Chapter 46 #2
My gaze darted around the room, desperately seeking an escape route, because Kaeleron had been right.
I wasn’t strong enough to fight him and win.
The urge to shift into my wolf form was strong, but in such a cramped space, it would place me at a severe disadvantage.
The instinct to shift battered me though, even as I tried to find a way out of this mess, and white fur rippled over my skin as I snarled at him through my fangs.
When he was close enough, I rammed the chair at his legs and bolted backwards, towards the other side of the desk. He laughed as he caught the chair and cast it aside. I scanned his desk for something I could use as a weapon, hastily opening drawers, finding nothing.
“After I have dealt with you, I shall dump your body in the courtyard. It will look as if Lorien finally killed you. No one will suspect me. Lorien loves doing my work for me. The fool thinks he will be king.”
He had no intention of letting Lorien sit on the throne.
Lorien was just his attack dog, taking down all the heirs for him, and when he was the only heir left, Sylvan would let him march into the Shadow Court to get himself killed and take the throne for himself.
This had all been an elaborate act of revenge for him.
Punishment for his grandfather changing the law of succession.
Stealing his throne from him.
Sylas’s queen and heir. Pointing the blame at the Shadow Court. Killing Kaeleron’s parents so he would retaliate and kill Sylas in battle, removing the only remaining obstacle between Sylvan and the throne for him—all without raising any suspicion about him.
But then the accord had been struck between the seelie and unseelie, and his plan had failed.
So he had killed Sylas himself.
And Sylas had got the last laugh by revealing before all the court that he had heirs.
Sylvan twirled my dagger in his grip, his amused smirk sparking a fire inside me.
I might not be able to defeat him as I was, but I had a weapon of my own.
I was a weapon.
The shift came over me in a heartbeat, the violence of it tearing my dress open, and I leaped at him, snarling and baring my fangs. He must have forgotten I was a wolf, that I would always be a wolf, because he just stood there, a stunned look on his face that made me want to howl in victory.
My full weight slammed into him and I brought my head down, my fangs aimed at his throat, but then movement out the corner of my eye had me twisting my head in that direction.
The blade came at me fast. I kicked off him, knocking him off balance enough that he missed me as he was spun around so his back was to the desk.
His rear bumped into it and he lifted his hand, sending a golden bolt of solar magic right at me as I launched at him again.
A yelp tore from my throat as it slammed into my right shoulder, the smell of singed fur filling my nostrils as pain ricocheted through me, threatening to force me back into my weaker human form.
Apparently, the ward didn’t affect him. Wonderful.
I ran at him again, a wild attempt to take him down that ended with the pommel of my own dagger striking me in the side of my head. Stars winked across my eyes as I went down, and panic gripped my heart as Sylvan’s knee came down on my throat to pin me to the floor before I could recover and move.
He raised the dagger above my head as he grinned down at me.
“What is this?” Meiryn’s voice rang through the room.
Sylvan’s head whipped towards the door, but he didn’t take his knee off my throat, kept applying the pressure and slowly squeezing the life from me.
“I suspect she is in league with the Shadow Court,” he snarled and looked at me again, raising the dagger higher, readying to strike.
Meiryn blurted, “She is.”
Snaring his attention again.
I growled at her as pain tore through my heart, as it burned with the fury that crashed over me as I shifted back, freeing myself of Sylvan’s grip, and glared at her. How could she?
She refused to look at me as she betrayed me, showing me I had been a fool to trust her.
“She shares something with Kaeleron the Wrathful. She told me about it.” She smirked at me as I scrambled onto my hands and knees, preparing to spring at her and take her down too, and then tipped her chin up when she looked at Sylvan again and pointed at me.
“Look. She wears what unseelie apparently call a moon ring. It tracks the bearer of its twin. They wear matching rings. The stone reveals the location, and it was blue for Lucia light the last time I saw it. The Wrathful King is here.”
Sylvan pushed to his feet, his fingers flexing around the grip of my dagger as he stared down at me. I bared my fangs at him, ready to shift again if he came at me.
“She must be incarcerated until the court can gather to hear her crimes,” Meiryn said. “It is our way, as you know. It is law.”
I thought about that punishment I had endured, and how at the time I had thought Sylvan had been acting as judge and jury. But it had been done publicly, before the elite among the highborn fae of this court.
They had been my jury, and would no doubt fulfil that role again when I was dragged before them.
Sylvan looked as if he still wanted to cut me down where I sat.
“Uncle,” Meiryn murmured.
He huffed and cast my dagger onto his desk, and reached for me. I growled in warning, backing away from him, summoning the shift.
Solar light whipped from his hand as he raised it, wrapping around my throat as I launched at him, and I cried out as it seared me, instinctively reaching for it to pull it away from me. I screamed as my hands burned before they made contact with it.
Blazing light devoured me, revealing the reason I hadn’t sensed Sylvan approaching his office before he had caught me. He could teleport within the castle.
The dampness was the first thing I sensed. A chilling cold that raised goosebumps on my bare skin, the musty smell of it so strong that it was all I knew as the sound of iron bars opening grated in my ears.
That burning light around my throat disappeared as Sylvan shoved me in the back, sending me stumbling into the cell and slamming into the wet stone wall on the other side of it.
I turned on him with a vicious snarl.
He slammed the barred door closed.
His blue eyes as cold as ice as he uttered a handful of words that chilled me to my soul.
“You shall have company soon enough, and then you will die together.”