Chapter 22
TWENTY-TWO
Crymson
“Brother?” Christian repeats, the dirty word hissed through his teeth. “You’re lying.”
“What reason would I have to lie?” Thorn asks, glaring at him.
“To trick me into letting my guard down? To use it as a way to distract me? Planning to murder me in my sleep?” Christian spits back.
“Don’t tempt me,” Thorn grumbles, his eyes tight with disdain as he folds his big arms across his chest.
“Enough,” I say, interrupting a conversation that’s clearly going to do nothing but get worse the longer it goes on. “Can we not have a civil conversation about this? It’s like watching two roosters trying to look bigger than each other.”
Rorrick slips in through the door then just to add, “Two cocks. Tha’ seems accurate to me.”
Christian shoots Rorrick a glare that nearly makes me laugh. Luckily, I understand now isn’t the time and keep it sealed tight behind my lips.
“Explain yourself,” Christian growls. “What proof do you have that your mother and my mother were the same woman?”
Thorn snorts. “It’s not hard to gleam, Princeling. You only have to sense her blood running in my veins.”
I watch in surprise as Thorn reaches up to one of the sharp points on his face and presses his finger against it, just enough to draw a single drop of blood.
He holds it up in the air between us, waiting for Christian to make the next move.
We all watch the Blood Prince carefully, waiting to see what he’ll do.
After a moment of hesitation, he steps forward and swipes the drop of blood from Thorn’s finger with his own.
I don’t know what I expect, but it isn’t the sight of him pressing the drop to his tongue.
Maybe I thought he’d smell it like a bloodhound or something.
Either way, his eyes widen once he tastes it, and he stumbles back.
“Impossible,” he growls.
“Clearly not,” Thorn says. I feel his imagined roll of his eyes. He’s too proper to actually do it, but I know he wants to. I’ve learned a lot about the Thorn King in these past few months. Like the fact that hidden beneath his lifetime of regality, he’s genuinely funny.
“My mother was a Promised,” Christian says again, as if that’ll somehow solve all of this.
“She was a Queen before Boris stole her,” Thorn repeats, his patience wearing thin. “We’ve discussed this.”
“How?”
Thorn shrugs. “How are we brothers? I thought you too old for the birds and the bees talk.”
“How did he take her?” Christian snarls.
Thorn tenses, his eyes flashing at the question. “He waited until they’d slain my father and then he sent in a team to take her. I was young then, too young to fight. She shoved me in a cupboard in the kitchen before they burst in. She killed two of them before they dragged her away.”
Carver’s words echo through my mind, making me shiver with the dark memory . . .
When they realized she was with child . . . he cut me out of her belly and left me in the dirt to die.
“And you didn’t stop them?” Christian snarls.
Thorn doesn’t flinch. “I was barely old enough to understand what was happening. When she told me to be quiet and don’t come out until my father came home, I listened. When I finally ran out into the night to look for her, they were gone.”
Christian’s disgust flashes across his face. His fangs make him look like a feral animal ready to attack at his words. My own anger rises and comes out before I can stop it.
“Stop!” I hiss. “Both of you shut your mouths!”
With a spark of chaotic magic, all three men in the room are unnaturally silent.
A muffled scream of words that can’t seem to get out shouts from behind Christian’s closed lips.
His face twists in rage, but his mouth literally will not open.
A glare like a dagger lands on me as he sends an accusing look my way.
My wide eyes shift from Thorn’s incredibly tightly pursed lips to Rorrick, who only shrugs in confusion but also can’t seem to form a single word to save his life.
“Shit,” I hiss, and I try hard to find the messy magic that lies restless inside of myself.
I take a deep breath and shove hard at the energy in the center of my chest. It’s there, and when I finally focus on it with intent, it lifts from me with ease.
I turn to the furious Blood Prince as he takes a desperate gasp of air. His fangs part his lips now with an anger that seems barely contained.
“He was a child, Christian.” I take a step closer to him, but his manic blood-red eyes flash to Thorn once more, wasting no time now that he’s able to yap a bit more freely.
“Too weak to stop his own mother from being kidnapped—”
“And what did you do when he slaughtered her?” Thorn growls, clearly sick of Christian’s shit. “What did you do once he drained her of her life? Did you step in? Did you stop it?”
Christian tenses, his eyes narrowing, clearly not having an answer.
At some point, they’d gotten closer, and now they stand far too close to each other.
Nose-to-nose, they glare at each other like polar opposites staring one another down.
Christian’s shoulders vibrate with his anger, one second away from exploding and attacking Thorn, which will land them all out of the castle on their asses.
Thorn looks ready to throttle Christian, his wings lifted tensely behind him. So, I do the only thing I can.
“That’s enough,” I say, stepping in between them, putting a hand on both of their chests to push them apart. “It’s new information, but we can be nice. We can handle this.” I look at both of them. “Can’t we?”
I just barely contain myself from telling them they’re family because that can’t possibly make things better right now.
Christian’s scowl gets impossibly deeper, and before I can try to calm him down, he turns and storms away, slamming out the kitchen door. Seconds later, a larger slam of doors announces he’s left the castle entirely.
And that’s a wrap, folks. This all fell apart before it even began.
I sigh and glance up at Thorn.
“Don’t look at me,” he says. “I’m behaving.