Chapter 61
LUTHER
When Diem finally returned to the reception, something in her had changed, though I couldn’t tell what.
That was hardly an unexpected feeling these days.
She hadn’t been herself since before the island, and every time I thought I might finally understand what she was going through, some fresh new hell arrived to split us further apart.
It once felt like the universe was determined to put us together, no matter how hard we tried to fight it. These days, it felt more like her feet were rooted in the island’s soil, while I swam with all my might against a riptide pulling me further and further out to sea.
Though she briefly met my stare, she didn’t approach.
She hovered on the edges of the revelry, hands clasped at her waist, her iron-grey eyes fixed on the south.
I waited and watched, sensing that she needed a moment to herself.
Each time someone stopped to greet her, her haunted features forced themselves into something beautiful yet false—the mask of someone hiding a part of themselves they feared letting anyone see.
The same mask I’d worn for a lifetime, before she set me free.
Diem handled each interruption with grace, offering polite smiles to the sycophants who came to curry favor and granite resolve to the fools who brought complaints.
The latter grew in frequency as word spread that the Centenaries had been invited to stay.
It was especially disappointing to see the Ignios refugees join in the objections alongside the very same people who, not long ago, had insisted they be left in the deserts to die.
How quickly warring prejudices could be overlooked by a shared one.
If Diem shared my disgust, I couldn’t sense it. I couldn’t read any emotion from her that wasn’t pretense. When Taran and Zalaric opened up their party to her army and the celebration moved into the camps, even the relief I knew she felt was invisible on her meticulously indifferent face.
She seemed . . . empty. Not sad, not distracted, just empty. The kind of empty I’d seen in her the morning after her magic first unleashed in the palace dungeon, when she’d made me promise to look after her family because she believed she wouldn’t be around to do it herself.
That memory did nothing to ease my concerns.
“Trying to work up the courage to ask her to dance?” Taran teased, sauntering up with a foamy pint of honey-gold liquid. “Or is watching her what gets you off?”
Against my will, a far different, far happier memory surfaced—of me stroking my cock as I watched a naked, soapy Diem touch herself in a Sophos washroom.
Instantly, I was hard, my body hungry from days of holding back.
Diem and I hadn’t been intimate since she’d returned.
I’d wanted to bury myself inside her the second we were alone, but that night and every night since, she’d curled up in my arms and asked me to hold her instead.
Though I was sharing her bedroll, it felt like something still lay between us.
“I thought you weren’t drinking,” I said, nodding at Taran’s ale.
“I’m not. This is for you.” He shoved it in my hand. “It’s my mating day. You can’t say n—”
“No.”
I tried to shove it back, but he jumped away and hid his hands, refusing to take it.
“Come on, Lu. We’re in the middle of war.
You just cut off the head of the enemy. The girl you love is standing right there looking like she needs a good fuck.
What better reasons to pull the royal scepter out of your ass and have a little fun? ”
Although those were the exact reasons I shouldn’t be drinking, I felt guilty that Taran’s mating ceremony had been marred by so much conflict, instead of the mating day he’d always dreamed of, where the two of us abandoned our worries for at least one night.
I grudgingly took a long swig, and Taran flashed a victorious smirk. “Zal said if I can get you drunk enough to sing, he’ll do this thing I like where he puts my dick in—”
I cleared my throat. “That won’t be happening. The singing part, at least. The rest is up to your mate.”
Despite my refusal, Taran beamed. “My mate,” he echoed, trying the label on, testing it out. “My mate.”
I raised the pint in toast. “A completed bond. How does it feel?”
His eyes wandered to Zalaric, who had apparently partaken in all the alcohol Taran hadn’t. He was completely naked, wearing only his mating mark and a radiant smile, and twirling in circles with a group of half-mortals who’d worked in his Umbros inn.
Taran sighed happily. “Like I finally have a home where I feel safe.”
My heart twisted. “I’m sorry you never had that before.”
“Yeah, well . . . neither did you.” He pointed a thumb at my father, who was mingling with a group of Benettes. “Saw you two talking earlier. Did you kiss and make up?”
I took another drink in lieu of an answer.
I’d thrown every wrong I could remember back at my father, and he’d had an explanation for every one.
They were not always noble, nor persuasive, but as far as I could tell, none were lies.
I still wasn’t sure what to make of it. I wasn’t like Taran, secretly pining for a reconciliation with the family who’d hurt me.
I had vowed to hate my father the day I watched his magic rip my mother apart, and I’d never looked back.
I already had all the family I needed in Lily, Alixe, Eleanor, Taran—and now Zalaric.
Maybe someday in Diem, Auralie, and Teller, too.
As for my father . . . he wasn’t in a grave or a dungeon. That was the best I could offer him for now.
“What about you and Aemonn?” I said. “Planning a playdate yet?”
Taran barked a laugh, though I saw him tense and his eyes dart to my glass. In the past, any discussion of his brother would send him straight to the bottom of a drink. I wished he knew just how proud it made me to watch him stare down the ale, then look away.
“You ever wonder who we’d be if our lives hadn’t been so fucked up?” he asked. “You think we still would have been friends?”
Unlikely, I thought. Even before my mother’s death, I’d been a quiet, serious child, far from the lively personalities Taran usually sought out. We’d only come together because we both needed something we thought we’d lost: for Taran, a family; for me, someone I could protect.
“Of course we would,” I lied.
“Yeah. I don’t think so, either.” He crossed his arms and gazed out over the garden and the surrounding camps. “I wouldn’t have met Zalaric.”
“I might never have met Diem.” I knew as soon as the words were out, they weren’t true. I would have found her in any world, in any life.
“Yes, you would. But she might not have liked you. If our lives had been as good as they were supposed to be, maybe she’d be raising an army against us.”
I wanted to deny it, but I feared he might be right.
All the Descended who’d joined Diem’s cause had their own reasons for feeling left behind.
To those who the system kept privileged and happy, its injustice was, at worst, a tolerable side effect of a greater, more valuable cure.
Even those whose hearts were pure—Lily, Eleanor—had accepted it, either to keep the peace or believing nothing could change it.
Only those of us who wore its scars had been driven to action.
If that’s what it took, then for once in my life, I was grateful for mine.
“Speaking of enemies,” Taran muttered, staring at the new tents being erected for the Centenaries.
I grunted my displeasure, and Taran grunted his back. Alixe had tried to move them into camp discreetly, but their arrival was already the talk of the reception.
“You think Diem was right to let them stay?” he asked.
I stared at my Queen. Though her stoic face revealed nothing, I knew her well enough to know she was debating the same question. I also knew her well enough to know that no other outcome stood a chance.
“Shunning people for their bloodline started this war,” I said. “I doubt doing the same will get us out. Though I do wish they’d come tomorrow. Your mating day has had too many distractions.”
Taran shrugged. “I’m glad it happened today. This is exactly why we didn’t postpone the party. Everyone here has a hundred reasons to hate each other or be sad. We wanted to remind them we still have reasons to—”
“—sing?” I said.
He grinned. “Exactly.”
I threw an arm around his shoulder. “When the war ends, we’ll have another celebration. Just our closest friends. I’ll drink as much as you want, and I’ll make Diem teach me the raunchiest song she knows so I can serenade you. It’ll be everything you wanted your mating day to be.”
To my surprise, Taran didn’t laugh or flash me one of his looks that warned me he had plans for us I was going to hate.
Instead, his features turned soft, and he gripped my arm with unexpected tenderness.
“Let’s do it to celebrate the war ending instead.
My mating day is already everything I wanted it to be. ”
I studied his face, illuminated by the flickering blues and oranges of the magic-fueled firelight, immensely grateful to see the contentment I’d always prayed for him to find.
Over our lives, his pain had built up like dust gathering on a vase on a high, unreachable shelf, its colors growing harder to see with every passing year.
Zalaric’s love had washed it away, revealing the masterpiece beneath.
He seemed older now, stronger, more mature—no longer the wounded boy I’d mentored, but a resilient, courageously loving man who had taken on a hateful world and won.
But Taran was still Taran, and when he suddenly clapped me on the back, his mischievous smirk made a triumphant return. “It looks like my new little brother is taking after me.”