Chapter 52
Chapter Fifty-Two
Aurelia
I t takes several excruciating minutes before the stimulant fully kicks in. Marc’s eyelids flutter. His limbs twitch against the bindings.
When his arms jar against the restraints with a sharper force, his eyes pop open. He stares forward and then down at himself with a bleary vagueness to his expression. “What— Curse it all?—”
His voice still holds a bit of a slur, but when he looks up again and focuses on me, a little of the fog clears from his face.
His forehead furrows alongside the narrowing of his eyes. “Aurelia? What in the blasted realms is going on? Can you untie me?”
He hasn’t processed yet that I’m the one who had him tied up.
I fold my arms over my chest atop my belly. My heart is pounding so hard it sends an ache through my ribs. “No, I’m afraid I can’t.”
He pauses in his struggling. His gaze sweeps across the room, landing on the three men standing farther back around me. His lips draw back from his teeth in a silent snarl.
Rage reverberates through his words. “Did they force you into this? Damned traitors after all. What do you idiots think you’re going to accomplish with this stunt?”
I swallow thickly and speak up before any of the princes can, although Raul’s glower has turned searing enough to burn. “They didn’t force me into anything. They’re helping me. And it isn’t a stunt. It seems the one who’s been playing the most tricks here is you.”
Somehow, my voice remains even. At my last words, Marc’s gaze snaps back to me. His fury wars with bewilderment on his face, twisting the lines around his mouth. “What are you talking about?”
I summon a little of my own anger to steady me in my purpose. “Why don’t you tell me? Your brother informed me this morning that he’s known all along that you ‘confessed’ your secret to me. Because this has just been one more in the long line of sick tests you’ve been putting me through since the moment I arrived here.”
What color Marc has in his pale skin drains from his face. He grits his teeth, but he can’t will away the unmistakable taint of guilt.
“Linus is lying to you,” he insists. “He knows I’m done with him—he’s trying to turn you against me the way he assumes we’ve turned against him. He?—”
“There is no ‘we’!” I break in, with a rawness to the protest that I didn’t expect. My stomach churns. “If he wasn’t already aware you’d told me, how would he have known it was safe to reveal the secret now? How could he have pointed out the exact moment when you let me into your supposed confidence? Right from the start, you came to me with all this talk about conspiracy and murder…”
I should have realized. Is that why I feel so awful? I suspected in the very first moment that agreeing to his scheme was a trap.
Why did I let him convince me he had any intentions beyond breaking me?
Marc grimaces. “All right. When I came to you at first, it was to prove a point. He insisted you’d take the first chance to betray one of us. I said we’d see. But you didn’t, and you’ve put up with so much of his shit without ever asking me to raise a hand against him…”
He trails off, looking down at his bound limbs again as if struggling to comprehend how his current state fits the story he’s telling me.
My voice tightens. “I didn’t ask you not to protect me either. I didn’t protest when you promised I wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore. So you got your betrayal after all.”
“That’s not—” Marc shakes his head with a growl of frustration. “I didn’t see it that way. Everything I said to you to begin with—I was already starting to think it. Our tour of the continent only drove home how unstable he’s gotten, how easily he could destroy everything our family has built. Why the fuck should he be emperor even half of the time if he’s going to ruin the whole damned thing?”
Raul can’t keep silent any longer. He lets out a snort. “And she’s supposed to believe that, just because you said so?”
“Who the fuck are you to have a say in it?” Marc retorts, and yanks his gaze back to me. Amid all the fury and confusion, there’s something almost pleading in his gray eyes. “I never lied to you, not really. At most I exaggerated my intentions in those early conversations. But the past few months—I’ve meant every bit of that. I love you.”
I sense the princes stiffening at the edges of my vision. I never mentioned to them that Marc had said those words to me—it hardly seemed important. The declaration feels like a joke.
Except for the anguish etched on his face, which even now I could almost believe is genuine.
Bastien pushes forward, his voice taut. “You can’t say that to her. Not after everything you put her through.”
“ I put her through? Fucking Linus?—”
I cut him off with a step toward him, my slippers rapping against the thin rug. “It wasn’t just Linus. Who hurled knives at my head? Who burned my hands raw and had me dance until my feet bled? Who sent me teetering across Estera’s maze unprepared and forced me to burn your wretched crest into these men? I might not know perfectly which times I was dealing with you, but in most if not all of those instances I was, wasn’t I?”
The wavering of the defiance in Marc’s expression confirms that my guesses were mostly accurate. “We needed to be sure of our empress. I knew when enough was enough. It’s Linus who wasn’t willing to let it go.”
“Neither am I.”
“Aurelia.” He strains against the ropes. “I swear to you, we can make this right. I will deal with him. We can rule as we were meant to.”
His attention slides away from me to the watching princes, and his jaw ticks. How does he think he’s going to deal with them if I free him now?
How can he expect me to believe we’d put all this behind us? Just a little misunderstanding, some light kidnapping between lovers?
Great God smite us, why does his plea tug at something inside me all the same?
Lorenzo shifts with a few motions of his hand by his side. Raul nods in apparent agreement. “We’re getting nowhere. Let’s deal with him and stop this horseshit.”
Marc’s mouth tenses. He’s definitely not promising them leniency any time soon.
But it isn’t even a question of how he feels about them, is it? All the promises he’s making me, the love he’s claiming—they’re for some other woman, not the one who’s actually standing in front of him.
If part of me still balks at murdering him, there’s an easy way to resolve my hesitation. To wipe any doubt from my mind about whether we could ever have peace between us.
“Not yet,” I say, and move even closer, my feet just inches from Marc’s where they’re pinned by the chair. He looks up at me, with a trace of hope in his eyes that wrenches at me more than I’m prepared for.
That hope can’t torment me if I shatter it.
“You want to know how you ended up here?” I say, cool and quiet. "I dosed you with a potion that knocked you out… the same way I delivered the poison that killed your father."
For the first few seconds after I've spoken, Marc simply stares at me—not in shock but utterly blank, as if he can't comprehend what I've said. A muscle in his cheek stutters. "You..."
"I got rid of a man who'd tormented my family and the people of my kingdom for far too many years. Who believed an appropriate response to his own nobles making a complaint was to slaughter their daughters—some of whom didn't even want to marry you anyway. Who ruled through terror and the crushing of any spirits strong enough to stand up to him. I have no regrets."
Behind me, Raul lets out a strangled sort of guffaw as if he can't quite believe my boldness.
Marc doesn't appear to know what to make of it either. His mouth opens and closes a few times before he works his voice from it. "Your dedication to Elox. You've always argued against violence."
How dare this man throw my commitment in my face. "I've argued for peace. It was clear no one was going to get that under Tarquin's reign except himself and perhaps his heir. Even Elox could see as much. So I did what needed to be done. I wanted that one act to be the end of it. I wanted to believe you'd consider at least a little of my concerns."
I cut myself off before more anguish than I want to let him see bleeds into my words. "You've made it clear time and time again that's impossible. I have a duty to my people, to every country on the continent, to stop the horrors you're committing before they get any worse."
Marc's lips twist. "Linus?—"
I swipe my hand through the air. "It doesn't matter which of you it was. You didn't stop him. You played along with his games. Even when you finally 'let me into the family,' it was all another test designed to crush me ."
At my sudden movement, the baby elbows my side. I adjust my other arm against my belly.
Marc tracks the movement. His throat works. "Our child. For the sake of our daughter, there has to be a way through this."
His plea is too measured, too reasonable . He still doesn't sound furious. He isn't spitting curses or glaring venom at me.
How much deeper do I need to dig the dagger to bring out the monster I know he is?
" Our child?" I say, as harshly as I can manage. "Do you really think I'd give my body over to a man who tortures and reviles me? I've endured what I had to, but most of what you and your brother remember of our intimate moments is pure hallucination."
“Then—”
Marc’s attention jerks to the men behind me. Something dangerous glitters in his eyes. “Them.” The pieces must click together in his head. He glares at Bastien. “ You .”
Bastien glares right back at him, the knife he’s drawn gleaming in his hand with the wavering lantern light. “Me. Don’t you dare say a word against her. Just because you all but threw her away doesn’t mean no one else was going to recognize what she’s worth.”
In the weighted silence that follows, Marc’s gaze cuts across all of us. I brace myself for hurled insults and caustic accusations.
Instead, he tips back his head and laughs.
There’s no humor in his laughter. It might be the bleakest sound I’ve ever heard, hollow and raw, but there’s no anger in it either.
No, I’d call that agony.
I draw my own knife. Holding it pointed at his heart and setting my other hand on the side of the chair arm for balance, I lean toward him. “Well? How much do you love me now? Am I the wife you dreamed of?”
“Aurelia,” Raul says like a warning, but my grip on the weapon doesn’t falter. I know exactly where to drive it if I need to. It’s not so short it wouldn’t pierce his heart.
Marc’s awful laugh fades away. He meets my eyes again, with a fervor in his now that looks almost like Linus’s mania.
“I wouldn’t have dared to dream of you. I suppose that’s my failing. Gods above—even with all Linus’s paranoid ranting, you managed to convince him there was nothing between you and them—that you barely tolerated their company.”
I flex my fingers around the knife handle. “I did what I had to do to survive and protect the people I care about. I doubt you’d have done much different in my position, whether you believe it or not.”
“Oh, I do.” Despite the fire in Marc’s eyes, his voice has gone strangely subdued. “You know the most absurd thing? I worried you were too kind and accommodating to hold your own. I praised your strength when I’d barely seen a fragment of it. But you were the strongest out of all of us the entire time. You defeated me. I can’t imagine Linus will give you much trouble after that.”
His eerie calm wobbles through my nerves. I prod his shirt with the tip of the blade. “What are you saying? Since when does His Imperial Majesty give up?”
Marc’s chuckle is as raw as his laugh was. “I don’t think it’s giving up when I can see how thoroughly I’m beaten. If you can kill me, then I deserve to die. Conquer all. You’ve held up the first tenet of the empire better than I have.”
I can’t drive my knife into his chest when he’s practically giving me permission. “Don’t try to turn this into another game.”
“I’m not. I’m out of moves.” As he gazes up at me, a melancholy note comes into his voice. “I’d like to think I’d have made different ones if I’d known what I know now.”
With a hiss of inhaled breath, I jerk away from him. My knife hand sways at my side.
Raul strides forward. “You shouldn’t have to listen to any more of his shit. I can?—”
Pain smacks me right in the middle of my pelvis. I hunch over with a gasp.
Fucking cramps.
But this one doesn’t stop. It radiates all the way to my hips, squeezing and twisting every muscle at the base of my belly.
In an instant, all three of the princes have circled me.
“Aurelia, what do you need?” Lorenzo asks in a taut tone.
Bastien grips my arm. “We’ve got you. How can we help?”
Raul’s head jerks toward Marc with a low growl. “If he did something to you?—”
I manage to shake my head, but that’s all I can find the wherewithal to do as the pain swells on and on. I barely notice that it’s started to ebb until my thoughts swim back into sharper clarity.
A sigh rushes out of me. Gathering myself, I ease straighter upright. “I’m okay. Just another cramp.” One that packed a lot more punch than the earlier ones, but it is what it is. “We have to?—”
Another wallop of pain drives through my abdomen. I clutch at Bastien, losing my breath all over again. The searing ache stabs deep between my hips.
And it occurs to me that this isn’t just a cramp. These are full contractions.
Gods help me, no .
The gods don’t appear to give a shit about my plight of unfortunate timing. The pain expands to the point of bringing tears to my eyes before it retreats again.
I choke back a sob, but I can’t deny the understanding rushing through me on the heels of the contraction. “The baby’s going to come.”
Raul sputters a curse and ushers me toward the panel in the wall as fast as my shaky legs will take me. “We’ll get you back to your room, make sure the medics are on their way, and come back to take care of him.”
Him. I can’t stop myself from glancing over my shoulder toward Marc.
He’s watching me go with a fraught expression, somehow hopeless and fierce all at once. Like he’s afraid of me… and possibly for me too.
Like he doesn’t hate me, even after everything I’ve told him.
The pain erupts through my lower belly again. I stop, gripping the men on either side of me to keep my balance, and the lantern light fractures into shards before my eyes.
I see dark feathers bursting apart around the pale form of a dove. I see a blade cutting through a layer of cloth, peeling it away to reveal what lies beneath. I see two lambs dashing away from me.
I can only catch one. But I can catch one.
Elox wanted me to see. I’ve argued against my godlen’s messages for so long, but he never steered me wrong before.
I close my eyes, and Marc’s terrified face follows me into the darkness.
All I’ve ever wanted is peace.
“No,” I grit out. “We leave him here, but we leave him alive. For now. We can’t decide yet.”
When I blink, Raul and Bastien are exchanging a meaningful look. I yank at their shirts. “Promise me!”
A gentle hand I know is Lorenzo’s rests on my back. “We’ll decide together, when you can be part of that decision too. Won’t we?”
At his pointed question, Raul stifles a grimace. “We’ll wait. Fuck. We’ve got to get you out of here.”
He slings my arm over his shoulder and scoops me up in his arms, straining belly and all. As I press my face into the crook of his neck, he hurtles into the passageway.