Chapter 31
Chapter
Thirty-One
EVIE
I plunged into the crystal water feet first, arms still reaching, as if begging for someone to save me.
As soon as the lake engulfed me, panic took hold.
Despair seared through me, freezing my limbs. I yelled inside my mind, but I couldn’t kick myself back up to the surface.
An unseen force was pushing me into the depths, the same way it had back in Grandpa Constantine’s pool when I was five, right before I was whisked away to the mountains.
Instead of fighting the water, my hands turned against me and clawed at my throat.
The purple surface above rippled as a shadow dove in. His palms grabbed onto my shoulders, trying to drag me up.
But I was stuck, legs limp, and heavy. My mouth opened in a silent scream, air escaping my already stinging lungs.
His face tightened with alarm.
He swam underneath, trying to push me back up. My body bucked against the pressure.
He shook my shoulders, tried to pull me again, grabbed my face in his hands, as if trying to reason with me wordlessly.
Nothing worked.
My eyelids began to close as I sunk deeper, my lungs now empty.
Then he kissed me.
Hard.
He pushed his tongue into my mouth and blew his own precious air into me.
The surprise of it shocked me out of my panic. My body stopped battling against me. As soon as I began to melt against his body, he broke the kiss, gripped me tighter and swam to the surface, like his own life depended on it.
He kicked when my legs refused. His arm wrapped around my waist and didn’t let me go until we both breached the surface, breathing heavily. The soft meadow breeze tasted sweeter.
“Don’t ever do that again.” His voice was commanding, despite the fear in it. “What happened down there?”
I shook my head, water droplets gathering in the valley of my brows, my shame deep. “I don’t know. This always happens when I’m in water.”
He clenched his jaw, but didn’t chide or ridicule. Instead, he nodded once and gently guided my arms around his neck. “Hold on tight.”
I nodded, my throat still seized by fear.
He swam us to shore safely as I clung to his back. He kept his movements slow, trying not to startle me more. He helped me onto the bank, keeping a steady hand on the small of my back as I found my balance again, a steady, grounding presence by my side.
Our clothes and hair dried instantly in the warm breeze. Even after I got my breathing under control, I still couldn’t look at him. He’d already seen me cry, I didn’t need him to see me panic.
“You scared me,” he said. I didn’t hear any reproach, but those words still cut me.
“I thought I’d gotten a handle on it. I know how to swim, I do. It’s just…fear.” And something else, something I couldn’t name. Yes, I almost drowned as a child, but I’ve been through tougher situations since then. This terror couldn’t be so deep…could it? “We’re in a dream, for gods’ sake.”
“Exactly. You have nowhere to hide in your mind, the fear is stronger.” His thumb caressed my temple in a ghost of a touch. “Use it, don’t let it control you.”
“I know. I will.” I swallowed thickly and cleared my throat, eager to change the subject. I sat down, fingers splaying in the silky grass.
His gaze never left my face. I felt completely exposed to him and it burned my pride while also searing my veins with that damn desire.
He’d given me his blood to protect me, now his air to save me.
“Thank you for saving me,” I mumbled. My heart was still racing, whether from drowning or his lips on mine, I didn’t know.
“Always, menace,” he said earnestly. “But can you do me a favor?”
“Depends on what you’re asking.”
“Can you stop risking your life?” That smile of his came back with a vengeance. “Indulge me for a single week.”
Despite the unease, I laughed. Gods, it felt good.
“That’s a long time for someone living in your Clan,” I said, playing along.
He sighed dramatically. “Then I just have to keep saving you.”
My stomach should not have flipped the way it had.
I cleared my throat, trying to keep my cheeks from coloring. I felt weak, but that didn’t mean I could allow myself a moment of weakness with him .
Not after everything that had happened at the wedding.
Not without knowing why it had to.
“You were right,” I said quickly. “Your parents are definitely brain-washed.”
If Zavoya spewed Banu and Valuta’s words without realizing it, Eldryan must have been targeted as well. After all, he carried all that precious Rohenstorm blood.
He and his son.
“What happened?” he asked sharply.
“You mean apart from your mother talking about my birthing hips and trying to coax me into having a lot of babies?”
His lips parted, but no words came out. He seemed to be caught between shock and confusion. He slumped on the grass next to me. There was an arm’s length between us, but my skin still pricked at the proximity.
We’d stood closer since the wedding. Between threatening him, the duel and–gods help me–the kissing, we’d inhaled each other’s breaths. But those moments were tainted with tension and mistrust.
This closeness–strictly physical, because there was still an emotional chasm between us–was so natural. Just two people sitting next to each other and talking in this beautiful, gorgeous meadow.
He looked up at the purple sky. “Why is my mother talking to you about sex and babies?”
“Because she wanted to convince me to let you alter my blood so that I could have eternal youth. Obviously.”
His eyes shined with an intensity that wasn’t there before. “I would never use my powers on you without your consent.”
“I know.”
I didn’t mention the other part of that conversation, about heirs and their sacrifice. He had hurt me, but, in this, I would not repay him in kind.
Nobody should feel like an afterthought to their own parents. I knew that first-hand.
“Want to know what I think?” I asked.
“It’s my greatest wish.”
“At first, I was furious at her. But I’ve been thinking about it…” I wrung my fingers, as if I could weave confidence in my theory from thin air. “ If Banu and Valuta are controlling your parents, maybe Zavoya noticed something’s wrong. Something so sinister, it shocked her and helped her circumvent the mental hold the advisors have, and she tried sending a message. Something which would require producing an heir–your heir–as quickly as possible.”
Zavoya’s small act of rebellion in a sea of complacency. Perhaps I was too harsh. After all, I was convinced I managed to resist Valuta’s powers because Allie–dear, sweet Allie, who’d looked out for me even before I knew what danger I truly had to face–had cast a protective spell on me.
Zavoya and Eldryan hadn’t had that advantage.
The angles of his face morphed, turning so angular, he almost didn’t look human. Fury radiated off him.
Owyn also had his suspicions about the advisors wanting the prince gone.
But it still didn’t make sense to me.
Why would Banu and Valuta so desperately want to get rid of me and marry their daughter off to The Dragon only to plot his downfall? They couldn’t take the throne, even if they managed to get rid of Zavoya and Eldryan as well, and Kaya couldn’t lead a Clan, especially not the Blood Brotherhood.
If the Rohen dynasty and the Rohenstorm family’s claim to the throne was by blood, then the crown could only go to an heir–
The meadow began to tremble and groan as realization slashed through me. The crystal water rippled.
The Dragon made a move to cover me as the twinkling lights in the trees fell around us, but I jerked away.
My soul shook as hard as the ground.
“Are you and Kaya having a child?” I asked in a deadly whisper.
As if that changed anything. But the idea of him and her and–
“No,” he said.
I detected no lie.
“I’ve never touched her and I never will,” he went on.
Still no lie.
The sudden earthquake began to quiet, but a wail continued to ring around us. It sounded like it came from his wall of shadows tucked behind the trees.
“I know I have no right to say this, but I only want you. I always will,” he whispered. “And if I survive this war, I will dedicate my life to making amends for the fact that I made you doubt that.”
Words. Just words. Truthful ones, I felt it, but words nonetheless.
“Marrying someone else tends to do that,” I said.
“I’m sorry.”
“That doesn’t change anything.”
“I know,” he said, his sadness a palpable pulse against me. “But I want you to know and understand, truly understand , that making you suffer is my biggest regret in life.”
I didn’t reply. His remorse was so profound in this world, it left an ashy, bitter taste in my mouth.
But the wedding had happened, the pain had been felt, and I couldn’t think of any possible way he could make it right.
“If darling Kaya isn’t carrying a little Rohenstorm inside her,” I said, venom dripping from my lips. “Then it doesn’t make any sense for the advisors to want you gone. They don’t have a claim to the throne. It would fall back to whatever descendants the former dynasty still has, if any. Either that or your parents are suddenly obsessed with grandbabies, which doesn’t seem like them and–why…why are you looking at me like that?”
His face had lost those sharp angles from only moments before as he stared at me with such pride, it made my heart stutter. “Looks like someone has learned to dissect the scheming ways of the Blood Brotherhood court. I believe someone else predicted you’d adapt quite well to Phoenix Peak.”
“Yes, yes, you might have been right.” I gulped to keep from licking my lips again; I’d already fallen once tonight. “You can gloat about it after you win the war.”
His mouth twisted with a grimace.
My heart began to race anew. If the famed Blood Brotherhood army fell–“We are winning…right?”
“The Serpents have a mysterious ally,” he said evenly. “They’re protected by some kind of veil that gives them force. The only Clan capable of it is the Protectorate–”
I opened my mouth to argue once more, but he beat me to it.
“And I know–I know –that Silas is useless and you trust your cousins,” he said. “They’re all accounted for, except for Dax, that slippery bastard, whose whereabouts change every five minutes–”
“I know where he is. And Dax hates the Serpents more than you, so he’s not to blame.”
He sighed gravely. “There might be a very powerful Protectorate member who loves the Serpents too much. Anyone come to mind?”
“The First Family has most of the power in our Clan.”
“Any bastards?”
“Grandpa Constantine would kill you for even implying he would have ever cheated.”
“Not him. Others. He had brothers.”
“I only spent days with my Clan when I came back, I didn’t exactly have time to listen to gossip.” But my cousins might have.
“No the Protectorate would never do that?”
“No.” After discovering someone was in my parents’ former library all those long years, I couldn’t deny it any longer. “I don’t know if a veil like that could even work.”
I didn’t know a lot about Protectorate magic–there were more answers I needed to find.
Fast.
Between a Protectorate member potentially helping the Serpents and the advisors possibly wanting to kill the prince, nothing made sense. Not to mention the fact that someone out there wanted to drain me and my cousins of blood. That didn’t seem like a Serpent plan.
Everything was a confusing mess.
One thing couldn’t be, though–the war.
“ Are we winning?” I asked.
He hesitated.
“Don’t lie,” I said. “Truth for truth.”
He clenched his jaw hard enough that I felt an echo of his pain. “No.”
I inhaled sharply. “Are we losing ?”
“Not yet. Gods willing, we won’t. I have a plan, insane enough to work.”
“What if…what if it doesn’t?”
He lowered his gaze. “Then I will have failed my Clan and I will die, and you will survive and run where nobody can find you.”
“You really think I’d run?”
He huffed a laugh. “That proud, stubborn Vegheara blood.”
“What if…” I gulped. “What if I fail?”
“You only fail if you die.”
“Zand–” I swallowed thickly once more, his name still defiantly lodged in my throat. “Fine. What if I die?”
“Then I will follow you into the gods’ embrace and my Clan will cease to exist.”
“Why are you so sure you’d die without me, but I won’t die without you?”
In case the first heir dies.
A sad smile curved the corner of his lips. He stared at me for the longest time, gaze jumping over my features, as if wanting to remember every freckle and lash. “Because I love you more than you love me.”