Chapter 33 #2
“You were perfect.” Her nails drag across my shoulders, catching in Badb’s wounds. I hiss. She smiles, I can hear it in her voice. “Before you learned to be afraid of me.”
“You killed my parents.”
The words fall out before I can stop them. Not technically true—I learned that much from Davis’s broken memories. But she was there. She benefited. She made me watch and then she claimed me. Close enough to murder that the distinction doesn’t matter.
Too late.
But I don’t take it back. Can’t take it back. And some small, exhausted part of me doesn’t want to.
Amarantha pauses.
For one terrible moment, I let myself think that she might actually hear it. Might actually feel something. Might look at me and finally, finally see the boy she destroyed.
Then she laughs.
Soft. Musical. Genuinely puzzled.
“I gave you purpose, cousin.” She cups my face in her hands. Her touch is gentle. It’s always gentle when she’s being cruel. “A boy with no family, no future, no power of his own. I made you the Summer Sword. I made you matter.”
She really believes that.
She also never told me. And I never asked how she could summon me.
I never questioned it. She was family.
“You made me a weapon,” I say.
“Same thing.” She smiles, and her eyes hold nothing. No guilt. No shame. No recognition that she destroyed a child and called it kindness.
Same thing.
To her, it really is.
“Now. About those secrets.”
She releases my face and glides back toward her throne. Davis’s expression shifts from jealousy to something like relief as she settles beside him, her hand finding his hair.
“A birdie told me that my predecessor kept secrets from me.” She’s watching me closely. Too closely. “Many, many secrets.”
“A secret?” I answer with a question.
“Tatiana was a clever queen.” Amarantha’s nails scratch Davis’s scalp, he leans into it like a dog. “Too clever, perhaps. She hid things from the court. Things I’m only now discovering.”
My heart hammers against my ribs. I keep my face blank.
Tiana. She’s talking about Tiana.
“I want you to uncover them all.” She rises, crosses back to me, leans down until her lips brush my ear. Her breath is warm. Sweet. It makes my stomach clench.
“And kill them all.”
Her tongue traces the shell of my ear.
I don’t react. Don’t shudder. Don’t let my skin do what it wants to do, which is crawl off my bones and find somewhere else to be.
I’ve endured this before. Her hands on me. Her mouth on me. Her voice telling me I should be grateful while every cell in my body screams wrong-wrong-wrong.
I breathe. I count. I wait for it to be over.
It’s always over eventually.
“That implies the secrets breathe,” I say carefully.
“Some.” She doesn’t pull away. Instead, her teeth graze the shell of my ear, and I have to lock every muscle in my body to keep from recoiling. “Some secrets are documents. Alliances. Hidden treasures. But some secrets, cousin, are people. People Tatiana protected. People she hid from me.”
“You want the Summer Sword to eliminate the secrets of the Seelie Court?”
I word it carefully. So carefully. Every syllable precise.
“Yes.” She bites my ear hard enough to bruise, and I feel blood well up. “Why won’t you love me?”
The question slips out of her like she didn’t mean to ask it. Her voice cracks on the last word, actually cracks. Like she has emotions.
And that’s the thing about Amarantha. That’s always been the thing.
She’s not manipulating. She’s not playing games.
She genuinely, honestly, sincerely does not understand why I haven’t learned to love her yet.
She killed my parents, claimed me as property, spent thirty years touching me without permission, and she thinks that she’s been kind.
That she saved me. That I should be grateful.
She’s not a villain who knows she’s evil.
She’s a villain who thinks she’s the hero of a love story.
That’s so much worse.
I say nothing.
Not because she doesn’t want an answer. She does. Desperately. She’s been waiting years for me to finally see what she sees, a queen who rescued a broken boy and gave him purpose.
But the truth would get me killed. And a lie would get me killed slower.
So I give her silence, and I watch her interpret it as cruelty, and I let her believe I’m the monster.
It’s safer that way.
“Kill all the secrets,” she says, stepping back. Her eyes have gone glassy. Distant. The crack in her armor sealing over like it was never there.
And that’s when I feel it.
The command settling into the binding. Taking root in my chest. Becoming law.
Kill all the secrets.
Not kill Tiana. Not kill the people Tatiana protected.
Kill. All. The secrets.
Including the ones Amarantha herself is keeping.
And she just handed me the weapon I’ve been waiting for.
Because she couldn’t be bothered to think through her own words. Because she’s so certain of her power that she never imagined her sword might cut both ways.
I keep my face blank. My thoughts buried. My satisfaction locked so deep she’ll never taste it.
I am the blade she sharpened against herself.
And she has no idea.
“Will that be all?” I bow, hoping like hell she sends me back. Back to Ash. Back to Orion. Back to the forest and the tavern and the people who kissed me goodbye like I mattered.
“Of course.” She waves a dismissive hand, already turning back to Davis, already forgetting me. “That will be all.”
The court dissolves around me.
I expect the forest. Expect Ash’s face, Orion’s hand on my neck, Kieran’s quiet solidarity.
Instead, I hit dirt beside a campfire.
In the Dark Forest.
Alone.
“Why are you here?”
I lift my head.
Tiana stares at me from across the flames. Jerky halfway to her mouth. Her eyes narrow with suspicion, with threat, with the particular wariness of a woman who has survived by trusting no one.
Kill all the secrets.
Amarantha’s secrets. The court’s secrets. Tatiana’s hidden heir sitting across a campfire with jerky halfway to her mouth.
I’ve spent my life learning to survive impossible situations.
Here’s another one.
“It’s a long story,” I tell Tiana. “And I’m going to need you to not kill me while I explain it.”
Her eyes narrow.
Fair enough.