7. The Mercy of a Taxpayer’s Money
seven
The Mercy of a Taxpayer’s Money
M y body was a traitorous vessel, its nerves singing from the lingering traces of the true High King of Faerie’s touch, but my mind—which, for arguably the first time in my adult life, had all of its wits fully intact without being chemically rebalanced by prescription medications—was spinning, falling, reeling.
Lucais had watched me smash priceless heirlooms into smithereens, and he didn’t try to stop me.
He had witnessed my faerieslaughter of a member of his staff, but he didn’t reprimand me.
He had kissed me, and then he wiped it off.
He had watched his own body being brutally tortured inside of my mind, but then he propositioned me for sex.
Infuriating High Fae, High King bastard!
I was so enraged that I thought steam would start blowing out of my ears.
As it was, however, only my breath clouded in front of me as Lucais opened the second door of the dank chamber and brought me into the real dungeon.
The room rapidly dropped to subzero temperatures, causing me to lose all sensation in my fingertips, and the moisture-laden air made every breath feel small and heavy in my lungs.
An inane sense of fear invaded my nervous system, and I searched for Lucais’s hand at his side.
For a split second once our knuckles touched, I was convinced he was going to pull away, but Lucais flexed his fingers around my hand before he threaded them through mine.
Warmth engulfed me from the inside out—a sensation he was providing using his magic to combat the bitter chill chipping away at my bones.
I hadn’t realised that my teeth were chattering until they abruptly ceased under the command of his power, and then I squeezed his hand back.
Our footsteps were stiff but heavy against the damp, uneven cobblestone ground.
The echoes were sharp, serenaded by an occasional plop of water dripping from the iron bars of the empty cells on either side of us.
There would have been no illumination if not for the orbs of Lucais’s faelight spinning around us as we moved because the cells had no windows.
If not for that little detail, the dungeon would be identical to the one from my nightmares.
My neck twitched against the temptation of a shudder, and Lucais glanced down at me. His eyes were a startling contrast against the gloom and darkness—vivid gold, deep enough for me to climb into and hide from the monsters who lurked within the memories of the room.
We walked by rows upon rows of small, tight cages protected by thick, wrought-iron bars. All of them were empty, haunted, foreboding.
At the end of the path, the space opened up.
A long, worn bench sat in the middle of the floor beneath a wall with hooks and large nails hammered into a wooden beam at crooked angles.
Weapons hung from them, though the shadows were especially dark and made them harder to discern, and Lucais’s faelight orbs remained obediently tethered to our sides.
Bravely, I took a step out into the open space and let his hand drop from my grasp.
A single orb of faelight accompanied me, alongside the warm relief of his magic stretching out to soothe the distance.
My gaze was trained on some kind of blade hanging from the rack.
I thought it might be familiar, though I couldn’t be sure. One more step, and—
Clang.
My head whipped in the direction of the sound, its shallow echo sending a bolt of anxiety rolling down my sternum.
The orb of faelight by my side hesitated, then eventually followed my line of sight.
Its weak, yellow-tinged glow illuminated the corner of the dungeon in a watery light, and my gasp of shock became lodged in my throat like a stone.
Hands flying to brace themselves against my stomach and chest, I banished all the air from my lungs by trying to scream. For all of my efforts, the noise I made amounted to nothing more than a strangled cry, muffled by the inability of my own lips to fully come apart.
The mangled figure of a man, strung up by his hands in iron cuffs chained to the ceiling, barely flinched beneath the sudden onset of faelight.
His skin was coated in dried blood, his wrists so raw the bone was exposed where the iron had burned his skin and flesh down to the remnants of a few loose flaps of ligaments and muscle.
The chains clanked together as he attempted to lift his head, bloodshot eyes spearing straight into mine.
My stomach gurgled with gall and spiralled downwards.
I recognised him as the sentry from the clearing in the Court of Light who had struck me.
Face pale and drawn, his matted hair was plastered to a forehead smeared with blood and dirt.
His eyes barely held the strength of a single blink before his head snapped forward with enough force to sprain the tendons in his neck.
“Hanson,” I whispered.
Lucais’s shoes scuffed against the ground as he came up beside me. I felt the warmth of his palm hovering within an inch of my lower back.
“What the fuck have you done?” I breathed, shaking my head as Hanson’s body finished swaying. My words were wisps of grey mist in the shadows between us.
The High King let out an agitated breath, mingling with mine. “This is not what I wanted to show you,” he muttered.
“Why did you do this?” I demanded softly, emphasising each word.
He shrugged in my peripheral vision. “He hit you.”
A tense, lengthy pause strained between us while I waited for him to elaborate. He stared at me like he was trying to figure out what more there was to say.
“You’re my mate,” he said at last, “and the High Queen of Faerie—or you will be, one day—and that means I could have someone executed for looking at you the wrong way if the mood struck. But, if you recall, you were not enthused by my suggestion of his execution, so”—he made a wide, reverent gesture towards the sentry with both hands—“I put him here. Alive. ” A heartbeat later, suddenly his voice was light and the words were coming out fast. “I cut out his tongue for the way he spoke to you, but he is alive. Can we move on now?”
My eyes were as round as a full moon and equally tormented as I steered my gaze back to the High King’s former sentry.
I knew it was stupid and, quite frankly, infuriating for me to feel badly about a man who had put his hands on me with harmful intent, but old habits were hard to break.
I felt something pulling at a loose thread of my heart as I scanned Hanson’s condition one last time.
The former member of the Guard had aged considerably since the last time I saw him, as if the magic preserving his immortal features had been drained from his very blood.
He suddenly looked like a great-grandfather, almost blurring the lines of mortality; a relic of humanity with wrinkles and skin sagging beneath his eyes and chin.
Lucais had rendered him helpless. Stripped him bare.
Robbed him of his strength and the power he possessed—derived from the position he had held in the High King’s Guard and for the simple fact that he was a man.
He came armed with the implied maturity and intelligence of all the years and all the weapons forged for him by his predecessors.
He had expected the world to honour it. And then Lucais took that, too.
I had to admit that part of me was thoroughly disgusted by the sight. Part of me was flattered, though. Even pleased.
A man had hit me, and Lucais had strung him up in the dungeon like a butcher’s kill of the day.
He had not even given him the privilege of sitting down in his own cell, never mind the notion of a fair trial or the bail granted to reoffend at the mercy of a taxpayer’s money. He had done that. For me.
When I realised how deeply concerning it was for me to be romanticising the actions of a psychopath, my forehead creased. My therapist would have been mortified—but my therapist had tried to keep me out of Faerie with pills, so I decided that I couldn’t really be bothered about her opinion anymore.
Lucais put both hands on my shoulders, his fingers reaching so far down that the tips softly curled underneath my collarbone. He gently spun me around, bending his head to speak into my ear. “Don’t try to scream this time,” the High King whispered.
And then my eyes met the serpentine gaze of my father through a set of iron bars.
The scream coiled beneath my rib cage, ready to spring loose at the flip of a switch.
It was tight, electrified, and raw. Lucais’s hands held it at bay, the soothing tendrils of his power coaxing a sense of calm and strength throughout my trembling body as pure, instinctive fear gripped my heart and nearly ripped it right out of my chest.
My father. In Faerie.
Lucais wrapped an arm around my waist, a life ring in rough seas. You’re safe. I’m here.
He was right.
I wasn’t alone. And when I wasn’t alone, I was always strong. I always had been, and I always would be, whether we were facing each other down in the human realm or in the land of the faeries.
Loosening my grip on the High King’s arm with my next steadying breath, I noticed that my nails had been digging crescent moons deeply into his flesh and felt a flood of regret colouring my face.
The ice-cold, emotionless eyes in the cell pierced me like the point of a fencing sword. They were the eyes I had once believed to be the mirrors of my own, as blue as a lagoon to reflect the seas in mine. After all, they were the only feature we shared. The long lashes, the clear colour.
But my mother had blue eyes, too, and my father wasn’t related to me at all.
I was the unlucky product of a faerie fling—the result of my mother’s infidelity within the first year of her marriage to the blue-eyed man presently behind bars.
The faerie father was nameless to me, and I had no desire to learn of his identity, but that did not change the truth.
The man in the prison cell was not my father.
But he was the man who had haunted me throughout my childhood and into my adult life.
He was the man who used his voice to silence the rest of our household.
The man who used his fists when that didn’t work.
He was the man who wore a bad mood like a cloak he never took off that dragged along the floor, leaving a trail of sadness and discomfort in its wake.
He was the man who tread heavy footsteps down the hall, whose weight caused the floorboards outside my bedroom to creak as he approached in the middle of the night.
He was the man who never stepped across the threshold, but sometimes paused to reconsider his decision to leave me alone after he’d already turned and started to walk away.
In truth, I didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t left. But I would try to stay awake for as long as I could afterwards, and then I’d fall asleep picturing his hand around my throat as he squeezed the last of the air from my body because that’s what I thought I heard him thinking about.
He wasn’t capable of doing that any longer.
My father figure was alive. The mortal louse had been preserved.
Although, he didn’t look like he was really aware of my presence or capable of coherent speech as he stared directly through the iron bars between us.
I moved, tilting my head from one side to the other, and watched him, waiting for a reaction.
None came.
He was breathing, but not responsive.
The terror invoked by his face subsided as quickly as it had risen. I covered my mouth with my hand and waited for the indignation to take its place. I waited for some kind of anger to boil to the surface, for fury at Lucais for what he had done to come and slap me back to my senses.
It didn’t. I suddenly realised I would be waiting forever because it never would.
Lucais Starfire had done the one thing I’d dreamed about doing for longer than anything else.
The desire was my earliest memory, my first big dream.
Lucais had exacted the vengeance that all of my previous boyfriends had sworn to do in defence of my honour.
He succeeded in the task that most of my father’s friends had set out to accomplish, and he did it without making a mess.
He did it without seeking glory for besting the monster.
Lucais had no trophy scars. No war stories.
No expectations of me. He simply had the man incapacitated in his dungeon, and the safety of his mate and her family secured.
I blinked up at him in a stupor and cleared my throat before I tested out my shaky voice. “You have had my father here this whole time?”
The High King nodded, staring intently at his prisoner through the bars. “Yes.”
I’d killed a man earlier in the day in a fit of rage.
I’d fought back a self-righteous smile at the sight of the sentry who had hit me strung up like prey.
And now I was about to thank the person responsible for both of those atrocities—the High King who had tortured his own man, kidnapped my father, and then discarded them both in a dungeon without so much as an acknowledgement in the newspapers.
It was the end of the road for me. I could never go back—and I didn’t even want to because the truth of the matter was that the situation I was in with Lucais was where I had been trying to go my whole life. Ever since I was a child, as deranged as I knew it may very well be.
I swallowed the emotional lump in my throat, trying to calm my racing heart and reel in my ecstatic, livewire nerves.
“Please let him go,” I said quietly, doing my best to mimic a businesslike and professional tone. I swallowed, and the sound was audible. “Before I actually fall in love with you.”
A heart beat twice in separate chests.
“Ew,” Lucais scoffed, scrunching his nose as he gave me a sideways glance. His eyes slid back to my father with the ease of an oil slick, but I thought I spied the corner of his mouth twitching. He flattened it immediately and adjusted his shirt. “Control yourself, woman.”
A gurgle of laughter rose up my throat and burst out of my mouth, the sound of a dam overflowing after many years of heavy rainfall under immoveable clouds and poor maintenance of the overall structure.
I laughed until I couldn’t breathe, until my sides cramped, and I almost fell over.
I laughed until Lucais picked me up and carried me out of the dungeon, his faithful orbs of faelight trailing us for the whole journey to a bedroom somewhere high up in the palace.
I laughed until tears streamed freely down my cheeks, into my ears, over my throat, and between my breasts.
I laughed until my jaw hurt and my throat was raw, until I forgot why I had ever begun, and until I fell asleep.