Zinnia paused and looked at her daughter. There…was indeed a way. She had long lost hope for herself, but her children were still so young. Her brother was kind; he'd take them in and raise them as his own!
"Did you… meet them?" she asked, referring to meeting her maternal family.
Zinnia was sent to Hassen because of her stepmother's greed. She was not allowed to make contact outside and had been trapped inside the large palace that had always felt suffocating to her.
It wasn't that her husband found the Golds to be a threat. Even if he did acknowledge that they were powerful in their own right, what could they have against him, a city lord in a city with a deep legacy?
That man simply liked everything to be under his complete control. Seeing her want to be with her family so much—oh, how much she had begged him to let her visit her family when she was younger—made him want to prevent it from happening even more.
