Chapter 8 #2
But my entire being shrinks at the prospect, dark energy sizzling in my marrow.
I detest Amriel, his intrusion into my life.
And now, as every footfall brings me closer, I can’t stop thinking about how his hand felt last night, collared around my throat.
How he touched me so casually, so possessively. As if he owned me.
An angry flush heats my body at the memory.
Calen continues upward. We climb until my legs quiver, but he doesn’t slow. He just persists with the easy grace of someone who makes this journey often.
At last, we arrive at a vine-laden door. A pink beetle scuttles across the wood, then takes cover inside a glowing purple flower.
I stare, envious of its ability to hide. Meanwhile, I stand here defenseless, my breath short, my pulse a chaotic drumbeat in my ears. Each passing moment only worsens my anticipation.
Calen knocks, then pushes open the door without waiting for an answer. “Your mate is here,” he calls across the threshold. “Like you asked.”
He shoots me a meaningful look and melts away, leaving me to face Amriel alone. It’s just me and the king, now. The lord of Velindra, ruler over all the fae.
And my mate, apparently. The bastard.
“Come in, Princess.” That now-familiar drawl sends shivers down my spine. “Sariah.”
Well, at least he remembers my name. I clench my jaw and step inside, prepared to find myself in yet another vine-crossed room. But the sight that greets me isn’t at all what I expect.
I’m in a solarium at the very top of the castle, a haven of glass and light and curling wrought iron.
Broad panes offer views in all directions—to my left, mountains crowd the horizon, their jagged peaks dusted with white.
To my right, the world drops away. The Wildwood spreads across the landscape like a stain, and from this height, I realize just how vast it is, how impenetrable.
How its shadows seem to writhe, as if they’re breathing.
I wrench my gaze away, unwilling to confront that threat just yet. Thankfully, the rest of the room holds my interest. Telescopes dot the space, their brass cylinders shining in the sun. All look well-used, their lenses polished, their mechanisms worn smooth from continual adjustment.
Among them, sprawled in a chair by the windows, is Amriel.
He looks much like he did yesterday—long-legged and golden, his pale hair spilling over his shoulders as he takes up space with casual assurance.
Black trousers cling to muscular thighs while the deep vee of his shirt bares the lines of his collarbones.
His feet are bare, and a bottle dangles from his hand, its garnet liquid catching the light.
My skin prickles. The fae king is up here drinking in broad daylight. He doesn’t even have the grace to wait until evening to indulge in his sinning.
“Princess,” he says, his voice cold and smooth and slightly slurred. “Looks like you’ve survived the night.”
My blood surges, a hot rush that has me clutching my lunch sack so tightly my knuckles ache. “Barely. Not that I have you to thank for it.” After all, I’m only standing here by the Shadow’s grace. Because he came to my rescue last night after Amriel laughed me out of the dining room.
“Oh, don’t be angry.” Amriel takes a pull from his bottle, his throat working. The wine sloshes in its container when it returns to his side. “My Shadow never would’ve let you fall. You know that as well as I do.”
I slit my eyes, unsure how he even knows about my harrowing close call. Did the Shadow tell him? He must have, but when? While I was sleeping? “Of course I’m angry. You left me to fend for myself. You brought me here and didn’t lift a single finger to help me.”
Amriel’s gaze flickers over me lazily. “What would you have had me do?”
“Anything,” I snap, my temper already fraying. Half a minute in this fae bastard’s company, and I already want to throw something at him. “Literally anything besides sit there and laugh.”
His frigid scoff cuts through the air as cleanly as a knife. “You’re the one who bolted from dinner. What would you rather I have done, Princess? Gone after you? Chased you? Caught you?”
My teeth clench so hard my molars ache. When I don’t respond, Amriel sets down his bottle and pushes himself from the chair. He stalks toward me, his yellow eyes tearing ruinous holes in my ability to think. In the simple processes that tell my lungs to expand and my heart to contract.
“What would you have had me do, my mate?” he croons, his lashes dropping toward his cheeks.
“Should I have caught you? Dragged you back to the dining room? Maybe I should’ve spread you out before me.
Pulled up the skirts of that”—his gaze slides downward, back up—“dress you’re wearing and had you for dessert.
Is that it? Would you prefer I have fucked you on the dinner table, right there in front of everyone?
Or would that have only made you madder? ”
Rage ignites in my belly, so hot my nerves glow molten. That’s not what I mean at all, and he knows it. “You’re drunk,” I accuse.
He stops just inches away, his wintry scent too sharp to block out. Too sharp, too close, too much.
“I’m not, sadly,” he says. “Despite my best efforts.”
“Oh, no? So you’re this horrible all on your own, then?”
His mouth curves. He bends close, his wine-drenched breath warm against my cheeks, and…goddess. His eyes are the exact same color as the Shadow’s, only emptier. As if something behind them has perished.
Yet try as I might, I can’t unstitch my gaze from his.
Or stop heat from flaring down my spine like a match dragged against flint.
Just as it did last night, the rest of the world fades, leaving me with nothing but an unsettling awareness of my own heartbeat.
Of the flush in my cheeks, my labored exhales, the disorienting rush at the base of my stomach.
Good goddess, this fae wields some kind of terrible power over me. No matter how badly I want to deny it, I only have to look at him to know something intangible binds us together.
“I may be horrible,” he says, “but you feel it, don’t you? The pull. Even hating me, you feel it.”
“Maybe,” I say on a hard exhale. “All right, yes. But that doesn’t mean I’m going to do anything about it. You mean nothing to me and never will.”
“Mmm. Smart girl.”
Silence descends. My pulse hammers with such force that each heartbeat drills into the roof of my mouth. Meanwhile, Amriel’s gaze slips over the high collar of my dress, my crescent moon pendant, my voluminous skirts.
“Shadows,” he murmurs. “You’re so different than I imagined.”
I do a slow blink, my anger derailed by the subject change. “Different? How?”
“You’re just not what I pictured. I’ve had so many decades to think about you.
So many ideas about who you might be. But your smell…
” He closes his eyes, breathing deep, filling himself with my essence.
When his lashes part again, that golden glow hits me like a force.
“Nothing could have prepared me for it. And your face…it’s not what I anticipated. ”
I frown, wary. “How so?”
“I was so worried you’d look like her. But you don’t. You only look like yourself.”
My eyebrows pull together. “Her? Her who?”
“Your ancestor. Alanna.”
I rear back at hearing that name leave his lips. Alanna was my great-great-many-times-grandmother. The Aethrolian queen who found her way through the Wildwood and accidentally sparked a war.
The same woman who used her Grace to curse him.
Goddess, I’ve been so preoccupied since coming here that I haven’t stopped to consider the obvious—that Alanna once stood in this castle, possibly in this very room. Maybe with the very same king who now looms before me.
The realization leaves me unmoored, like I’ve missed a step on a staircase. “You…knew her.”
“I did.” Amriel’s mouth twists. “To my eternal regret.”
“Regret? Why regret? Because she cursed you during the war?”
He ejects a short, sharp exhale, the skeleton of a laugh. “Oh, Princess. Not during. Before. How do you think that infernal war got started?”
I go still. Amriel started the war himself. As for Alanna…
“I don’t understand,” I say, piecing my words together slowly. “Alanna came here for peace.”
He huffs. “No. She showed up one day, full of ideas about how we should unite the kingdoms by marrying. Which I declined. I told her I wouldn’t wed someone who wasn’t my mate, and that angered her.
Enough that she crafted this curse as my punishment.
As for the war…well, that was me punishing her in return. ”
I shake my head in bewilderment. Aethrolian history books talk of Alanna’s diplomacy, of her mission to establish relations with the fae. No record exists of her proposing marriage to their king.
No, it was Amriel who first resorted to violence. And now, as I survey him, I believe it. Something brutal and desolate lurks behind his eyes, an emptiness that chills me.
I grind the balls of my feet into the floor, drawing strength from the solid stones. “That’s ridiculous. Alanna came here in goodwill, and you gave her bloodshed. You’re the one who started the war.”
Amriel’s smile curves into something cruel. “Is that what they’re teaching you in that dreary little castle of yours? That I’m the villain in that story?”
I push away the doubt prodding at the back of my brain. Aethrolian history lays out Amriel’s role in black and white. “Yes. Because you are.”
He laughs bitterly. I almost shrink in the face of his reaction, but he relieves me of the need by whirling and sailing away, the tang of winter berries trailing in his wake. He makes for the room’s far end, snatching up his wine on the way, draining a quarter of it in one go.
He collapses behind a wide wooden desk—the only sizeable furniture here, apart from the apothecary cabinet behind him. An array of bottles and gadgets fill its cubbyholes, most of them unfamiliar to me.