Chapter 17
Belle
Despite my fears, the king didn’t leave me alone—not at first. He walked me into the crowd, introducing me to one bloodsucker after another.
Lord this, lady that. A deposed duke. A marquis trying to reclaim his lands.
The Chamberlain. The Chancellor. A flurry of names and titles—some so grandiose as to be suspect.
The Warden of the Silver Chalice, Keeper of Twilight Vale, Lord of the Revel.
There weren’t a quarter of such titles in Cassius’s court, and not nearly so many high-ranking nobles—and yet, from all I could tell, the Bloodvale dwarfed this cursed kingdom of paupers and lords.
The crowd churned around the king, a whirl of names and faces I would never remember.
He guided me through the room, his hand firm against my lower back.
It was a game to him—he was simply showing off his newest toy—but there was a thrill to it as well.
Being on the king’s arm. Feeling the way his power shifted the room around him.
To be displayed, as if somehow, in some way, I was something of value.
And then he was gone.
I broke off my conversation with a lady and turned, but I couldn’t spot him through the revelers, despite his height. I was on my own, a thundering absence where he’d been beside me.
The unfamiliar faces pressed in. Lady Darkoath. Lord Carmine.
A man took my hand and twisted me to face him.
With a narrow jaw and a thin mustache, he was like a spider, so tall he almost had to stoop.
I pulled back, but he didn’t release his hold on me.
“Pardon my boldness, my lady, but I’m the Viscount of the Black Marshes, and I’m desperate to hear news from the Bloodvale. ”
I extracted myself from his cloying grasp and did my best to recapture my composure. “The Black Marshes lie within the Bloodvale, but I’ve never heard of a Viscount dwelling there.”
“Ah,” he said with a conspiratorial nod. “Human lives are so short. There is no memory of anything. It’s an ancient title from before the old king burned down my estate and evicted our line from the Vale. I keep the appellation as a memory of what was lost and what will be ours one day.”
A woman in a dark purple dress with a looming collar cut in. “What the Viscount lost is nothing. The whole south of the Bloodvale used to belong to my line. We lost it when your kind revolted three centuries ago, and it was never restored.”
A sneer pulled at her lips, and venom laced every word. Most of the immortals in the court looked like they resented me, but this one looked like she was planning to eat me alive.
“I’m sorry for the loss of your lands, Lady…”
“Duchess Graveloch,” she interrupted. “And do not think you can address me as an equal. You are the sister of a pretender queen who should be flayed alive like all the other human traitors.” She bent closer. “I just wanted you to know, if the king doesn’t make an example of you, I will.”
She hitched up the train of her dress, then turned and stalked away. I stared after her, stunned.
“By the gods, will we never be free of her ceaseless lamentations?” a lady in silver sniped, rolling her eyes as she fluttered her hand. “Oh, the tragedy! The injustice! The duchess lost her lands.” She turned to me with a bitter smile. “Everyone here has lost everything.”
Same as I had.
The woman’s open dislike of the Duchess instantly made her the closest thing I had to a friend in the room—someone who might be able to help me get the lay of the land.
“What about you, Your Ladyship?” I asked. “I didn’t get your name or title. Did you lose lands in the Bloodvale as well?”
She gave me an unwomanly bow, sloshing the blood in her glass over the rim and onto the floor. “Isolde Morgrave, countess of nothing, baroness of who gives a fuck anymore because it doesn’t matter. I’m here, and I’m drunk, and that is good enough for today.”
A lord on my left laughed. “While the Viscount and the Duchess cling to their past, many of us are happy to forget—an inclination His Royal Highness is all too happy to embrace.”
His laugh was hollow, with an undercurrent of sadness that gave me pause.
It wasn’t just him. The surrounding smiles were too bored, the laughs too loud, the attire too bright—as if the music and clothes and boisterous conversation were all a mask to hide the misery of the court—to bury a sickness gnawing away at the joy. Just like the people in Harrowick.
Had everyone here lost everything? Or had the king and his curse taken it from them?
I studied the revelers with fresh eyes. Their eccentric clothes weren’t just riotous, but out of place—a myriad of different styles to match the varying complexions of their owners. I turned my attention to the voices murmuring around me, picking up on dozens of accents I didn’t recognize.
“Have most of the nobles here been displaced?” I asked.
The lord grunted. “Everyone here is running from something.”
“Even the king?”
Isolde laughed. “He’s been here as long as anyone—yet no one even knows his name.”
I stared at her, utterly dumbfounded. “How is that possible?”
“We’ve all speculated as to who he is or what brought him here,” the lady said, brushing the comment away with her hand as if an anonymous king was simply routine.
The shock of it dulled my thoughts. What crime was so heinous that it could make an immortal abandon his name and history? A massacre? Betrayal?
Maybe bringing about a curse?
Unfortunately, the Bloodvale had been cut off from the wider world. I didn’t have a strong enough grasp of the continent’s history to even posit a guess.
“The king is old news,” Isolde chirped, staggering closer as if we were intimate friends. “What we want to know about is you. Are you truly the sister of a queen?”
“Is she as beautiful as you?” the viscount asked as he sidled up beside me.
“They say she’s a sorceress,” a woman muttered from my left. “Did she bewitch Prince Cassius?”
I turned to refute it, but a gruff male asked, “How did Cassius gain the throne without an immortal bride? The court would never accept it.”
“What of his brother who was meant to rule?” asked another. “Did Cassius kill him? That was how his father ascended to the throne.”
The voices kept coming from every direction. My head swam, and my chest grew tight, my lungs struggling for breath that I couldn’t seem to take.
“Has there been a purge of the court? There’s always a purge. There’s no way they put a mortal on the throne without one.”
I tried to intervene, to refute, to object, but soon enough, I was completely overwhelmed. Their voices lost their distinction, and their faces blurred as they pressed in. Malicious smiles, hungry eyes, and lips stained with blood and wine.
My back thumped against the wall as they kept coming.
A man gripped my shoulder and spun me to face him. “It’s about time we had something fresh around here. Are you a witch like your sister? You smell like it. I’ve always wanted to know what a witch tasted like.”
Another lord loomed on my left, his eyes smoldering as they raked a trail down my body from the curve of my neck to my waist. “Fresh indeed, but I’m more interested in—"
The lord’s head jerked back sharply as a hand crushed his windpipe. The next second, the king slammed him against the wall. The immortal kicked and squirmed, but the king’s grasp was iron, and his eyes filled with a lethal light.
“I thought I made it clear,” the king growled in his ear, “Miss Marquette is my guest. Touch her and I’ll rip out your heart.”
His voice was a whisper, but it shook the room like an earthquake. Faces paled, and the crowd of bloodthirsty immortals melted away. I stood there stunned, stretched between the terror of it and a thrill that shouldn’t have been there.
The moment shattered when the king rammed the lord’s face against the wall and cast him to the ground, leaving his nose a bloody mess.
The lord who’d grabbed me tried to flee, but the king seized him, wrenching his body into an impossible shape. Bones snapped. The lord screamed and collapsed to the floor, clutching his mangled arm.
“Next time, it’ll be your neck,” the king growled.
The broken man looked up at me, eyes burning with hate. He wasn’t the only one. If I hadn’t had enemies here before, I’d have plenty now.
The king turned his back on the two lords and approached.
The ribs of my dress crushed around my chest, and my breaths grew ragged. He’d moved so fast, I hadn’t even seen it. What chance did I have against a monster like him? If he wanted, he could sink his teeth into my neck before I even realized he was there.
There was nothing I could do to stop him from taking whatever he wanted: my blood, my body, my life.
I stumbled against a table and my shoe caught on the train of my dress, sending me lurching sideways. His hand clamped around my arm, and he pulled me close as a candelabra crashed to the ground beside me.
Suddenly, we were inches apart. Too close. My heart drummed against my chest, and my skin grew slick with sweat. I didn’t even bother trying to conceal my fear anymore. There was no point. He could smell it.
“You seem to be causing quite a stir, princess,” he murmured, low and warm.
“I didn’t realize you kept a court of animals,” I parried, trying desperately to keep my voice steady.
He grunted in disdain. “Animals are easier to train. These ones need to be reminded that obedience is the cornerstone of civilization, and that immortality can be rather fleeting.”
“You’d kill one of your nobles just for touching me?”
A wry smile formed on his lips, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “I would kill them for defying my orders. Or for looking at you in a way I didn’t like.”
He was a bloodthirsty tyrant. Monstrous. So why was there a shameful flutter in my belly?
Suddenly, he drew nearer. Too near. His presence consumed me, intoxicating and terrible, and the air grew difficult to draw.
I stepped back quickly, my skin flushed from his heat. “Thank you for intervening, Your Highness, but you must have more pressing matters to attend to.”
He followed my movements, a feral gleam in his unrelenting gaze. “More pressing, perhaps, but not nearly as intriguing.”
The way he looked at me shouldn’t have prickled my skin or sent heat pooling low inside me.
This was a mistake. I should have stayed in my bedchamber.
I forced a smile. “I’m afraid my sister is the most intriguing thing about me.”
“Your sister is of little interest to me. You, on the other hand, are quite an enigma,” he said in a velvet voice that did nothing to veil the underlying threat. “What are you really doing in my kingdom, Belle?”
“Currently, just trying to keep my skin intact.”
The king watched me for another heartbeat, assessing me, before glancing at the large clock on the wall. “If that’s your goal, then it may be time to retire. The reception is nearly over, and the revel is about to begin. I doubt you have the right disposition for what happens next.”
He motioned to the footmen standing at the ready beside the door. “Escort Lady Marquette to her chambers. I think she’s had enough excitement for the night.”
He held my gaze, a muscle in his jaw ticking, before he turned and walked away.
I stood there, my arm still hot from his touch, trying to decide what terrified me more—the court that wanted to devour me, or the king who’d just announced they couldn’t.