Chapter 14
Chapter Fourteen
Malakai
“Jezebel, call the council,” Ophelia instructed the moment we were in the Mystique Council Chamber two floors above the cells. “Cyph, Tolek, start mapping routes. Rina, can you prepare a pack of tonics and ointments?”
They fluttered around me as if I was a statue in the middle of the room.
“What are you doing?” I rounded on Ophelia.
She gaped at me. “What?”
“What is all this?” I waved my hand at the preparations.
“Malakai.” A softness lowered her voice. “There’s an immediate threat to the city. We have to respond.”
“Why are you pretending to believe him? He’s obviously lying.
We should throw him off the fucking mountain.
” I paced along the windows, looking out over the courtyard and training arena.
After my years being locked up, the view was refreshing, but even so, the memory of chains at my wrists dug deeper.
I rubbed the scars, counting the ridges.
The Engrossian deserved at least that much.
“Why would I kill him, Malakai?” She approached slowly and tried to take my hand. I jerked it away.
“Are you fucking kidding me?” I pulled aside the collar of my shirt to remind her of the Engrossian ax I now bore.
Ophelia had the decency to flinch. “I’m sorry,” she muttered.
She stepped forward, placed a kiss to the scar, and observed it for a long moment, jaw grinding.
Then, she swallowed, blinking back her emotion, and righted my collar, hands tightening around the fabric.
There was steel in that grip and fury in her eyes, though she spoke with the voice of the Revered.
“But this is a political decision. We can’t assume his information is a trap because of what his mother did to you. ”
I stumbled back a step, forcing her hands off of me. Politics, strategies, alliances. It seemed every choice she made these days was for those narrow-minded goals.
“Was it a political decision when my father put shackles around my wrists? Was it political when Kakias instructed hot blades cut my flesh?” I roared.
“Everything claims to be political, but not everything must be.” Some things should be innocent choices, not tangled up in the motives of clans and strikes against enemies.
“Those were all matters of strategy, Malakai,” she soothed. “They were twisted, decided upon for perverse reasons, but it boils down to powers and policy and pride. I won’t make my decisions based on their actions.”
“That’s what you’re doing!”
“Not in the same way. I’m choosing not to punish him for his mother’s actions, but I will if he gives us his own reason to. If he’s lying to us, he’ll—”
“It would punish her, not him,” I seethed.
“There might be a better way to enact revenge.”
“She’s right,” Cypherion agreed, placing a hand on my shoulder. “Look at it, Mali. Not hurting Barrett, allowing him to help us—that might strike Kakias even deeper.” Ophelia nodded at Cyph. In that one action, I was more isolated than ever.
“So now we’re suddenly not only not hurting him, we’re giving him free rein?”
“No.” Ophelia’s tone turned harsh. “I never said that.”
“You might as well have.”
“If what he says is true, we need his insight into the Engrossians. How their armies train, their movements.”
“I’ll never ally with him.”
“You don’t have to. But I can’t squander what could be a chance to cut off a very real threat before they arrive. A shot at survival.”
What did they know of fighting for survival? I’d learned not to rely on others for that.
“I don’t trust him,” I growled.
“I don’t either, yet.” But she was considering it. And that was enough to twist my heart. Enough to squeeze the life right out of it.
“He might not be so bad,” Tolek offered.
I glowered at him, unsure who I was even looking at.
He raised his hands. “I’m aware of everything he stands for, everything he is a reminder of. But you don’t know him.”
“Neither do you,” I spat.
“No, I don’t. We won’t ever, though, if we don’t consider this information. Think of what we’d be turning away.”
“We’d be giving him a chance to ruin us.”
“Malakai has a point,” Jezebel said. Finally, someone fucking agreed with me. She pushed back her chair. “He could be playing us, loyal to his mother.”
“That’s a risk,” Ophelia agreed. “It’s always a risk, and I’m not going to trust him outright.”
But she wasn’t going to not trust him either.
“If it truly is authentic, we need to move on the Southern Pass,” Cyph said.
“He seemed genuine when I stitched him up,” Santorina said. “He was grateful.”
“He has a unique position as heir. Both a bargaining chip and an undeniable wealth of knowledge.” Tolek ran a hand over his scruff. “I vote he stays.”
“It’s not a fucking vote!” I snapped.
They all froze.
“I’m sorry, Malakai,” Ophelia whispered. My heart might have stopped beating, I couldn’t be sure. Because Ophelia was the one person I was always sure of before I left, and now, I didn’t recognize her.
Before anyone could offer another excuse for their misplaced faith, I stormed from the room.
I hadn’t even decided where I was headed, but my feet carried me there.
The hallway stretched before me, shadows curling around sconces and statues, foreboding. My chest rose and fell as I stared at the door, darkness separating us.
For weeks I’d avoided this place—this entire section of the palace. Ophelia and the others had come here to search for anything my father may have hidden, but I couldn’t. It held too many ghosts I didn’t want to address.
But now, they’d sought me out.
Anger churned my blood, heating and warping until I was charging down the corridor, throwing the door wide.
Dull mystlight blinked to life when I entered, as if surprised. Like it knew when the inhabitant of this suite had died and pieces of its energy went with him. There were no reminders of me or my mother in my father’s former home. Not an artifact, not an image.
Shoving that disappointment aside, I strode for the office. It was locked, but I threw my shoulder against the wood—once, twice, three times, until the lock snapped, handle clattering to the floor.
It still smelled of his piney cologne. Exactly like the office he’d held in our home in Palerman.
Though carefully rifled through, the room remained his.
Trinkets, papers, and books were thrown about lazily beneath dull mystlight, as if he’d spent many long hours slumped over the desk, working on whatever despicable plans he concocted.
I hadn’t expected it to feel so…lived in.
Holding his presence despite the weeks since he’d died.
Fuck, there were even bottles of liquor and sticky glasses lining the shelf beneath the window. Like he’d only left briefly and expected to come back. That, more than anything, was a punch to my gut. A stark snap to reality.
He’s not coming back. I breathed through the sentence and the roar of guilt it dragged through me.
But his son was here.
I stormed to the shelves and tore down every book I could reach.
The son he wanted more than me was here.
I swept the bottles of liquor from the table. Glass shattered, a mimic of my own world breaking. Shards crunched beneath my boots, filling the room with echoes of broken promises. Sharp cries of a father not protecting his son as he should.
Not wanting his son to exist.
The words on the papers covering his desk blurred before my eyes. It was his handwriting scribbled in cramped lines, his arrows and doodles. They spoke of Angels and tokens and prisons and things I could not give a single fuck about—not in his hand.
Each streak of dark ink ignited the anger inside me. Before I knew what I was doing, the papers were flying through the air. Shredding beneath my hands. Falling into the stains of dark liquor that seeped across the ground.
I collapsed to my knees with them.
It was unfair.
It was so unfair.
I’d only wanted to follow in his footsteps. I’d only wanted to make him proud. I’d never known there was no chance.
Liquor seeped through the knees of my pants, glass digging into my skin.
At some point I started crying. I wiped my tears away angrily, at first, but the cascade quickly overwhelmed me, a curse I couldn’t outrun.
It happened often these days. And no one—not my mother, not my friends, not even Ophelia—understood the torment constantly warring through my body. I was eternally alone.
I need to be alone. The solace of isolation was perhaps the only place I could be free.