Chapter 3 #2
My laugh was as cold, empty, and humorless as his fortress.
Did those words really leave his mouth? “Killing my family and sparing me only because the mating ritual ignited between us wasn’t enough?
Oh, I forgot. You also concealed the truth for years while you used the mating ritual to tie me to you for the rest of our immortal lives. ”
“You allowed these things to happen,” Carmine said.
I had to check myself as red rage threatened to overtake me. I let my family be killed? I let myself be lied to for years by someone I’d loved?
Fury filled me, and yet five years in this realm had shown me that demons didn’t suffer victims whatsoever.
If a demon was betrayed, then that was their fault, and they should apologize to whomever betrayed them for being so weak.
That was the only definition of “sorry” in this realm.
I’m sorry that you were able to hurt me.
Messed up. Though not to demonkind. Weirdly, their attitude had helped me to become who I was.
Yet Carmine also knew that in the Earth realm people generally chose to do good things out of a sense of morality or empathy. During our last months together, he’d worked to understand that side of my culture.
All that to say that he knew the fury that his comment would inspire.
Rage boiled inside, but I refused to give him a foot in the door, whether physically, mentally, or emotionally. “I can say with all sincerity that I hope your hand keeps you warm over the centuries, Carmine.”
“Should I have continued to conceal the truth?” he asked, still turned from me. “Even after hearing your views of betrayal and Earth morals?”
I smiled. “If you wished to keep me as your pet, then yes.”
“I could not do so any longer,” he said in a low voice.
My blood boiled anew. The gall of him to stand there and whisper regrets.
Carmine might have told me some of the truth, but he hadn’t told me everything.
I’d only learned the full truth two months and one week ago.
That truth was the entire reason I had entered Tiers.
More importantly, Carmine had no idea that I knew everything, and his ignorance was important to my plan. “Is that so?”
Silence.
He was a coward. All that muscle and lethal sexiness and no fucking guts.
Even with his supposed mate-intended, the demon king couldn’t be more than halfway honest. I wasn’t after a mate or a man with two sides.
For years I’d been in love with one Carmine, thinking that version of him was enough to erase the other.
Then the truth came out, and the veil was drawn back from my eyes.
He’d crushed my fierce grandmother.
He’d impaled my cunning mother.
He’d poured crimson smoke down the throat of my twin until her death. My twin, my Tempest. That was when I’d felt the permanent shift from him and our mating. With that confession, I had seen that Carmine could not be saved from himself.
He’d told me the truth once we were nearly halfway through the mating ritual, thinking I couldn’t leave.
Or that I wouldn’t. Really, he’d told me two years too late.
Maybe I would never have entertained the ritual with him if I’d known upfront, or I might have forgiven him upon learning the intricacies of demon culture and norms that saw betrayal as the fault of the betrayed and not the betrayer.
Either way, the choice would’ve been mine to make.
He took that from me, and now, even if I found love again, I could never find sexual gratification.
“I’ll need to enter Tiers each week,” I muttered. “Otherwise, make your demands.”
Carmine remained turned away. “You will remain in my royal quarters and attend royal engagements as my mate-intended, and behave in accordance with that position.”
“Done,” I replied, though the other contestants would certainly form an enormous hunting pack in response. That was a problem for future Syera.
“You will not play Tiers,” he continued.
I pressed my lips together. If I responded with a challenge, he’d go out of his way to ensure I couldn’t play. If I didn’t say anything, he’d understand my intention was to play despite his order.
The furious roar that broke from him rattled the wall and my insides, and I would’ve reared back from his charge if I’d seen the attack coming.
I looked up at the seething demon king. He appeared one misplaced word away from throttling me. Ice, ice, and more ice.
“I will discover why you entered the game,” he spat out.
Only once every piece of my impossible plan fell into place, hopefully.
I didn’t move an inch. I didn’t breathe. I certainly didn’t voice my murderous intent. I waited, and eventually, Carmine exhaled and rested his forehead against mine.
“You drive me to insanity,” the demon king hushed, as though that excused his behavior.
I didn’t have a thing to do with his insanity. The asshole drove himself there five times a weekday and seven times on the weekend.
Carmine stroked my cheek. “You will stay here, enamai. In my quarters.”
I couldn’t help myself. “You’ll trap me as you were once trapped.”
A shudder rippled through him. Those words hurt him like nothing else I’d yet said, as I’d known they would.
The last king, my father, had locked Carmine in the dungeons for one hundred years before he’d managed to escape and take the throne.
How many times had Carmine sworn to me that he would never do the same to another?
The dank dungeons buried in the peak were notoriously empty.
Except they weren’t, and they hadn’t been for the last five years.
One person was down there. That was the truth Carmine still concealed from me to this day. As he’d poured crimson smoke down my twin’s throat, he’d also torn her weak demon from her dying magus body. And then he’d chucked her demon in the dungeon to rot.
Only to then start the process to make me his for eternity. The cold, soulless bastard.
“Look at your time here however you choose,” Carmine replied.
“Choose to alleviate yourself of blame however you can,” I answered in the same tone.
The door on the opposite side of the room opened. There were only two people who would enter that way, and I liked neither, and neither of them liked me.
“Carmine,” his sister said. “There’s news from the gates.”
He raised a closed fist—a command to be silent.
Gratia’s crimson eyes landed on me. She didn’t say a word, which was unusual for the smooth-tongued older sibling. She hated my guts, and I’d been scared of her during my time here. Now I saw a woman who had power and was sure of her place.
I was that woman too.
We were equals.
Which wouldn’t stop me annihilating her if she made the mistake of getting in my way. Nothing personal. I was willing to kill my mate-intended, so she was just collateral.
“I’m needed elsewhere,” Carmine said to me.
I pressed a hand against my chest. “You’re talking to me? Go where you like. I couldn’t care less.”
“You will speak to me with respect, Mate-Intended.” The demon king straightened to his full height. I used to be so impressed when he did that.
As it was, my mind turned over what Gratia just revealed.
Carmine was obsessed with expanding his territory.
He’d discussed secret gates into the territories of other supernaturals at length when we were together.
I’d just stared at him in adoration in response, not really taking anything in.
Was he close to infiltrating their territories?
If so, I had to accelerate my plans big time.
The silence made me aware that both demons were looking at me. “What did you say?”
Gratia sucked in a breath. “You—"
Carmine cut her a look, then lowered his head to ensure he had my attention, I supposed.
“You will be at the banquet tonight, Syera,” he ordered.
I hadn’t agreed to his terms and wouldn’t until my access to Tiers was assured.
He could shove that banquet up his ass.