24. A Price Paid in Blood
Atlas
We made our way to my bedchamber, and my mind was a turmoil of emotions. But among the storm, I hadn’t missed the look in Theron’s eyes as I’d told him about Alexandra.
It was the look of someone who cared for her, and deeply. I gritted my teeth at the thought, so hard I was surprised they didn’t shatter.
The look stoked the rage I was working so hard to keep leashed. If I had seen it on any other man’s face, my sword would have removed his eyes from his skull so quickly that he’d have gone on staring out of empty sockets before he understood they were gone.
The heat of the rage crawled up the back of my neck, my aura threatening to engulf the space surrounding me in flames as the monster beneath my skin tested its chains.
I breathed through it… I had to.
The thing that wanted to kill Theron was the very same thing that wanted to gather Alexandra up and never let another soul look at her ever again. But neither option would do her the slightest good now.
It also made me wonder, more than ever, what had transpired between them that led the Gorgon King to fall under her spell so quickly.
He had let himself be summoned to a castle he despised, into the company of men who would gladly have watched him bleed.
Yet here he was, and there was no doubt in my mind it was for much more than blind curiosity.
Aster and my brother were plenty capable of a simple kidnapping, but taking the King of the Badlands?
There was nothing simple about that. Which meant he had let himself be taken.
He would have been more than able to fight both of them off, even without going so far as to turn them to stone with a single furious gaze, born of his godly ancestry.
And that led me to only one explanation.
He had come here for my girl.
Again, the thought had me murderous.
Unless, of course, there was another bargain he had in mind. Which still begged the question… What had my little warrior promised him in order to reach me in time? Because the mighty and fearsome King Theron did nothing without a reckoning attached.
Even with these thoughts running through my head, I managed to quickly brief Theron on the events leading up to and finding Alexandra. The disturbed wall. The rooms below the castle. The empty box.
Theron remained a silent shadow at my shoulder until we finally reached the door to my chambers.
Aster and Lazaros had stayed behind, scouring the old grimoires and any tome that so much as held a whisper of dark magic.
Theron and I didn’t wait for them, as I was eager to get back to her and discover the root of this illness.
I pushed the door open and stepped through. My gaze went toward the bed instinctively and snagged instead on the other figure in the room.
We were not alone.
Across the chamber, at the side table beneath the window, a maid stood turned away from us, unaware as yet that anyone had entered.
She had a shallow basin cradled in her hands, and as I watched, she tipped the last of its water back into the porcelain jug on the table.
The damp cloth she had been using was folded over the basin’s rim.
It looked like the maid had been tending to Alexandra, cooling her heated skin with the water. Trying in the only small way she could to ease a fever that was not a fever at all.
The girl, I realized, was new to the castle, one of those faces that hadn’t yet sorted itself into a name in my memory. A maid I knew Alexandra thought very highly of and had even struck up a friendship with, even in the short time she’d been here.
She set the basin down upon the tray beside the jug, lifting the heavy load with both hands as she turned. Only then did she see us. Her eyes found mine first as she dropped at once into a curtsey, the tray still clutched carefully against her.
“My King,” she breathed respectfully, before her eyes lifted past me to Theron. Whatever she saw there emptied the blood from her face all at once.
The tray slipped from her fingers, and a second later porcelain met stone.
The jug shattered, the basin ringing as it rolled, water washing dark across the floor.
She cried out, both hands flying to her mouth as she watched it unfold before her.
Then she was on her knees in the wreckage, gathering the broken pieces with frantic, shaking fingers.
Doing so as she stammered out apologies to the floor.
“I’m so sorry… forgive me, my lord… I’ll… I’ll have it cleaned, I… Ah!” She hissed out a sharp and pained cry as a jagged shard opened a clean line across her palm. Blood welled at once, bright and quick, and dripped down onto the wet stone.
“Oh, no!” she cried, and I moved to help her up, grinding my teeth at the delay, half of me already straining toward the bed and the woman dying in it. But Theron’s arm came up across my chest, silent and commanding, conveying a single thought…
Stop.
I opened my mouth to object, but I saw his face and closed it.
His whole attention had narrowed to a single point, and that was the blood running over the girl’s hand. He had gone completely still, the way the air goes still before lightning, and something cold and wary crawled up the back of my neck to match it.
Theron moved.
He crossed the short distance between them and sank into a crouch in front of her, folding all that height and breadth down toward the floor. It was as though he understood exactly how he loomed and was trying, for once, to be less frightening.
A seemingly pointless endeavor, as even beside her, he still remained enormous. She was a slip of a thing to begin with, and on her knees in a puddle of broken porcelain with this great dark king bending over her, she looked tiny enough to vanish.
He reached out and took her injured hand in both his, with a gentleness that didn’t match anything else about him.
And the poor girl…
Terror flooded her face.
He didn’t seem to notice, or he simply didn’t care for it.
Instead, his eyes had fixed on the thin red thread sliding down her wrist, and his thumb smoothed the back of her hand once, a slow, soothing glide.
It was similar to the way someone might be with a frightened animal they had every intention of keeping.
But this was when her whole frame began to shake as fear gripped her and wouldn’t let go.
“Theron.” His name left me with both a low warning and a question.
He didn’t answer.
I saw the precise moment the scent reached him.
Something shifted behind his eyes. His pupils thinned to slits.
His jaw clenched as though he were wrestling some ancient, involuntary thing up from his very soul.
And every muscle in his body went taut as a drawn bowstring.
For one held breath, the air felt charged, as though the smell of her blood had woken something in him that had been sleeping for a very long time.
Hunger, or curse, or magic… I couldn’t have named it. Perhaps it was all three. But it had hold of him, whatever it was, and his expression as it took him was not greed.
It was recognition.
It was the face of a man who had been asking a question his whole long life and had just, without warning, been handed the answer.
He lifted her hand to his mouth and ran his tongue slowly across the cut.
His grip was tight enough that no matter how much she tried to tug free, he wouldn’t grant her even an inch.
Gods, from what little strength the girl had, he may not have even felt it.
His large hand wrapped so easily around her wrist that his fingers more than met.
A muttered curse escaped me as my hand found the hilt of my sword by instinct.
The maid whimpered and tried again to pull away. She must have caught him off guard as she managed to slip free of his grasp. This gave her a chance to go scrambling an inch across the stone, and the movement broke whatever fragile leash he’d held himself to.
His grip flashed from gentle to iron. He caught her wrist again and yanked her back toward him, close, far too close. Now folding her small hand flat in his and pressing his mouth to her palm as if he refused to let a single drop of her go to waste.
“Easy,” he murmured against her skin as he must have felt it tremble in his unyielding hold. A low, dark, and unbearably soft command came next.
“Don’t be afraid, I won’t hurt you… Hold still now.”
The girl was shaking so hard I could see it from across the room, her free hand pressed white-knuckled to her own mouth, her eyes huge and swimming with unshed tears.
And every line of Theron’s body had gone rigid and coiled.
There was a possessive strength in his shoulders, his head bowed over her hand like a beast hunched over something it had claimed.
I took a step toward them, ready to put my own body between this stranger-king and a frightened girl of my household.
However, his gaze cut up sidelong and pinned me where I stood.
There was enough in that look, enough of the old, killing stillness, that even I, in my own castle, went no further.
I hadn’t missed the warning. It was in every taut line of him.
Come closer and learn what I am.
“Please…” the maid sobbed, the word cracking apart in the middle. “Please stop.”
And this was when Theron came undone.
Not all at once.
No, it was stranger than that. His eyes flicked up to her face, truly seeing her now and not just her blood. And at the raw terror written there, something seemed to break and reverse in him all in the same instant.