16. My Least Favourite Person in the World #2
I gestured vaguely to his looming and overbearing frame. “The whole protective soulmate bit. Even when you’re sick of me, you’re still so aggressive about keeping me alive. I get it. You take your job seriously. Commendable work ethic and all, but you can tone it down.”
A blond brow stretched up into an arch on his forehead, and he rubbed his temple with one hand when he asked, “Are you trying to get yourself killed on purpose?”
“No.” I kicked at the gravel beneath my boots. I could admit to making decisions that didn’t centre around the preservation of life, but I wasn’t suicidal. “Not really.”
Groaning, both hands moved to his temples, rubbing small circles on his skin as if he was trying to stave off a headache.
“Why does it always have to be about you, Aura? For the love of fuck, I don’t have to ask you to marry me—or whatever it is that you humans do—in order to feel guilty if you end up dead,” Lucais reminded me wearily, hands sliding into his hair.
“For better or worse, you’ve monopolised my every waking moment since the day we met, and have you ever considered what I’m supposed to do if you’re suddenly gone? What are you going to leave me with?”
“I’m not leaving,” I said, rolling my eyes. “I don’t want to die—”
“Then what else do you need to grant me the permission I apparently require to care about your life? Since I love you clearly isn’t enough—”
I cut him off, incredulous. “You were poisoned —”
“I was still perfectly lucid—”
“That’s a lie if ever I heard one!”
He dropped his hands from his head and clenched his fists. “I meant it when I said those words to you, damn it!”
“It doesn’t matter,” I spat back with a little more acid than he probably deserved. “It’s not you, and it’s not me, and we both know it!”
Lucais looked at me like I’d just hacked off my own nose to spite my face. “Are you dense?” he demanded. “You could be my least favourite person in the world, and still be the only one I’d save if it ended. That’s what this bond means.”
“Exactly my point—”
“No!” he bellowed, cutting a line through the air between us with his hand.
I fell still, watching him like a storm rolling in on the horizon. A vein appeared on his forehead, his jaw locked, and he raised his pointer finger in the air. There was a dark part of me that wanted to lash out and bite it, so I turned my head away with my hands looped around the back of my neck.
“I decided to have these feelings for you all on my own,” Lucais vowed. “Trust me, even you yourself had very little to do with it in the end, considering you constantly berate me for saving your fucking life!” He stared at me, wild-eyed, chest rising and falling rapidly. “Loving you is its own—”
“Stop it!” I seethed, jerking my hands away from my head.
My fingers were so stiff that, for a moment, I worried they’d sprain as his infernal words entwined around my heart like live wires.
I’d heard him the first time, and then the second, but I was very deliberately acting as though I had not. “Stop saying that!”
“Why?” he challenged me.
“Because I know !” I gripped two fistfuls of my hair on either side of my head, my eyes feeling like they were about to explode straight out of my skull. “I know you do. Or you think you do. I heard you! I just don’t want you to—”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake, Aura.” Lucais cradled his face in his hands.
“Why not?” he implored, lifting his head.
“Is it the Oracle? The whole fate thing? The High Mother?” Dropping his arms back to his sides, I caught the roll of his golden eyes as he shook his head at me despairingly.
“Who the fuck cares? You want me to summon them and demand they rescind their part in this? Because I’ll fucking do it—”
“ No! ”
“Then what ?” he yelled, so wretchedly I swore the wind changed directions and the empty warehouses shuddered. “What is so wrong with this that you can’t let me in for just a single fucking second long enough to show you what’s been right in front of your face since we met?”
“ Because! ” I screamed back at him mindlessly. I held no dominion over the weather, so I stomped my feet like a child and kicked up a small cloud of thin grey dust. A few measly stones scattered, clanging against the metal fence.
The High King panted as he watched, waiting for me to elaborate with the kind of patience that could wait out the death of a star. Lucais had waited so long already—he probably thought he had all the time in the world.
“You might love me,” I began quietly. The words tasted sour in my mouth. “But you are an asshole , Lucais. You think saying sorry is going to erase the fact that you were horrible to me when we first met? You think that your good intentions are good enough?”
He watched me, calculating and cool, though his eyes were practically on fire. I stared back at him, shoulders trembling, and devoured the expression on his face that told me he really didn’t understand my problem.
“Lucais,” I tried again, when my breathing was under control once more. He was pushing me into confessions that would only breed resentment between us, but I had to do it. I had to stop the accursed dance around fate and soulmates.
“I grew up with a man who used to tell me that he loved me when he brought me a stuffed pony to say, ‘Sorry I smacked you across the face and sent you to school with a split lip.’ ” The admission hung in the air between us, swinging like an axe.
“That fucking stuffed toy was wrapped up in good intentions and tied in a strangehold with a bow. But he still gripped me too hard when he was angry,” I pointed out carefully, taking a step closer to him.
“He still knocked me into doorframes and the sharp corners of the kitchen bench or the dining table until I bruised when he was upset. Oh,” I went on around a quivering lower lip, my voice descending into untempered emotion alongside it, “but he swore that he loved me.” I paused, letting the words sink in.
“That’s why I don’t know what to do with yours. That’s why I don’t want it.”
The High King dragged his hands down his face, leaving momentary streaks of white behind on the flesh where his fingertips had been digging. “Fuck, Aura.” He sucked in air through his teeth. “Bookworm, I know.”
“You know?” I parroted back, surprised.
“I figured that he was abusive based on your reaction to him,” Lucais confided with a measured shrug.
“Coupled with the fact that, shortly thereafter, I saw him throw your mother into the caenim, and it was confirmed. Of course, I didn’t know the extent of it, but… ” He pursed his lips, contemplative.
The way his throat worked around the words meant they were going to be hard for him to say or hard for me to hear. Or both.
“When I brought him to the dungeons in Caeludor, I went through his memories—ah, don’t look at me like that, please.
I thought he might have known something about your biological father, but it’s…
” He waved a hand around abstractly as if to emphasise the squiggly lines that took up an angry residence inside my father’s mind.
“By the Elements, it’s a fucking mess inside his head. ”
“Yeah, it’s genetic.”
“No, he’s…” Lucais trailed off, struggling once more to wrestle the words.
“The man barely remembers any of his adult life. It’s mostly bits and pieces of his childhood.
His parents getting divorced. A drug addiction that started when he was barely an adolescent.
And he has some sick, fucking twisted feelings about you festering in the disaster zone inside his head.
But none of them were coherent enough for me to pick out any specific instances of what happened, except…
” The High King tilted his head regretfully and gestured to my arm, silently asking permission to take my hand in his.
Swallowing the dread anchored in my throat, I gave it to him—limp, but consenting to whatever was going to come next. I had to know, regardless of whether it confirmed my suspicions or threw my entire world into a tailspin.
Gingerly, Lucais brushed his fingertips over my wrist before sliding up the sleeve of my shirt. I realised, absentmindedly, that I’d left my coat behind on my mother’s front porch as Lucais delicately traced the trio of circular burn marks on the soft skin in the crease of my elbow.
The roughened, healed skin stood out against the thin layer of flesh streaked with the bluish hue of my veins.
As a war raged inside of his eyes, I blinked down at the marks impassively, only forming an expression when I realised how close they were to the scar of the iron manacle the High King had left on my arm from our trip through the Forest. The silence dragged on for what felt like days before Lucais spoke again.
“For some reason, he remembers the night he did this to you.”
The victimology overwhelmed me, ramming into me like a freight train and crushing all the air out of my lungs. I ripped my arm from Lucais’s grip without warning and staggered over to a green wheelie bin a few feet away, barely managing to lift the lid back in time to vomit into it.
Groaning as all of the breakfast Wrenlock had piled onto my plate that morning came back up with a vengeance, I heaved every last trace of it out of my stomach and spat the acid in my mouth into the bottom of the bin.
The dry, raw taste burned my throat, lingering there as I coughed and spluttered, trying to dislodge it.
When I noticed that I was inhaling the bin fumes in my eagerness to beat the suffocation of the memories, I stumbled backwards, dropping the lid with a slam.
As a sombre silence blanketed the estate, I realised that even the monsters waiting for us in Faerie had stopped knocking on the door to the world that had made my father.
The High King stood a few paces away from me, torment evident on his face. His body was turned mostly to the side as if he wanted to offer me privacy, but his neck was twisted, craning his head back to make sure I hadn’t fallen into the bin.
I couldn’t have answered his questions even if he’d voiced them.
I didn’t know why my father had done that to me. I never understood what had happened that night.
And I didn’t want to.
“I am never going to love you like that, Aura.”
Tears threatened to pool in my eyes at the sacred vow. I blinked them away. “Then how are you going to love me?” I dared him.
“In whatever way you want to be loved,” he whispered. “Even if that means not loving you at all.”
Despite the warmth humming around my heart, I couldn’t think of anything to say to him in reply. It was all I could do to stand there, watching him, and weigh his words in my mind against everything else that had ever happened to me throughout my whole life.
We might have stood in silence forever if a crack of thunder hadn’t broken it. A flash of lightning split the sky, opening a gap wide enough for a swarm of insects to come pouring in like rainfall. I opened my mouth in awe, the question on my lips, but Lucais’s thoughts were faster than my words.
Locusts.