Chapter 40
CHAPTER FORTY
MORGANA
I don’t know if I fully comprehended what I was doing before my lips were pressed against his with this gentle hesitancy. I found a strange comfort in the resentment I held for the gesture of affection I imposed upon him.
I couldn’t help it. He looked so tired, sad—vulnerable. I meant what I had said. He wasn’t a monster. He was… evil, selfish, cold, but he was… tempting. He was a trial of blood and sweat and danger.
I wanted to win.
Did that make me selfish? Yes.
But as I jolted back mere seconds after our kiss, the electricity between us fizzled. The peace turned to chaos again as the noise, the jostling train, and loud silence occupied the space. It was a paradox I didn’t want to understand. I merely wanted it to cease.
“I’m…”
Was I sorry?
My eyes fluttered open to catch his bewildered gaze, flushed cheeks, and more than anything else, the ghost of a smile.
“Do you kiss monsters often?”
I choked on a bitter laugh, but it wasn’t without a glare. “I don’t think I’ve ever tried something so wicked.”
Aster hummed. It was deep and vibrated in his chest, his presence so close that it roused this deep, irrational frustration. I was the one who’d done this. I was the one who brought on this terrible, terrible confusion.
I was far too rash.
“Poisonous, perhaps.” He pushed himself off his knee and stood, offering a hand down to me. I stared at it, the places his hands had been turning cold. I gulped and accepted his help. His hold on me lingered before letting go, bowing his head and gesturing toward the door. “There is plenty of time to find your preferred flavor of poison, little dove. As I’ve said. We must train in whatever manner this train permits, and to do that, you must eat.”
I squeaked. I fucking squeaked. Like a rat. My brother had called me a mouse for the way I snored—quiet yet grating, as he would say—but I never lost my composure around people like this. Hells, when Galen went missing, I made it my mission to use people, even kill if warranted, but this was worse than any espionage or sabotage I’d ever endured.
This was dangerous.
I sat at a long table fit for six bodies. Nestled one chair away from each other on the other side was Erynna and Aster, and I alone in the middle opposite them.
We were in a dining car. The room was small, and the food smelled divine. The staff were dressed in all black with white gloves, and the walls were draped in crimson curtains, the furniture dark and glossy. I didn’t touch much of my food. I wasn’t hungry. I was in shock.
Okay, perhaps I was hungry. But that streak of confidence in the observation cart had dwindled to terrible anxiety, my hands trembling beneath the table as I stared at the plate of steaming meat and vegetables.
I wanted to hate these two.
“Morgana, are you okay?” Erynna asked, her tone flat but, well, concerned.
I looked up. Aster was focused on his food. To think that she was the first to offer friendship, and the first to jump ship. I wondered if she spent her days away from that university Aster told me about, with pirates, learning their ways after capturing the only bit of hope I had left.
“Fine,” I muttered, picking up the silverware. I cut the steak slowly, watching the juices ooze out of the meat. It was cooked to perfection. “I’m fine.”
I heard Erynna sigh as I sliced a piece of the meat, and Aster shifted in his seat. A few moments passed before she responded. “Since I trust my brother has done little to prepare you for our time in Avendatis, I wanted to tell you our plan. It ought to bring you back to your roots.”
“My roots?” I repeated, taking a slow bite of food.
“You spent years sneaking across rooftops in search of your brother, correct? Even went so far as to kill?”
“Erynna,” Aster hissed. My gaze flicked between the two of them before I dropped my fork on the plate with a clatter.
“What?” she hissed back and threw her head in his direction. “Stop treating her like glass. She’s wielded a blade to survive before. This week will be no different.”
I leaned back in my seat, hands tucking beneath my arms in a tight hug across my torso. “Please tell me we are not planning on assassinating a royal.”
Erynna faced me fully, that warm, saccharine smile spreading across her face. “Well, let us hope it doesn’t come to that. But, no, that is not my first plan. Hardly my second.”
“Good. If it was, you better choose the quote you want on your grave. If you’re fortunate enough to get a burial, that is.”
Her head cocked, dark strands of hair falling from the clip that held it from her face. I felt burned by those piercing crimson eyes. Aster’s were sad at times, hollow even, but hers? They were fiercely loyal and calculative. If I had any doubts about her loyalty or my usefulness to either of them, I’d be on my knees begging for mercy already.
But Erynna and I were cut from the same cloth. She may have had the royal training and the agility that came with it, but I’d been forced to learn how to survive on my own. Just like Galen had.
That arcanist in the morgue was not the first life I’d taken.
It was simply the most innocent of them all.
“Tell me, Morgana. How many lives have you taken?”
The breath choked in my lungs at the question. Aster, too, had grown silent, but I could sense the patient stare that dug a hole into my cheek. He was waiting. I had no doubts he’d let me sit in silence for the rest of the night, if it came down to it.
Erynna, however, was not a patient woman.
So my mouth formed the number before my voice found its courage. It used to be four.
My heart ached at the fifth. The arcanist didn’t deserve the monstrous death I’d given her. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Five.”
“Only five?” Erynna leaned back in her seat and mimicked my posture, arms crossed tightly over her chest. “Are we going to make that six this week?”
“Something tells me I have little choice in that matter,” I said before gritting my teeth. “Is there a point to this line of questioning, Princess?”
“None.” She went lax again, shoulders slouching forward after a melodramatic sigh. She grabbed her silverware and pierced the fork through a cubed potato. “Well, some, but if Aster glares at me any harder, I fear his shadowy friends will do everything in their power to keep me from sleeping this entire trip.”
My attention turned to him, but he was already fixated on his food once more. There was a dark presence about him that hadn’t existed moments earlier—this uncertain dark mist that rolled off his skin in waves.
He was hauntingly beautiful, a terror in the skin of man. I licked my lips and turned my attention back to Erynna, doing everything in my power to ignore the inexplicable draw I felt to him. I loathed Aster Sinclair—he was my captor and the reason I was stripped from my friends and attempts at finding Galen.
I wanted to scream at both of them at the mere thought. These emotions roiled within me like a tempest I’d never experienced before. Normally I was calm, level-headed, indifferent.
Lately, though, I’d been teetering on the edge of insanity and numb lethargy.
“Why don’t we stop pretending like either of us care about Aster’s anger and you tell me exactly what it is I need to know in order to win my freedom.”
Erynna stopped chewing for a moment, laughing with a closed mouth before grabbing her wine and drawing it to her mouth. After swallowing her food and drink, she wagged her fork at me. “Smart. The sooner you learn to ignore his tantrums, the better. These shadows make him so irritable sometimes.”
I hummed.
“But, as I was saying,” she said and stabbed her fork into a piece of steak. “King Lucif de Avendatis,” she said, emphasizing the accent, “is an ugly, mean man. But he has handsome sons who hate him just as much as we do. We believe one of them has the mirror, but even if Lucif had a warm heart, he’d never give it up easily. Aster will play a politician, I will distract the princes, and you… well, to be clear, you will remain boring enough to forget. I need them to believe you are not their concern so you can dig up anything we can find that points us to the mirror.”
I had balled my fist beneath my chin, elbow pressed into the hard wooden table, and shook my head. This wouldn’t work. “I don’t do well at blending into small spaces, Erynna. They are going to question why I, who by no means look, act, or speak like a royal, am accompanying the two most dangerous arcanists in all the land.”
“Hear that, brother?” Erynna said with a cackle, jabbing him with her elbow. “She just called us arcanists.”
Aster smiled subtly, lifting his attention to me.
“Don’t worry about looking the part. That is why you are going to get a royal makeover on our last day. Courtesy of your least-trustworthy friend.” Aster’s sister grinned ear to ear, holding up her wine glass to cheer me. “I cannot wait to make heads roll.”
I swallowed past the lump in my throat. “You know, I’m not going to even fight you on this.” I peered at my partially eaten steak, my stomach turning into knots. “Just so long as I get my freedom back, bit by bit, mission by mission. I don’t care how many dead ends you two send me down.”
It was Aster who spoke next. “We’re grasping at straws here, Morgana. The last few that remain too.”
His words earlier rang in my ears, and I folded my hands in my lap so tightly that my skin nearly bruised. “As I said. I don’t care, just so long as you live up to your word.”
Erynna giggled wildly. “Then we train, dress you for the role, and you do what you do best. Get us answers or kill when things go awry. You know, the normal day-to-day things.”
I lifted my head. “Am I free to go?” I asked with a harsh, twisted tone pointed at Aster. He merely nodded once, jolted onto my feet, and aimed for the train car for my bed.
Just as I opened the door to move into the next room, I heard the prince whisper to his sister, “You are a cruel woman, Erynna. She doesn’t need to be treated like she is beneath you.”
“You’re correct, Aster,” Erynna said between bites of food just as quietly. “She is not beneath us, nor is she fragile. Have faith and trust my process.”
I pierced a nail into my palm and continued out of the room, tears threading across my eyes. I wasn’t fragile, no, but lately I felt so weak that the wind could blow me away.
I had never felt more bewildered and afraid than now. That kiss was the first time I’d felt numb to it all, but it was temporary.
More than anything, though, I’d never felt like I could crack easier than glass. I was not fragile, but I was waiting to shatter. It was only a matter of time before I let it all fall apart.