Chapter 60
Kieran
“Amarantha.”
Irritation claws at my chest—this woman, the fact she still fucking breathes. Tiana should have killed her by now. Which means something happened.
I push the worry away. There’s no place for it right now.
“Great.” Moros’s drink sloshes over the edge of his glass and he pushes Kestra’s blade from his neck with one finger. “The bitch has arrived. The murder must wait.” He is sad about that. He can’t hide it. He wants to die.
Which is bullshit. After everything he put me through. Everything he put Kestra through. Our mother. He doesn’t deserve to die on his own terms.
Amarantha pauses just past the throne, her pointy chin held high and her eyes scanning the court.
She’s cataloguing exits. I know because I already catalogued them.
Three doors, two passages, one shadow-walk point that only works for Unseelie blood.
She won’t find a way out that I haven’t already closed.
“Go away, bitch.” Moros chugs the last of his Fae mead.
“I think you’ve had enough of that.” Kestra snatches the cup from Father. I tense for a moment but he doesn’t touch her. Not once.
Thankfully.
For now.
“Did she tell you what she did?” Moros tosses a leg over the side of the throne and slouches to one side, his chin resting on one knuckle. He looks childlike. It’s unsettling. I hate it.
“Moros.” Amarantha steps over a shattered piece of glass. Warning in her voice.
“Oh, but we should wait for this conversation.” My father yawns. He never yawns.
“Where is your commander?” I ask.
“Killed him.” He blinks at me slowly. Not an ounce of empathy in his cold gaze. “The Balance is gone. Broken. Shattered. There is no point to anything anymore.”
“That’s not true, darling.” Amarantha steps up behind the throne and lays a hand on his shoulder. Her long nails dig into his skin.
Darling.
What does she mean by that? Nothing Amarantha says is by chance.
“Tell me, Father.” I don’t move toward him. Hell, I’ve barely moved at all. I feel frozen to the spot. “What did she do?”
Amarantha’s nails dig deeper. “This isn’t the time for—”
“It’s always the time.” Moros waves her off like a fly. “Pour me another drink, Kestra.”
“No.” Kestra holds the cup behind her back.
“Stubborn girl.” He almost smiles. Almost. “Your mother was stubborn.”
“Don’t.” The word comes out of both Kestra and me simultaneously. We don’t talk about her. Not here. Not with him.
But Moros is past caring. Past fear. Past whatever careful architecture of control has kept him silent. He’s a man sitting in the rubble of everything he built and there’s a specific freedom in that kind of destruction.
“She wants me to shut up.” He jerks his chin at Amarantha. “She’s been wanting me to shut up for years. Since long before your mother died.”
“Moros.” Amarantha’s voice has dropped to a quiet and dangerous register. The voice she uses before she ruins people. I’ve heard it once. When she spoke to Finnian before dragging him to the Seelie Court.
“What are you afraid of?” I ask her directly. Let my shadows curl toward her feet. Not threatening. Testing. “What could a drunk man in a chair possibly say that frightens the great Lady Amarantha?”
Her jaw tightens. There it is. Fear. Real fear. Not performance. Not manipulation. The genuine article, sitting behind her eyes like something caged.
Moros laughs. The worst sound I’ve ever heard from him—worse than the silence before punishment, worse than the calm instructions to kill. A laugh that says nothing matters.
“Ask her why she’s here, son.” He rolls the word son around his mouth like it amuses him. “Ask her why she ran across Faerie the moment your sister put a blade to my throat. Ask her how she knew.”
The room goes still.
I look at Amarantha. At her hand on his shoulder. At the way her body has positioned itself between him and Kestra without her seeming to notice she’s done it, as though the movement was instinct.
“How did you know?” I ask.
“The Balance moves when a king’s life is threatened.” Her chin lifts higher. “Anyone listening close enough would feel it.”
Every word true. None of them an answer.
“Anyone didn’t run across Faerie,” Kestra says. “You did.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing in the room.
And then the door behind me opens.
I don’t need to turn. I know Finnian before I see him—that particular weight of his presence, his careful footsteps.
Tiana follows. I catch her in my periphery. Dark skin, cropped hair.
But it’s Finnian my eyes find first. I can’t explain the way my body swerves toward him, at just seeing him all right. Alive.
Tiana doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t look at Kestra or Moros. She looks at Amarantha’s hand on the king’s shoulder and she goes very still.
Tiana learned Amarantha when they were maids together. Serving Tatiana together. Tiana tilts her head, a frown wrinkling her forehead.
Right now she’s seeing something that makes her face drain of color.
“Show me your wrist, Amarantha.”
Four words. Quiet as a closing door.
Amarantha doesn’t move. For the first time since she entered this room, she has nothing to say. No quip. No deflection. No darling.
She cannot possibly mean…
“I said show them.” Moros reaches for a bottle that isn’t there. Gives up. Pushes up his own sleeve instead.
The ring sits against the inside of his wrist. Dark as a bruise, and very clearly a mate ring.
How? I look from his cold eyes to the ring, and back again before reality tells me exactly what I’m seeing.
“Kieran.” Finnian’s voice is careful, academic. He’s clearly just as shocked as I am. “That’s a mate mark.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought it was as well.
A mate mark.
On my father’s wrist.
A mark I have never seen in three hundred years of being this man’s son.
My shadows react before my brain catches up. The temperature in the room drops fast enough that Finnian’s breath fogs. The shadows on the floor stop spreading and start standing, rising off the stone like living things, filling the space between me and my father with darkness that tastes like rage.
“How long?” Two words. I barely recognize my own voice.
Moros has the decency to look away.
“Mother?” My voice shakes.
“Kieran,” he won’t meet my eyes.
Understanding arrives the way every bad thing arrives—late, and from the inside. This went on longer than I ever anticipated.
“Amarantha is as old as I am, as old as Finnian.” My palms sweat. “When?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Amaranth heaves. “A hundred years.”
I feel the shock first. Then the math.
He was mated to her during his bonding to my mother.
The next breath doesn’t come. Until I feel my lungs struggle and demand air. I take large gulps of breath.
“True?” My legs want to give way. This news shakes everything I thought I knew. How did I not know?
All those years of him uttering about the Balance and true mates and he was bonded to my mother… He wasn’t, was he? “You never bonded my mother.”
“No.” He slumps back onto the throne.
My mother never had a chance.
She was with a man who was never hers.
Kestra makes a sound beside me. Small. Like something breaking that was already cracked. I reach for her without looking. My hand finds her shoulder and squeezes once, twice. Maybe I’m the one who needs her.
“The darkness.” Finnian chokes. “The darkness I tasted on you in the Seelie Court. It wasn’t consumed power. It was him. Unseelie shadow magic bleeding through a mate bond.”
“Clever boy.” Amarantha’s voice could cut diamond. “You always were too clever.”
“You broke the Balance.” Kestra’s voice shakes but holds.
“Not through politics. Not through war. A Seelie queen and an Unseelie king bound through a mate bond. Two courts that exist in opposition, tied together through the most unbreakable magic in Faerie.” She looks at our father.
“You broke the thing you spent your entire reign screaming to protect.”
Moros says nothing. His silence is the loudest confession I’ve ever heard.
Amarantha shifts behind the throne. I track her movement through my shadows. She’s not trying to run. She’s positioning. Closer to Moros. Between him and every blade in the room.
Because his death is her death.
That’s why she ran here. Not strategy. Not alliance. The mate bond. He offered his throat and she felt it through the connection and it dragged her across Faerie because her heartbeat is tethered to his.
She will never let him die. Not for Kestra. Not for justice. Not for anything. Because Amarantha has only ever loved one thing in this world, and it isn’t Moros.
It’s herself.
And he’s the only thing keeping her alive.
I open my mouth to speak—to take this revelation and forge it into the weapon this room needs it to be—when the corridor behind us fills with sound.
Footsteps. Several sets. Moving with a familiar cadence, people who aren’t trying to be quiet because they’re done hiding.
She walks in and the room rearranges itself around her.
Not physically. Something deeper. Like gravity shifting its allegiance.
Ash. Crown of thorns sitting on her head like it grew there. Blooms I’ve never seen spread past her collarbones. Bare feet on Unseelie stone, and the stone doesn’t fight her. It welcomes her.
Behind her stands Orion. Fire in his hair, and he finds me across the room before anyone else.
Then Pepper, chaos magic sparking purple at her fingertips, and Sabina with an arrow nocked. A boy with the green eyes brings up the rear, and I file him under we’re going to talk about that later because right now I cannot afford to know.
Ash’s eyes find mine across the room. She reads me in a heartbeat—the rage, the devastation, the ice holding it all together. She doesn’t ask what happened. Doesn’t need to.
She crosses the room. Past Finnian. Past Tiana. Past Kestra. Straight to me. She doesn’t even flinch when she feels the tension in the room that is impossible to ignore.
Her hand presses flat against my chest. Over my heart. Over the place where the Spear sleeps.
“I’m here.”