Chapter 37 Quinn
QUINN
Iscreamed. Before the echo had faded, Mav stood between me and the flood of guards pouring into the room.
“Not one step further,” Mav growled. “Lay a hand on her, and I swear—”
“How touching.” Edric stepped fully into the room.
My stomach plummeted.
“Tell me, Quinnie,” he condescended. “Is he why you hesitated? Why you looked at me as though I were a stranger?”
“Mav did nothing wrong,” I said, finding my voice at last. “If you must be angry, be angry with me.”
“Oh, I intend to be.” He snapped his fingers.
Two guards lunged. Mav erupted into movement. Unarmed and outnumbered, he felled the first with a driving elbow, spun, and drove a knee into the second’s gut. But a third guard struck low, the hilt of his sword slamming into Mav’s ribs. He grunted, folding forward.
“Mav!” I shouted as they wrenched his arms behind his back.
“I’m—” he rasped, blood shining at his lip. “I’ll be fine, princess.”
“No,” I gasped, shaking my head. “No—”
Edric crouched beside him, a serpent moments before striking. “You will love the dungeons,” he murmured. “You’ll find them free of…distractions.”
Mav bared his teeth. “Touch her,” he snarled, “and I will end you.”
The king released a wry chuckle. “No, you won’t.” Edric rose, brushing invisible dust from his sleeve. “Get him out of my sight.”
They dragged Mav toward the hall. “Quinn!” he shouted, twisting to look back at me.
“And round up her little friends while you’re at it,” Edric added.
“Leave them out of this!” I shoved the king in the chest. “They have done nothing—”
Crack.
Edric’s palm met my cheek in a brutal slap. White fire burst behind my eyes. I staggered, copper blooming across my tongue. My hand flew to my burning skin.
“Quinn!” Mav’s roar carried from the landing.
The tether violently wrenched, prepared to rip my ribcage from my body. Air vanished. I clutched my sternum.
Edric’s brow arched. “Have I hurt your precious feelings?”
I gasped. “It is—the tether—”
“Ah, yes. I have a solution for that,” he said mildly, turning as a tall figure entered. “Lord Zachariah, if you please.”
A nobleman I recognized from dinner. He avoided my gaze and clapped his hands together.
Golden light ignited between his palms, knitting itself into a gleaming blade.
Zachariah advanced, chanting in Old Avandrian.
The tether materialized into a visible ribbon of golden, stretched to its breaking point.
“No,” I whispered, stumbling back.
Zachariah raised the sword of light high above his head.
“Please! Don’t!”
The blade fell, slicing through the tether.
My scream did not feel like my own. It clawed itself from marrow and memory, from every place where his presence had lived in me.
Somewhere below, Mav screamed too. I crumbled to the floor, clawing at my chest as if I could seize what had been severed.
Pain crashed over me in a dark tidal wave, devouring breath, devouring thought.
My chest imploded around the sudden void.
The room tilted off its axis. The world slipped its mooring.
The tether was gone.
I could no longer feel Mav’s presence.
“No,” I sobbed, curling into myself. “No, please, please—”
Edric chuckled. “Now that’s better,” he said with the casualness of straightening an off-center painting of himself. “Much better.”
His words hardly reached my ears. I rocked, arms wrapped tight over my chest. My tears came unchecked, hot and salt-slick, sliding into my mouth as my entire body shook.
“All of you, out,” Edric commanded the remaining guards. When they hesitated, he spoke again. “I said out!”
They retreated in a hurried patter. The door thudded closed, sealing the chamber in a foreboding silence.
Edric turned to face me. False tenderness arranged itself upon his features in an ill-fitting mask.
“I had my suspicions,” he murmured. “I wanted to trust you, Quinnie. I told myself you would never humiliate me so.”
He advanced a step. I trembled, still on the floor.
“But I didn’t see what had…blossomed.” He sneered. “As your betrothed and your king, you understand I can’t allow such disrespect to stand.”
I flinched as he crouched beside me. Gloved fingers gripped my chin, forcing my gaze to his. His scent overwhelmed me—the bitter, medicinal tang of wormwood overlaying the rancid scent of rotting pears.
“Seeing as I found the bastard here,” he said, the softness in his voice worse than shouting. “Did you permit him to defile you?”
I went utterly still, as he waited for a shame that would not rise. Instead, what surfaced within me was a cold, cleansing rage.
“Defile?” I echoed, voice sharp as broken glass. “As though my virtue is a trinket held beneath your thumb?”
His brows leaped, shock flashing in his widened eyes.
“I defiled him,” I said, my tone sweet as poisoned wine. “Every inch, and he relished every moment—”
Crack.
Spots danced in my vision as pain rushed along my cheekbone. Blood salted my tongue. I lifted my head until my eyes met his. I was shaking, but remained unbroken and unbowed.
Edric’s composure splintered. “You think this is a game?” When he spoke again, his voice was smooth and cold. “You forget your place.”
My pulse thundered, rattling through my skull until I could feel it in my teeth.
“You were promised to me. Chosen for me.” He paced a slow, predatory circle around me. “Your life, your magic, your body—they are mine.”
I refused to track him; to grant him the satisfaction of my fear.
“You think this is pride?” he asked, circling closer. “It’s survival.” The hairs at my nape rose. “You are the last Twilight, and I’ve waited a very, very long time to bind that bloodline to mine.”
My stomach turned to stone.
“I’ve been patient with your follies.”
I winced as he grabbed my shoulder hard enough to bruise.
“But I don’t take kindly to people touching my belongings.”
Fury rose through the fog of fear. “I do not belong to anyone.”
“You belong to me!” His eyes narrowed to slits as he removed the gloves from his hands. “And now I shall ensure you never forget it.”
An unsettling certainty claimed his features.
All at once, I understood.
Cold surged through me, violent as a winter tide.
He was not going to strike me again.
He was going to forcibly take what he believed to be his.
My limbs locked. The air roared in my ears, a rising rush of blood and fear. My skin prickled, as if it understood before I did. My every instinct screamed for me to run.
Edric lunged.
I shrieked, kicking, scrambling backward. His hand closed around my ankle.
“No!”
He dragged me to him. His weight pinned me against the cold stone floor.
“Get off me!” I screamed, thrashing.
My nails gouged any skin within reach. I slammed my knee upward. He yowled when I sank my teeth into his wrist until blood flooded my mouth. The copper tang mingled with the reek of wormwood and rotting pears.
Nothing deterred him. He was stronger than me by far.
“Stop fighting,” he snarled, breath hot and vile against my ear. “It will be easier if—”
Terror sent lightning through my veins.
No, no, no.
I reached inward. Past pain. Past fear. Past the yawning hollow where Mav’s thread had been severed.
To my magic.
The last thing that was mine.
I called it down from the stars, and it answered. My skin began to shimmer silver.
“What are you—”
Power burst from my hands in a violent surge of color. Twilight auroras exploded outward, throwing Edric off me.
His body seized. Limbs jerked, eyes rolling white. A guttural sound tore from his throat as he went slack. Alive—regrettably, but unconscious.
The silence afterward rang in my ears. My heart slammed wild and uneven. I stared at the sleeping king, my hands shaking so violently they blurred. My knees buckled, and I fell to the floor.
Sobs came in raw, heaving waves. I clutched at my sternum, at the hollow where the tether had once lived. I reached for it anyway, half-mad, desperate. Needing one spark. One flicker.
Nothing.
No warmth.
No pull.
I do not know how long I cried. Time had no shape. The cold stone floor seeped into my nightgown. Thoughts circled like carrion birds, dropping broken fragments into my mind:
He will kill Mav.
He will kill them all.
You gave him the excuse. You gave him the reason.
The spiral threatened to drag me under. I shut my eyes. My refusal could very well accelerate their deaths. Edric could take the rejection out on them in the form of torture.
Twilight whispered along my skin.
I knew what must be done.
My fingers shook as I pressed them to my temple. I built the sequence slowly. I imagined what Edric craved. His desire made manifest. Tonight, as he wished it to be. I crafted it to be believable as memory.
My skin crawled with the horror of what I had created.
As I pulled my fingers from my temple, the silver threads of the fabrication stuck to my fingertips. I crossed to his unconscious form. Bile burned my throat as I laid my hand on his head, transferring the sequence into his mind.
Edric sighed and smiled in his sleep.
Wiping my face with the heel of my hand, I trudged to the washroom. I rinsed his blood from my mouth and splashed water over my face. Avoiding his place on the floor as I walked, I curled into the farthest corner of the bed.
Sleep did not grant me the mercy of its reprieve. I lay breathing through the pain, the grief, and the gaping hollow where Mav used to be, waiting for a dawn I was not sure I wanted to see.