as we were all vampires, but humanity nonetheless.

To claim that I had no qualities that were on the lighter side of the spectrum would be blasphemy. I loved my coven and I loved my mates. That love for them proves just that. He had called me a sociopath, according to Carlisle and Jasper, but in fact I had more love to give to others. I felt love and empathy, disproving that accusation entirely.

What would I be without my love for my family? The love for my son and my mates? Who would I become but a bitter woman with no will to live?

It was what I had become before. I wouldn't let myself fall down that hole of despair again.

For the first time in months, I started to write my final letter to Edward.

I always had to have the last word.

It was the way of the queen.

The way of a vampire.

But most importantly,

The way of Annalise Volturi.

__________________________________________________

Dear Mr. Masen,