Chapter 12 #2
Titos motioned for a pair of soldiers behind Alexandra. “Escort my niece to her rooms. She’s soiled her pretty dress.”
Alexandra curtsied low to her uncle. “Thank you for dinner. I’ll return the favor soon…” She flicked her gaze to the queen. “With fewer mouths, of course.”
She whipped around, smiling, fueled by gasps and demands for her immediate execution. The soldiers were there, but she passed right between them, untouched.
Alexandra reached the exit just as Titos’s assurances overruled his family. “She’s harmless.”
“No, you are not,” they said.
“No. I am not,” she agreed.
Augustus stood at the foot of their bed, staring at the impression of her head in her pillow. As if she had just been there and was now bathing or dressing or somewhere safe.
Minutes, maybe hours, passed as he hovered over their bed. He could’ve recalled how sweet she smelled in the mornings, how she sighed in her sleep. But no. He didn’t deserve those memories.
It was her face the last time he saw her. He’d already pictured it most of the day, so the recall was easy. But in addition to that defiance, he also thought about the hurt in her eyes. How she’d looked at him, as if he were a stranger.
It wasn’t far from the truth. He’d spent the last five to six months hiding from her. He’d taken on the responsibility of managing her safety without telling her—or anyone—that she needed protection. He, in all his bottomless wisdom, thought he could outrun the gods and their will.
“I miss my mother,” he told Selene’s empty pillow, saying all the words he couldn’t before.
“I dream of her every night. She haunts me with that fucking prophecy.” He dragged his fingers through his hair.
“She warned us this would happen, and I failed you. I’m so sorry, i psychi mou. So, unimaginably sorry.”
Selene’s dragon whined, drawing Augustus’s attention to his large, blinking eyes at the foot of the bed. He sat calmly on his back haunches, having never been more than a foot from Augustus’s side since appearing on the ship.
They’d scoured the market together. He’d ridden on Augustus’s shoulders while he questioned the survivors of a massacre so severe that the people of Perean wouldn’t soon forget.
“She went with the man,” an old woman had told him in the end. “He said his name was Tristan Thorne. She saved us.”
Of course she had.
Rage and utter devastation barreled through Augustus. Without anything close enough to punch or break, he gripped his hair in tight fists and yelled his outrage and anguish into the void. Once all his breath was gone, he let the weight of his guilt take him to his knees.
The dragon jumped onto his shoulder and curled around his neck.
A day ago, Augustus would have been annoyed. Right now, the only thing that mattered was finding Selene. And until his ship was back in working condition, he wasn’t going anywhere. Not that he had a direction in mind or a particular vessel to look for.
A knock on the doorframe startled Augustus to his feet.
Blaze.
Augustus relaxed—an old reflex he hated more than anything.
He wished it never existed at all. Or that Blaze still had that effect, no matter how much he wanted to hate him.
Unfortunately, he couldn’t nullify years of connection that, until Selene appeared, had been unmatched.
First, as friends—the best of friends—and then… more.
Bla?ej Ka?par had been, once upon a time, the best and worst thing that ever happened to Augustus.
Blaze took a hesitant step into the room. “The king said I’d find you here.”
“He’s not the king.” Augustus winced the moment the words were out. Selene had gotten so angry with him for a similar remark. Even now, he hadn’t learned that lesson. “What do you want?”
“Can’t a man look in on his friend?”
Augustus considered the attractive man only feet away. His “friend.” Once, the one man he turned to for one particular brand of comfort. For just a moment—the most fleeting of seconds—Augustus wanted that physical connection with Blaze again. Now. Anything to help him forget his immense loss.
He truly was the worst man in the world.
Augustus cleared his throat and shouldered past Blaze. “We’re friends again? I hadn’t realized.”
Out on the terrace, he inhaled the fresh air and almost choked on it. His current bay view reminded him how much worse things were. The Entia’s mainmast and foremast were splintered. Large portions of the gunwales and decking needed repair, as well as new canvas for the damaged sails.
As for the two attacking ships, they had been sunk by the Perean Navy and now lay at the bottom of Castona Bay. The surviving crew was locked away in the bowels of the palace until their public hanging.
The dragon’s weight vanished, and his purring started a moment later.
Blaze held the little beast and scratched him beneath his scaled chin. Apparently, the ranger wasn’t at all grossed out by the wet, flopping tongue hanging out.
A fresh twinkle in his brown eyes, Blaze glanced up. “What do you plan to do with the dronsian when you leave to find Selene?”
“What are you talking about? What’s a dron—”
Blaze pointedly held up the dragon. “Him, Augustus. Selene’s pet.”
Selene’s constant response echoed through him like broken glass. “He’s not a dragon, Augustus.”
Augustus wanted to laugh and choke on the same breath.
“I ask,” Blaze continued, “because you’re heading into a war, and I have no idea how well dronsians manage at sea.”
“Hold onto him, then. Consider him yours.” Augustus couldn’t care less. If the creature mattered that much to Selene later, he’d find her another one.
Blaze shook his head, then sighed. “I’m going with you.”
He really had some nerve. Now he cared? Now he said the words?
“The fuck you are,” Augustus snapped.
Too-fucking-late.
The dronsian dropped onto the railing, then raced across the branch of a nearby tree, vanishing in the thick growth.
Blaze closed the distance and held Augustus’s gaze. “If you think I’m letting you sail off into war after—”
“Stop! What exactly do you think—? Never mind. Forget it. I can’t deal with you and focus on finding Selene at the same time.” Augustus aimed a finger at the balcony doors. “Go. Get your little team and find your next monster. I don’t need you.”
“No, you don’t,” Blaze agreed, mouth turned down at the corners. “But…”
“But what?”
“I don’t know.” He squinted into the pale light of the setting sun. “I already told the others, and they agreed to come along. They’re always down for a good fight.”
“Walk away, Blaze. You did it once. How hard can it be to do it a second time?” Augustus clapped him on the shoulder. “Maybe I’ll get lucky, and it’ll be for good this time.”
He strode back inside just as Dimitrios entered the sitting room. Augustus scrubbed his face. He couldn’t wait to be rid of all these people, back in his own world, with a crew who knew how to fucking knock.
Then matters turned from bad to worse. Lazaros strode in behind the heir.
“You,” he said to Lazaros, “can turn right the fuck back around. You’re the last person who should be around me right now.”
Lazaros’s head bobbed in a subtle nod. “I only came to tell you what I learned about Selene’s location.”
“What you learned?” A laugh jumped from his tight chest. “Am I to believe that—in just a few short hours—you somehow came about these important details? Because I have to tell you, Bareas, I’m more likely to think you’re working with Thorne.”
Lazaros frowned.
Dimitrios offered the traitor an encouraging nod.
Lazaros inhaled deep, then said, “A ship matching the two the navy sank in the bay was seen leaving Stone Cove. They’re heading south.”
Warian Bay was south. So was his father and the fleet. Thorne’s war had always been with his family, and taking Selene… Was this his way of luring Augustus into some trap?
“Thorne wants a war with your family,” Lazaros said as if reading his mind. “Where’s the fleet?”
“You think I’d hand that to you? So you can scurry back to Thorne and buy redemption?”
“I only want to help.” A hard edge had entered the traitor’s voice. “I lived in Warian Bay for over two decades, Augustus. I watched and I listened and I lived that life. I can see how all these pieces fit.”
“That’s unfortunate.”
Augustus leapt forward. The room disappeared. There was only Augustus, Lazaros, and the razor-sharp knife at the traitor’s throat.
Augustus held Lazaros by the back of the neck, distantly aware of the voices shouting his name. If there were hands on his shoulders, there was little they could do to break the contact.
“Did you think,” Augustus said, tightening his grip, nose to nose, “I would be grateful to you for this? That I would forgive you?”
“No.” Lazaros swallowed deep against the knife’s edge.
“Once, you claimed to be a man of honor. Raised to value loyalty. Remember?”
Blaze appeared in his peripheral. “Augustus. What are you doing?”
This was none of his fucking business.
“You said those words to me while I was your captive,” Augustus continued. “After months of playing the part of one of my most trusted advisors. You told Selene her friends were dead with so little regard for their lives or her feelings—”
“I thought I was doing the right thing for my country. I’m not proud of it.”
“Ah, mate,” Augustus purred, “you shouldn’t have said that. My mother always said, never take a life unless you can live with it. Because if you regret it, then it’s nothing but a waste.”
Lazaros didn’t blink—didn’t breathe—as Augustus put his mouth near his ear. “Believe me when I say… I won’t regret this.”
Augustus slid the blade deep and long across Lazaros’s throat, then stepped back to let the traitor’s blood spray across his chest.
Lazaros held tight to his wound, eyes wide as his blood slicked past his fingers.
Hands clamped around both of his arms, and Dimitrios’s shout for help came as if from a dream, but none of that mattered. As long as he got to witness every moment of this death.
Lazaros sank to his knees as tears fell from his eyes. Even as his life poured from his throat, Lazaros nodded. As if to say, “Yes. This is what I deserve.”
He crumpled, blood slicking the floor as the guards surged forward.
“Put him in the southwest tower,” Dimitrios ordered. “I don’t want him near the other prisoners.” Then he muttered under his breath, “God only knows the damage he’d inflict on the others.”
Augustus fought back for the first time. He would be here for this traitor’s last breath, even if he had to tear his arms from their sockets.
Feet planted, eyes glued, Augustus bared his teeth at the dying man. “I hope you burn, Bareas.”
Lazaros gave a rattling sigh, and his hand fell from his neck to the marble floor.
Augustus relaxed and unleashed a grin on Dimitrios that made the grown man pale. “You can thank me later.”
Dimitrios gathered himself and shook his head. “You’re not the man I met in Wairia.”
“No.” Augustus laughed, cold, hard. “That man had hope.”
And this one had nothing left to lose.