Chapter Thirty-Two
A blanket of warmth settled over Nick. Peace.
Happiness. His shoulders relaxed as he stared at the delicate fingers curved around his bleeding arm.
Fine green veins ran beneath pale skin, nails trim and blue.
Nick’s gaze moved slowly upwards, from the notch of her wrist, the curve of her elbow, to the sleeve of her wedding dress.
Desre was beautiful. Through a thick fog that permeated his mind, Nick had the vague feeling that he was meant to be doing something to please her.
“Desre,” Nick murmured, meaning to ask what she wanted from him. He knew it was something very important to her, something he could give that nobody else could.
“My lady,” she corrected.
“My lady,” Nick copied instantly.
Desre slid a hand under his chin and lifted his face, peering into his eyes. Nick leaned into her wonderful, cold touch, shivering. “My lady,” he repeated, feeling lost and content at the same time.
The doors to the hall banged open. Heels clicked hollowly on marble stone as someone marched down the centre aisle. “They’re gone,” Rin said.
Desre looked over Nick’s shoulder. “They withdrew without attacking?”
“Not just the army. All of them are gone. The guards, the workers, the people—there’s not a soul left in Aridia.” Rin came side by side with them. She bore a confused expression, one that Greya matched, though Desre’s expression—the only one Nick cared to read—filled with realisation.
“So this was the solution he found, to deny me of people at all.” There was a hard note of anger in her voice. Nick felt that anger shivering through him, dangerous and threatening. A pained groan slipped past his lips as the need to placate Desre overwhelmed him.
“I can show you on a map where they are,” Nick offered.
Within the fog of his mind, something twisted and rebelled.
But that feeling mattered none at all when compared to what Desre wanted.
“Kit is being kept there.” A flicker of something sharp and painful passed through him.
“I even know what room he’s in. I can help you get him back. ”
“What do we do?” Rin butted in.
Desre turned back to Nick assessingly. She was worried, he thought, that he was tricking her.
Nick’s heart ached that she suspected him of trying to harm her.
Even though he had. “I’m sorry. I hurt you.
I didn’t know what I—I didn’t know.” Confusion curled through him.
How could he have forgotten his love of her?
How could he have struck out and physically attacked her?
Something was terribly wrong.
“He hurt you?” Rin asked, distracted.
Desre’s anger swept through Nick; she felt so cold inside he wondered if anything in the universe could warm her?
He squeezed his eyes shut. He’d displeased her again.
She didn’t want these people to see her vulnerability.
To know that a protection symbol had blocked her power, that she had come to physical harm.
“Rin’s jealous of you,” Nick said, trying to distract Rin from asking more questions that Desre didn’t want asked. “She thinks the god that came here liked her, not you. She’s delusional.”
Rin’s breath stuttered. “Excuse—I—that’s it, I’m having that tongue.”
Desre’s head tilted to the side, a slow smile twisting her lips. Her eyes gleamed. She still felt ice cold. “No,” she said, amused. “It’s growing on me. And really, Rin, all this time you thought he favoured you? His maid? You were with him for years, and he never once took you to bed.”
Rin reddened. “It was an intellectual connection! We discussed strategy and battle plans and –”
“He was many things, but he was no battle commander. None in that family line were; it’s why they’re all dead. I’m actually married to a commander, so I can tell you the difference is rather irksome. What do you know of Valor’s plans?” She addressed the question to Nick.
Nick breathed out, thinking hard through confusing, muddled thoughts.
This was important. “What I know could be lies,” he said, recalling Valor’s nature.
“He would burn Aridia down to keep Kit free of you; that matters more to him than anything. Ending you is important. But he cannot kill you. He…” Nick blinked, a thought coming suddenly through the gloom. “He let you find me.”
Desre’s eyes narrowed. “Let me?”
Nick would have nodded, but her lovely fingers were digging into his throat, nails biting into his pulse and drawing blood. “How did you know where to find me? I only went to the river twice, and the second time, Captain Hin was waiting.”
“An informant. Valor does not think you can kill me, even if he knows of your…spells,” Desre said. “You’re no match for even the weakest of my guards.”
“I’m not,” Nick agreed. “But I doubt you were the only one to get information about my whereabouts. Your power doesn’t work on merfolk, does it?
” Nick asked. She wouldn’t have diverted them to the Dia River, where she knew rebels waited to snatch away Kit, if she wasn’t afraid of the mermen stopping their ship.
“They’ll come for me. Here. He’ll tell them where I am and what you are.
” Fear made his heart stutter. “He’ll twist it so that they’ll kill you when they do. ”
Foreign emotions roiled through Nick. Anger. Hate.
“Why would they come all this way? For a student?” Desre demanded. In his peripheral vision, he saw the uneasy look Rin and Greya exchanged.
Nick blinked heavily. “My brother is the new monarch.” And then Nick knew with certainty that was exactly Valor’s plan.
He’d said as much, hadn’t he? Valor was certain all he had to do was get Desre and any merfolk together and she wouldn’t survive the encounter.
“You need to go. You can’t be here when they arrive.
Stay with me. They can’t find me, or they couldn’t, maybe now they can?
” Pain radiated behind his eyes. “I can’t think clearly. ”
“How could you take one from a monarch’s court?” Rin demanded, horrified.
“It isn’t her fault,” Nick rushed out. “I was dressed like a student. I had these symbols on my arms like one.”
“Shut up!” Rin snapped. She bodily grabbed Desre and spun her around.
The hand on Nick’s face fell away, but the one on his arm slid through blood, catching at his wrist. Her grip was tighter than the shackles.
“What are we supposed to do? A monarch? A monarch is coming for us? He will take one look at this and claim it as spoils.” Rin gestured to the well.
“We have to move it. All of it. Now.” She marched down the steps, trembling.
“We’ll bring it into the mountain, as far from the river as we can.
I need jugs, jars, servants! Someone come here now before I skin you alive! ” Her voice rose to a panicked screech.
Nobody answered her.
“Calm yourself, Rin.” Desre’s voice was far from calm, undercut by fear.
“Enough. I do not answer to you.” Rin spun on her heels and glowered at Desre.
“For all you call these kits animals, you’re worse than them yourself.
Did you forget where you came from? Because I didn’t.
I remember the first day I saw you crawling out of that well.
I remember the rancid stench of you. The filth.
The grime. You would have died in that hole, desperate and starving, if not for me.
Don’t talk to me as if you have noble blood; no amount of posturing will ever erase the reek of nymph. ”
Desre’s cold rage infected Nick, hooking claws deep into his bone marrow.
He touched the edge of a vast cavern of emptiness, the source of her coldness.
Nick ached to fill it for her. Could he brighten this darkness?
With Kit? Perhaps Laurence? His little brother had been born with the ability to repel unhappiness, a superpower that got Nick through every rough patch from toddler to teenager to man.
An ache behind his eyes squeezed so tight his vision shadowed at the edges.
“Seize her,” Desre ordered.
Nick turned towards Rin, but Desre didn’t release his arm. Instead, the guards at his side let him go and advanced down the aisle in quick, sure steps. They didn’t hesitate. They didn’t care about the ‘council’; they yielded to Desre, and her power only.
“Desre?” Greya looked up from the glass of blessed well water he cradled in alarm.
“Rin? Don’t fight, darlings. We only have each other, remember?
Please. It’s so unbecoming. Personally, I love the smell of nymph, and I think you were quite fetching even when you lived in the well—though truth be told, it was so many years ago, I can’t recall what you looked like back then.
But I do remember our Lord felt quite bad for, erm, was quite taken with you! ”
Desre’s anger, Nick’s anger, grew and grew, the feeling unspooling fast as the realisation that a salvageable situation was slipping beyond reach.
Nick struggled to figure out what to do with the emotions shrouding his mind.
He glared at Greya. “Shut up,” Nick warned.
“Or you’ll be the one losing his tongue. ”
“I really do hate this one!” Greya edged away from Nick, wary.
Desre pressed both her hands to Nick’s cheeks, cradling his face, drawing him from his knees to his feet.
Behind him, he heard grappling, Rin screeching.
Greya set his glass on the nearest pew and rushed down the aisle, calling out ineffectual warnings at the kits to stop being so rough.
Desre focused on Nick. Nick focused on Desre.
He could feel that she held not even the smallest speck of affection for him; there was contempt, hate even, though twined with that was something victorious that she had mastered him.
Nick didn’t mind. He would make up for his past behaviour towards her.
“Kiss me,” she said.