The Shards of Ophelia (The Curse of Ophelia #2)

Chapter 1

Chapter One

Ophelia

There was something to be said for standing up when, internally, you were shattered.

When your flesh was a case for broken bones and your heart beat tainted blood, but you slipped a mask over your features and became what was expected of you.

Only the strongest survived the wounds dug into their souls.

Walking into the Rapture Chamber, I’d imagined what I would face from the five chancellors of the minor clans. They would see me as too young, too brash for the role of Revered—the warrior who, as the leader of the Mystiques, singularly held the most power on the continent.

So, I’d entered with the confidence I’d seen from warriors before me and the pulsing reminder of the power in my own blood, using that to meld my broken pieces shoddily together for the duration of the meeting.

Twelve hours later, facing down a different battle entirely, my resolve was buckling. I squeezed my sister’s and Malakai’s hands on either side of me, seeking their strength.

“Are you sure you don’t want me to come with you?”

My cheeks flushed where Malakai’s stare burned into them, but it was nothing lustful. It was the third time he’d asked me, and I’d denied him for as many.

Instead of meeting his gaze, I tracked the shadows dancing across the marble floors.

Night swept further over the mountains, orbs of mystlight popping into existence along the ceiling’s center.

Buried as we were in the lower level of the palace, one wall built directly into rock, the stars and moon were hardly visible.

Dull light shone through the arched windows, gold-trimmed panes peeking between thick velvet curtains.

The Revered’s Palace was nothing if not a center of opulence, despite the fact that only Lucidius—our corrupt former leader and Malakai’s father—had occupied it in recent years. Even this level, the holding cell, was built to symbolize power.

Ice filled my veins, curling around my stomach at the reminder of the lies Lucidius Blastwood had bathed in while his people suffered.

How he’d schemed with Queen Kakias of the Engrossians for decades to ignite a false war between our two clans in order to place their bastard son in the Revered’s seat as a sign of peace.

The revelation sent shock waves through the continent as strong as the Spirit Volcano erupting.

Thousands of Mystiques had been devastated by those actions.

Yet he had been here, hidden away in his marble tower, doing Damien knew what with his days.

“Ophelia?” Malakai asked, his whisper slithering down the stone walls.

Shaking my head and blinking back to reality, I dropped Malakai’s hand and met his worry-worn eyes. “We’ll be okay.”

“I won’t utter a word.” The crease between his dark brows deepened, mystlight casting shadows on the planes of his face.

I opened my mouth to argue but stopped at the bob of his throat.

The fidgeting of his stare. Perhaps he didn’t want to accompany us to protect me, but to avoid his own ghosts and the memories drawn to the surface by these cells.

After signing a treaty to end the war and handing himself over to his father and the queen, spending two years as their prisoner, it made sense why this would haunt him.

I’d seen the pale scars marring his chest and torso, contorting the skin across his back. Though my stomach turned, I’d committed them to memory. This new map of his body outlined my own path to vengeance.

Setting aside my frustration for him, I stretched onto my toes to kiss his cheek, hoping that gentle touch could siphon away his pain as it once had.

“We’ll be fine, Malakai.” My voice softened with the words I left unsaid.

He stiffened, hand fisting against the bare skin above the skirt of my leathers, nails grazing softly against my spine, longing to keep me there.

“Besides,” I added, stepping out of his hold. If I didn’t, neither of us would get through tonight. “You have your own matters to attend to.”

Bricks fortified a wall between us at the reminder.

“Good luck.” I brushed my thumb across the scar his father had left on his jaw. The father I killed, I thought, dropping my hand.

He recoiled. Turned.

I almost pulled him back to me, almost indulged the desperate need flaring around my ribs, expanding with every breath. But I stayed still.

Without responding, he strode down the corridor. Each echo of boots against stone inflated the bubble around my ribs until it popped. Silence ricocheted inside of me, cementing that wall between us. Shrouding me in its shadow.

He paused before the farthest door, collecting his breaths. An echo of a pulse flashed through the Bind, the North Star tattoo we’d illegally received before he disappeared. Our jolted emotions bounced back and forth haphazardly along that sliver of threaded soul.

Over time, the bond should’ve deepened until the ink formed a bridge between us. Our own personal reality, through which we could pass thought and feeling.

But it hadn’t.

Malakai left so shortly after we’d received the Bind, our tattoos had barely settled into our skin. After being apart for years—growing and shrinking and coping—everything within the magical ink was convoluted.

Now, there was a brief sweep of knee-shaking nerves, then the connection fell silent, as if he’d brushed aside all feeling. Without another look, he knocked. A dull voice welcomed him in, and the man I loved disappeared to confront his past.

Jezebel squeezed my hand. When I looked at her, her brows were raised.

“What?”

“Is everything okay?” She jerked her head toward the door Malakai had walked through.

“Everything’s fine.” At least, everything I had space in my mind to consider right now was. “Are you ready?”

For a moment, she looked so young, with wide eyes and a slight frame. The need to shield her from pain snapped like a whip inside me, but the time for that had long passed. She may still be seventeen, but she was as much a warrior as I was—the first underage Mystique to complete the Undertaking.

She closed her eyes, and I could see her build a steel frame around her emotions. When she opened them again, the tawny depths were a void.

Together, we stepped to the closest door, the reddish-brown wood reflecting mystlight on our skin and weapons. Gathering strength from the spear, Angelborn, at my back and dismissing my thundering heart behind my ribs, I rapped my knuckles against the wood.

After a beat of strained silence during which I swore I could hear both my sister’s and my own blood rushing, a familiar voice called, “Come in.”

We stepped across the threshold of our father’s chamber, locked palms sweating. A tense rope knotted between us, each party observing the other.

A month. That’s all it had been, but an eternity of experiences spread across the stone floor like spilled oil, leaving a sheen behind even once cleaned. It was clear, there in the thickening of the air—we were not the same girls who left Palerman.

The expression on my father’s face stopped my voice in my throat, his eyes dull and cheeks hollowed out. His unbound golden hair fell in wild waves past his shoulders.

“Girls,” he whispered, pushing back from his untouched plate and standing to his full, intimidating height.

A piece of my old self crumpled at his cracked voice, and we ran forward, each fitting beneath one of our father’s arms as we had as children.

When I left on my quest, I didn’t intend to ever see my father again.

I said goodbye to Palerman and my entire life, ready to greet my death at the hands of the Curse.

But when the Spirit Volcano leached it from my body, I was gifted a second chance.

And when Damien confirmed the Curse was a ruse, I no longer knew what to believe.

As I stood there with my sister and father, all of those emotions came crashing down on me.

Reluctantly, I stifled that impending flood and pushed out of his arms. Jezebel followed my lead.

“You look…” he began, taking in the official leathers we wore. A grimace twisted his lips. My eyes drifted over my body, stopping on the Curse webbing on my wrist. The fresh white scars across my waist and arm. “The lupine daimons,” he whispered.

“The what?”

His eyes focused back on mine. “The scars are from the tundra wolves, aren’t they?

The lupine daimons.” I nodded, tucking away the name for the creatures we’d battled during the first step of the Undertaking.

My father’s shoulders drooped. “I’m sorry I couldn’t warn you about them.

I’m sorry they—” His words faded into a guilt-laden silence as my scars caught his stare again.

“I’m not. I’ll never forget the pain those wolves—the lupine daimons—caused me, but I’m proud to bear these scars.” He couldn’t have prepared me any better without sharing secrets of the Undertaking. “You gave us everything we needed to succeed.”

I looked over at my sister in her own leathers.

The boots to her knees, with their thick soles.

The gold plates around her shoulders and wrists.

The fitted dress brushing mid-thigh with a tight corset up the back, made of the imbued brown leather from which Divina Delantin crafted all Mystique Warrior garb.

Together, we looked formidable. To my father, we must’ve looked—

“You look like true Mystique Warriors,” he finished, a silver sheen gathering in the corners of his eyes.

Jezebel cleared her throat beside me, and I swallowed my own emotion.

“Father, take a seat.” He snapped to attention at my stoic tone, but listened, returning to the table set for one. The room felt more like a bedchamber than a cell. An empty armoire stood in the corner, doors gaping, and a single bed waited across from the fire.

“How was your journey?” I began easily.

“Plagued with concerns after learning my daughters fled with no indication of where they were going.” He ran a hand through his hair, muscles tensing as if trying not to yell.