25. A King’s Ultimatum #2
Theron regarded him with the patience of something that had watched empires rise and rot to dust. “You labor under a misapprehension,” he said.
“The ring does not answer for the whole of my collection. Only my most prized possessions are bound to it, and the Weaver’s Torch was never among them.
It lay in the deepest vault, behind doors no hand but mine may open.
” He turned the silver band idly on his finger as Aster’s jaw worked like a grinder, his teeth gritting.
Theron’s gaze sharpened. “Remember, you didn’t cross the realms to fetch a trinket, Minotaur.
You came to ask a king for his aid, and your queen paid what I asked for it.
The journey. The bargain.” His voice cooled.
“The judgment of the gods, in my garden, where she might so easily have been left standing among the rest of my statues. That was never a thing my ring could have spared her. It was the cost. And she chose to pay it.”
The reminder landed like a stone in my gut. Whatever she had risked in that place, she had risked for me, and told me nothing of it.
“You let her gamble her life,” Aster growled, taking a step.
“I let her choose. There is a difference, young bull.” Theron’s voice never rose.
“And she walked back out of those stones alive, did she not? You both used the torch and found your king, and his kingdom still standing.” His copper gaze slid, almost gently, to the dark stain on the floor where she had bled.
“Alexandra, however, does not have the luxury of time to squander on old grievances. So, I would suggest we stop squandering it on her behalf.”
Aster made a sound remarkably like a bull about to charge, and I was honestly surprised he had not already begun to turn.
“I agree, this is pointless. What’s done is done,” I snapped, and Theron followed these thoughts as my attention fixed on the vial in his hand.
That and the small, cold certainty growing in my gut that none of this was as simple as he was letting it seem.
He had named his price already, the girl and yet here he stood.
Willing to pour away the very last of something irreplaceable on the strength of a bargain he could have driven so much harder.
It made no sense unless he knew the girl was here. But I had seen it for myself. The shock of finding her at all. He certainly hadn’t been expecting it. So I had to question why he was willing to part with something so precious, even before he knew Thalia existed.
“If that’s the last of it,” I said carefully, “why spend it so freely? Why use it at all if Alexandra means nothing to you?”
Theron’s gaze slid to the floor where she had lain, and I did not miss the small smile that touched his mouth, nor the care that softened his eyes as it did.
“Oh, I never said she meant nothing to me.” He smirked, making me growl as the furious bite of jealousy struck. However, before I could do something suicidal enough, like take on a living God, he continued,
“But it is rather difficult for her to uphold her end of our agreement whilst comatose, even more so if she is no longer among the living,” he said, his voice quietening as if the thought pained him.
Every muscle in my body went still.
“Especially,” he went on, turning the vial once more in the torchlight, “when she promised me whatever I desired.”
The words sank into the silence, and for a moment I could only stare at him. Then came a roar of my words, “She did what?!”
Theron’s coppery gaze slid past me to Aster.
“You never told him,” he said. It was not a question, hence why my head snapped to Aster so fucking fast, my neck cracked. He stood with his jaw tight, and the guilt that flashed across his face told me everything before he had said a single word.
“Aster.” My voice came out low and dangerous. “Never told me what?”
He lifted both hands, palms out, the way a man does when he is trying to keep a wild animal from charging. “She made me swear not to tell you until she could tell you herself. And she assured me, Atlas. She swore to me she would tell you.”
“You should have fucking told me!” The fury tore out of me before I could stop it, my aura flaring hot enough that the torches in their sconces flared brighter. “She made a bargain with a god, and you said nothing!”
“It matters not now.” Theron’s voice cut across the chamber, flat and certain.
Yet somehow that quiet was louder than all my shouting combined.
He waited until my eyes found his. “The point,” he went on, “is that she came to me, of her own will, and offered me a vow. Her aid, whenever I should have need of it, in exchange for mine. She agreed to it freely. And it is that bargain, young king, that brought her to you in time. Without it, you would be standing over a grave instead of a sickbed.”
The truth of it landed like a blow. Every breath I had taken at her side these past days, every stolen hour, I owed to a debt she had hidden from me.
“Now,” Theron said, and there was something almost gentle in it. “I suggest we move on. Save her, and you may yet have the chance to ask her yourself why she kept it from you.”
I had no answer to that. There was no answer. Only her, fading above us, and the box on the pedestal that might hold the only road back.
“Then do it,” I said through gritted teeth, and thankfully, he took not a second longer before his fist closed around the vial.
The crystal gave with a sound like cracking ice, and yet it did not cut him.
The shards simply dissolved, and the water drifted instead of spilled, breaking apart into a thousand glittering jewels that hung in the air for the space of a breath before they fell like magic compelled them.
Each one had a slow descent, drifting down over the box, the pedestal, the blood stain on the floor, like the gentlest rain, each droplet catching the torchlight as it went.
Where the water touched its destination, the world began to change.
The air above the pedestal thickened and paled, curling into smoke that was alive.
Shapes began to rise. Gray shadows shifting before becoming nearly as translucent as breath on cold glass, the chamber filled with the ghosts of a moment already passed.
And then I saw her.
Alexandra.
Walking into the chamber as though in a dream, her bare feet silent on the stone, her nightgown pale against all that dark.
She didn’t look afraid. That was the worst of it.
She moved toward the pedestal the way you move toward a voice you love and have not heard in years.
Drawn there with a foolish certainty, reaching for something she didn’t fully understand.
The smoky shape of her stopped before the box, and her hands rose, and she lifted the lid.
I knew what waited inside before the vision showed me, yet I didn’t fully understand how.
The heart.
One slick, dark, and impossibly still beating. There it sat, upon a bed of velvet, pulsing out a slow and dreadful rhythm I swore I could feel in my own chest even now.