56. Maren #2
He clicked his tongue, amber eyes rising slowly to meet mine. “Don’t think me some noble man who rose to the occasion. I love Aren, but that’s not why I married his mother.”
“Why did you, then?” I asked softly.
“To pretend, I guess. That Aren was mine. To give him my name, because I couldn’t give it to Nikolaos.
To feel worthy, because in those days, I felt anything but.
Selfish reasons. Aren’s mother didn’t love me.
She was heartbroken and angry. She only said yes for him.
All of that came much later. Long after Cemre died. ”
“Does Aren know?”
Aras laughed sadly. “Of course he knows.”
“And Jonet?” I sucked in my breath a bit, wondering if the question probed too far.
Aras wet his lips slowly, his thumb rubbing one side of his chest as if massaging an old wound. “Does Jonet know, or is Jonet mine?”
“Both.”
The glow swished across his golden eyes. “Yes,” he whispered.
“That’s why Emilius killed Cemre,” I guessed out loud, a stitch between my brows.
Aras wiped the corners of his mouth with a rough hand. “He killed her because she was expecting again, and he assumed the child wasn’t his.”
I didn’t ask if it had been or not.
“I know what you’re thinking,” Aras said, picking up the lantern again, switching it to his other hand.
He flexed the ghost of its weight from his fingers.
“Why didn’t you just stop going to her bed?
It seems easy, doesn’t it, just ignoring someone rather than loving them, if it means saving their life.
I’ve hated myself for years. Nikolaos’s judgement doesn’t bother me now.
I could tell you it’s nearly impossible to deny the woman you love, when she’s crying in your arms, asking for your comfort.
Or when her lip is split and her teeth are bloody, but she looks at you with a certain demand, as if you’re the one thing that grants her control. ”
He burnished his fingers against his brow. “But the truth is Emilius would have killed her eventually, no matter what she did. Everything that stands outside his influence eventually winds up dead.”
“I’m sure telling yourself that makes your life easier,” I said, barely louder than the hiss of the lantern’s flame.
“It does.” Aras nodded, a bit absently. He turned his head enough to fix me with golden eyes. “There is a rumor among the Guard. That you severed the hand of the King.”
I lowered my chin, holding his stare, and didn’t say a word, though every cord in my body went taut.
“I would caution you,” Aras murmured. “Emilius will only keep people near him when they serve a purpose. When he can leverage one against another. He let Nikolaos and Jonet live so he could control Cemre, but he used to torment her with the threat of hurting them. Had he believed it might work, he probably would have.”
My stomach rolled at the thought, but my cheek turned to view him askance as I waited for his point.
“You’re alive now because the King has a use for you. Your home, your knowledge, your importance to your husband. But if he can’t control you, Emilius won’t balk at the idea of laying you in the ground. He’ll have no qualms over using Nikolaos to get to you.”
A rising shudder nipped down my neck. Similar words had been spoken to me before, and they still managed to weigh over my body like a dark shadow over the moon. “Thank you for the warning.”
“And,” he said, glancing over his shoulder again, “if you want, I can help you into the lower dungeons without leaving your name. But we have to be fast.”
He motioned for me to enter one of the empty cells, my back to the wall just inside the open door. “Stay in the shadows,” he said softly before his steps faded into the quiet.
It was dark.
I tried not to look around. There was nothing to see, but all I could think of was sitting in a cell blanketed by black, and though the walls weren’t wooden, I knew they were tight and shallow.
That they’d squeeze and shrink if I thought about them too hard, that I’d hear the wooden groan of a ship, the buoyant rocking of the sea, leaning to one side and then the other.
Instead, I turned myself into nothing, forcing it all out. Until the scrape of boots over stone returned, two sets of feet, male voices bounding softly off the walls as light and shadow crept over the floor.
I thought he might have told you.
Kye had coasted over the subject of his father in the past. I'd always been curious, but I'd known not to press him for a name or identity, the same way I'd known to avoid the subject of my mother with Ano.
I'd sensed a heaviness there, a reluctance, a wall built from stone that ran as deep and dark as the dungeon I stood in.
Footsteps. Lantern light crept through the hall, Aras walking past the cell I hid within along with a young guard. He glanced back at me, a faint tilt in his chin. Then turned to face forward, chatting with the guard as they headed toward the stairs.
I waited for the lantern and the sound of their shoes to vanish before entering the hall, fingertips grazing the wall to keep me moving forward in the dark. One left turn, then another. More steps into the underground.
The air moved like a phantom wind here. Sound echoed, the screech of something like nails over glass raising the hair at the back of my neck.
Dim light spilled from four cells at the very end.