13. Lex
13
Lex
T he last time I’d seen the queen at her full power, she’d threatened to tear my head off my shoulders and put it on a spike so she could kiss my pretty lips every morning. Of course, I’d tried to use my power on her, so maybe I deserved it. The Diana in the abandoned pub with us barely qualified as the same person, but the mental image in this tent? This was the queen of fairies I remembered. She damn near shimmered with subdued might, primed to make good on her previous threat.
When she asked to speak with me privately, I wanted to tell her to fuck right the hell off. Whatever she wanted to say to me would get relayed to my spouses no matter what, so it made no difference whether they were here or not. If the queen of fairies wanted to play chess, I would try my hand. I was older and smarter than the young man she’d met at Samhain. I wouldn’t be so naive as to think I could take her down on my own. So I agreed.
But now that I was facing the error of my hubris, I would admit I had no fucking idea what I was doing. If Diana felt threatened, she’d get defensive, and then I’d never get her back. Hell, she could keep me trapped in her mind for days, weeks, long enough for my body to decay like that fucking town. I had to be careful. Strategic. I had to figure out what she wanted from me and utilize it to my advantage.
“Well, well, well,” I said with a smirk, stepping over the pillows to move closer to her. “Alone at last.”
She pursed her lips and eyed me from head to toe, seemingly unamused by whatever she found.
“What did you have in mind?” I raised my eyebrows and shoved one hand in my pocket. “Do I get a question, too? Or was that my question?” I feigned a gasp and put a finger to my lips. “Don’t want to get cheated.” The queen continued to stare, perhaps waiting for me to dig my grave deeper. “Why are we alone, Diana?”
She hissed in an insulted breath at her given name. Ivy had referred to her as Your Majesty, and Siobhan had always called her My Lady. Perhaps she had expected the same level of pomp and circumstance from me, but I’d had enough of this charade. In Faerie, she may be the queen, but in the human realm, I was Lex Fucking Fairfax, and that carried more weight.
I bowed to no one, not anymore.
“I wanted to speak to you about what’s to come.”
“Hmm.” I glanced around, noticing some of the pillows had disappeared while we’d been talking. Her bed no longer looked as opulent, and the plush surroundings had started fading away to reveal the wooden planks underneath.
She held her head higher, her back straighter. “If I were to help you defeat the king, it would require a sacrifice.”
“Yes, I know.” I ran a finger over my eyebrow, another slice of uneasiness slithering down the center of my chest. “Siobhan told us we would need to give something up, something significant.”
Fuck that.
But the scared look in Diana’s eye told me she wasn’t screwing around. If whatever she had to say terrified someone as powerful and fearsome as her, then it would be in my best interests to be at least hesitant about that same thing. This upcoming battle with the king would come with a hefty price, and until now, I hadn’t truly considered what that might be.
Now, though…now, she had my attention.
“Cursing him to Faerie cost me that which I loved the most, my connection to the human realm.” Her voice cracked, and she blinked back a single shimmering tear. I stood frozen because it was a miraculous sight to see. Spending the last few days with her rarest form had convinced me that, deep down, she was just another soul like everyone else. But now that I saw that glimpse of emotion from her powerful alter ego, I almost felt sorry for her.
Almost.
Let us not forget she was the one who shoved Poppy into Carter’s arms. She was the one who had caused the rift with the king in the first place. This was all because she couldn’t sort out her shit with her husband. Apparently, marriage was a fucking trap in every realm of existence.
“Are you prepared to make such a decision?” Diana raised her eyebrows higher on her head, circling me while she spoke, like a snake preparing to strike. “When it comes to your life or that of Ivette, or Miriam, or Carter…which choice will you make?”
That was easy. I would die a thousand times for any of them. To save my spouses from whatever the king might have tucked away in his magical hat of horrors, I would do a hell of a lot worse.
“What if you had to choose between them? What if you could only save Ivette, or Miriam, or Carter?” Diana’s calculating gaze narrowed as she came to stand in front of me again.
My heartbeat sped up, but I took a deep breath to hide my reaction. If I could only save one of them, I would sacrifice myself to save them all. But then I thought back to what Carter had said yesterday. If they were like us, we were like them. We could not survive without each other.
“That wouldn’t happen.” I was so sure of it, the rightness settled in my gut as I said it. “The gift can’t survive without us all. If one of us were to die, we would all die.”
She pursed her lips. “Is that what you believe?”
“That’s what Ashley and Siobhan told us.”
“Hmm.” Diana made a small laughing sound deep in her chest. “And yet you want to gut my husband alive and watch him bleed to death.”
Yep. Sure did. “He abducted our family. He’s been haunting Ivy for months. He did something to Miri.” Likely raped her, or worse. He had erased it from her memory, wielding it over her like blackmail, as if she didn’t have the right to her own sovereignty. “He’s fucking with their minds.”
She nodded. “Yes, he is.”
“He deserves to pay for that.”
“Yes, he does.”
Confused, I furrowed my brows and shrugged. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
“If you kill him, you will kill me, too.”
“And you speak of my sacrifice?” I let out an incredulous whistle. “Your Majesty, your worshipfulness, all due respect, but if it takes putting you down to get rid of him, that’s what I’ll fucking do.”
She hissed again at my language, shaking her head as she eyed me. “You are lucky we are alone. If any in my court heard you say such things to me, they would have your tongue as an ornament.”
“I was curious why you wanted to speak with me privately.”
“Because you are the epicenter,” she said. “You are my contrast. Just as Ivette is to Alberich. It’s why he’s taken such an interest in her. Miriam, too, of course. And I would be remiss if I did not mention how beautiful Carter has become. I suspect Alberich and I would fight over him, if it came down to it.” She sighed and shook her head, obviously frustrated with how little we had figured out on our own. “But you…Oh, Alexei. I have been watching you for such a long time.”
That made me pause and straighten my shoulders. What did she mean by that?
“You are the strongest of them. You are the one they look to for protection, for leadership. A king, perhaps, in your own way.”
I thought over the last year, how Ivy and Miri had crumbled at the seams, how lost and clueless Carter had been to fix it…and me—the conductor of this circus, the one keeping the beat and making sure everyone hit their marks.
In the end, it came down to one thing: I considered them mine. Ivy may have been born first, but I was the possessive fuck that had the nerve to claim them, all of them, so completely. Was that not the epitome of a great king?
“At the end, it will be up to you to decide who or what to sacrifice,” she continued, “and you are the only one who can make this decision, the only one powerful enough.”
All the air whooshed out of me, my lungs suddenly the weight of anvils. I understood what she was saying as well as what she wasn’t. Only moments ago, I was willing to sacrifice myself for my loved ones, and now, I needed to let that possibility settle in my gut. Like most of the stories we’d read pre-Christianity, this fairy tale didn’t have a happy ending. The sooner I came to terms with that, the easier this was going to be.
I thought of my reason for all this, the one image that kept me going—a sunny afternoon at our cabin. Miri hunched over in her garden, her smile huge and timeless. Carter, graying around the temples, wrinkles in the corners of his eyes, tossing a football with our children, chasing them around the yard. Ivy, with that molten silver stare, still Amazonian and statuesque, none of it having diminished with time. I wanted so much to be a part of that picture, to be the one behind the lens…but what if I was only the one able to give it to them?
The realization hit me in the gut, nearly dropping me to my knees. If it came to it, I would lay down my crown and fall on my sword if it ensured my loved ones returned home again.
No. Fucking no.
I wouldn’t let it happen. I just wouldn’t. All of us were making it out of this alive, so help me God. I wouldn’t let Alberich or Diana or any of these pricks take that away from me. I didn’t believe in sacrifice. I didn’t believe in predetermination. Fuck that.
If I’d learned anything in this disgusting fairy tale, it was that no one could predict the future, especially not Siobhan. She got “gut feelings” and “instincts,” whatever that meant. Carter and Ivy would call it fate, but I refused to believe my destiny lay in the hands of a bunch of psychotic fairies.
I decided my life. I decided my destiny.
For so long, I had wished it was me who died on that boat instead of my brother. And now that I’d finally accepted it wasn’t, these fuckers wouldn’t take that away from me.
“Oh, Alexei,” Diana said, cupping my jaw as she stuck out her lower lip in a pretend pout. “Do not look so furious. You have always believed you are in control of your own fate. None of this has any real power over you.” Giving me a quick pat on the cheek, she winked and said, “Remember?”