In a place like Darrow, a place where something like the Clave could never survive and where Luke would be a little concerned for the safety of anyone who tried to instate something along those lines, he imagines a conversation might be a little more likely to happen. Without anything else to demand their attention, if Alec were to really press the issue, he can't imagine Maryse or even Robert would continue to essentially ignore their child. But that relies on one or both of them coming here, because he knows if Alec goes back to New York instead, nothing is likely to change. Even in the face of a potential war, even with Valentine trying to destroy everything they've fought for, he knows people tend to look at the battle instead of what's going on around them.

They always think there will be time for that later and sometimes nothing is further from the truth.

Luke nods when Alec asks about his mother, though, letting him guide the subject change. "Sister Cleophas," he says with a wry twist of his lips that might have almost been a smile if not for the bitterness in it. Perhaps it's funny that it's his mother who still holds the majority of Luke's resentment, especially when so many awful things have been done to him over the course of his life, but the only one in which he can't find a direct correlation to his own behaviour is his mother's decision to leave him. He has so many questions about his parents, his family, but none of them will ever be answered and not only because he's estranged from his sister, but because he expects she knows as much as he does.

"She left when I was still quite young," he says. "I don't have many memories of her anymore, but I do feel like she never particularly wanted to be a mother, but that she loved my father very much. After my father died, I suppose she saw little point in trying to raise two children she didn't really care for one way or the other, so she left. Amatis raised me. Rather, she did the best she could, she was only a few years older than I was."