I’m Not Hugging You Until You Clean That #3
Esme smacked a kiss to his cheek before leaving to hug the rest of her family. Tagas, a dark-skinned man with silky black hair curling into his dazzling face, stuck a finger in her chest when she moved toward him.
“I’m not hugging you until you clean that,” he said, his other hand covering his nose.
“What, will you die if I touch you?” Esme asked, wiggling her reeking arm at him, but a snap of her fingers had a shadow dropping a wet rag in her offending hand. She cleaned it well enough. “Am I fit for your presence now?”
Tagas gave her an up-and-down. “As fit as you could ever hope to be.” And he crashed into her, both of their chests shaking with laughter.
“I forgot the only person you tolerate is Sam,” Esme wheezed in Tagas’s hold. She held out a hand to the tanned man just behind them. “How have you been, love?”
“Dealing with this one? Exhausted,” Samander, Tagas’s husband, said as he weaseled his way into their hug. “You should make me a collar for him.”
“I want no business with your circus of a bedroom,” Esme said, ruffling his dark brown hair.
Samander was just as beguiling as his husband, with a wide nose and high, round cheeks.
He wore his hair simply, parted down the middle and tied back at his nape.
“Speaking of business, do you own the Head yet?”
Samander snorted. Esme liked clothes, Urias liked liquor, but he liked property.
Omniel banned them from owning land, but through a twisty conversation, Samander tricked Turiel into saying he’d let a Wraith own a restaurant in the Head before “one of those brown ones” did.
Samander had been signing deeds ever since.
He winked. “No, but I do have the eyes, nose, lips and ears,” he said.
Every now and then, the Wraiths blended into their legends a bit too much.
Samander’s savvy purchases made him the perfect “Three-Faced Beast” of gluttony, just like the divination cards magicians used in the streets called him.
But Esme understood it. Omniel once drained their accounts just to torture them.
Sam swore then that he’d never find himself penniless in a country he’d built ever again.
Esme pushed him off with a laugh. He stepped aside so Esme could finally get to Daphna, the last of the Wraiths present.
“Ugh, they’re all so disgusting. How did you even stand them before me?” Daphna jumped up to Esme’s height, being the only Wraith shorter than her.
“No fucking clue,” Esme said, lifting Daphna to their toes with a groan. “How have you fared since I left?”
“Oh, it’s been wonderful. No dead kings, no missing assassins, no bitch queens, nothing,” Daphna said as Esme put them down. “The only good thing is, it’s not my duty to clean it up. I don’t envy you, sister.”
Esme and Daphna were sisters. It didn’t matter that Daphna wasn’t a woman, or that they came from a world with no conceptualization of Micrean gender.
When Omniel dragged them by their hair into this world, he demanded that they both conform to the Micrean idea of womanhood.
Daphna shared the plight of that conforming with Esme, and so, sisters.
The bond between them could be described no other way.
It did not demand the confines of womanhood to have strength and meaning for them.
“I don’t even envy me,” Esme grumbled, throwing her head back.
Urias and Esme, as two of the eldest Wraiths, held the most responsibility.
While the others were strictly for assassinations or robberies, Esme and Urias wore the titles of diplomats, council members, and whatever else a king might ask for.
The only reason Esme had to retrieve that necklace was because she’d been closest when Turiel found out it’d been nicked.
“It’s what you and he get for being intelligent in public,” Padrian said as Esme and Daphna pulled apart. “Should have played stupid, like me.”
“I was never under the impression it was an act, dear Padrian,” Urias shot back, leaning against the slab of rock and making a face down at Turiel’s gooey body. “It’s good you’re all here. We need to make our plan before Isobel and Belchin make theirs.”
“It starts at the will, right?” Tagas asked, crossing his arms. “We can’t do much without knowing who’s heir.”
“It’s probably Belchin,” Padrian said. “If you ask me, I think getting the old idiot as a king is a boon.”
“Why do you figure?” Esme asked. Belchin was dumb enough to stab his own dick thinking it was a snake.
“He’ll run the country to the ground, there’ll be a civil war, and once these greedy bastards have all killed each other, there’ll be no Micrea, and no more kings of Micrea for us to follow. We will be free,” he said simply.
Each Wraith gave the plan a once-over. Not terrible.
“Turiel wasn’t totally stupid, and he loved Hallel.
It could be her,” Esme said, crossing her arms and leaning back on a block of ice.
As Isobel’s daughter from her first marriage, Hallel wasn’t Turiel’s by blood, but he adored her.
Her little feet didn’t touch the floor for the first year of her life, and Turiel wept when she took her first steps, lamenting that his days carrying his brass-haired baby girl were coming to an end.
“We may have sway on her through Mak’kon,” Esme continued.
Mak’kon was the last of the seven Wraiths.
He, Esme, and Urias used to regrettably be in love fifteen years ago until he left them for Isobel.
The idiot even bankrolled Isobel coming to Amaris, which then led to her seducing Turiel and becoming queen.
Now, Her Highness used Mak’kon as a bodyguard for her daughter and a bed warmer for herself.
He let her be a fucking terror to them, too, especially Esme.
She and the queen would sooner tear into each other with teeth than work together, and Esme knew he loved seeing the women in his life snap at each other over him.
“Mak’kon wouldn’t let us use her like that,” Sam said, waving away the thought. “He’s too soft.”
“We could convince him.” Urias lifted and dropped his shoulder, looking only at Esme when he suggested it. His attention seemed far off, as if he was thinking of things miles beyond this room.
“I am never getting close to that man again,” Esme huffed, looking away. The years Urias, Mak’kon, and Esme had spent together had been some of the happiest of her life. Isobel stole that from her. Mak’kon let her take it.
“Not even for a scheme?’ Urias asked, raising a brow. He knew she loved schemes.
“If he was dying from a poison only my piss would save him from, I would sooner die of kidney failure than urinate on him,” Esme said.
Urias pinched his brow. “How do you think up such vile ways of saying you don’t like someone?”
“I am a bitter old bitch,” Esme said, then sighed. “We wait it out if it’s Hallel. If it’s Isobel… well, we’ve dealt with her all this time, I think we can manage a few years more. If it’s Belchin, I say we all get dead drunk and brace ourselves for the end of the kingdom.”
Urias nodded in that slow way he did when he was thinking of something so large it couldn’t fit in that big, brilliant head of his.
“Ryukyhn, spit it out,” Esme said, a shadow flicking his head.
Urias’s bit his lip when he couldn’t hold back his smile anymore. “I have a plan.”
“Why didn’t you say that before?” Daphna asked.
“I hadn’t finished concocting it yet,” he said, squinting like he was still putting it together. “It involves some unsavory news.”
“What in our lives doesn’t?” Sam scoffed. “Say it, old man.”
Urias stepped away from the slab and pulled out a tiny roll of parchment from the pocket of his black coat. One by one, the scroll stole the breath from each Wraith.
It was a will. Esme tore it from Urias’s fingers.
Her thumb ran over the three wax seals pressed to the edge.
Royal wills were always stamped closed with two seals: the seal of the dead ruler and the seal of Muhnir, the Micrean death god.
This will, however, had three: Turiel’s yellow seal on the right, Muhnir’s black one in the middle…
…and Omniel’s bloodred one on the right.
Omniel had written this will. For Turiel.
“Song’s balls, Ryukyhn!” Esme slapped a hand to her mouth to keep her voice down lest some lurking spy overheard. “Where’d you get this?”
“From Turiel’s room,” Urias said as Esme turned the will in her fingers. Age nipped at its yellowing edges, further proving its authorship. Omniel had been dead for over three decades.
Esme’s throat squeezed. Omniel’s bony, fleshless fingers coiled tight around her neck even now.
Sometimes, she imagined she’d finally awoken from the nightmare of his ownership now that his body lay at the bottom of the Wyvern Sea.
And then he dragged himself out of the frothing waves, a skeleton in his tarnished crown, to wrangle her to her knees once more.
“How’d you get there before the captain of the guard?” Padrian asked, edging closer over Esme’s shoulder to look at the will.
“Dumb luck,” Urias said, chuckling. “Sent a bird to sweep the royal wing and caught Isobel just as she started to stir. She woke up, threw a fit, and everyone was so concerned with getting her out of the room and searching the castle that they didn’t even notice the little crow slip in before they could close the windows.
And once they’d all run off, I had a few minutes to myself.
I found this in a bottom drawer—no dust. They’d been staying in another room because of the heat.
That means Turiel brought this with him from the royal suite.
It must have been important for him to do that. ”
Having Omniel’s seal made it important. Once his reign was over, all of Omniel’s signet rings had been melted down, and recasting a dead king’s seal was so illegal Esme doubted a smith would ever attempt it. Truly, this was the last decree of Omniel Asterou.