Chapter 19
ACKER
Olivia is driving me fucking crazy.
I suppose I didn’t think to ask, but Wells failed to mention just how pregnant his wife really is.
She’s pregnant. The kind that can still be hidden behind a loose top, which is how they kept it from me when she was still in Kenta, but without layering clothes her swollen belly is very evident.
And she wields her condition like a weapon, knowing I can’t defend myself against her anger, which follows me wherever I damn well go on this boat.
We boarded the ship at the port not far from where Wells’s parents reside and allowed the current to take us down river to the sea.
It’s quicker than traveling to the coast by carriage, but nothing is quick enough when trapped with a childhood friend who currently curses the day I was born with every breath.
When Olivia isn’t openly yelling at me, she gives me the silent treatment.
Which would be fine, preferable actually, except Wells’s only reason for living right now is to cater to his wife’s every whim.
Meaning when she goes silent, he goes silent.
He can’t risk being seen fraternizing with the enemy, and that’s a fucking problem.
We’ve resorted to sneaking around like teenagers in the middle of the night. I’ve been waiting for him on the bow for two hours when he finally makes an appearance. Hair unkempt and clearly sleep deprived, he’s a nervous fucking wreck.
“She’s sleeping,” he whispers, as if she can hear him from below deck.
“Good.” I mean for it to come out positively, but the chastising look he shoots me tells me I didn’t succeed. “She’s less spiteful when she’s rested,” I amend.
He braces an elbow on the railing, cradling his head. “She would be giving you hell even if she wasn’t pregnant.”
Accurate, honestly.
Olivia has never been one to skirt around a topic for the sake of anyone’s feelings.
Her own or anyone else’s for that matter.
It’s why she and Beau gravitated toward each other as children.
That, and because there were few other girls their age at court, certainly none who wanted to be caught befriending the king’s bastard child.
But Olivia didn’t care about any of that, much to her parents’ chagrin.
Between the two of them, I’ve never gotten away with anything reckless without getting an earful.
“At least I would be able to give her hell in return.”
“She’s disappointed in you,” he says.
“Obviously.”
“And she thinks you’re up to something.”
“She does?” My brows hit my hairline. “Or you do?”
He grins. “Oh, I know you are.”
Leaning on my forearms, I stare at the inky black of the night beyond. The sky and water merge together, impossible to tell where one ends and the other begins. It reminds me of that space between me and Jovie. The nothing that exists when I follow the tether to her. Of our time on the boat.
I take a deep breath, gathering the courage to speak the truth. “My father has been manipulating me my entire life, Wells.”
He moves closer, posture mirroring mine. “What made you realize? This alliance with Wren?”
“I think in some ways I always knew. Even as a boy, he demanded things of me regardless of my feelings about it just because it served his interests. I just didn’t realize the extent of it until…” I huff out a breath at the incredulous notion. “Until Jovie took his magic.”
The days following her betrayal are a blur.
The council was dead and their families were demanding retribution.
When my father refused to attack Maile, they became incensed and withheld necessary resources from their lands.
Sent their men to join the uprisings in the capital city.
The protests became violent, riots broke out, and the only answer my father provided was to have the remaining relatives of his murdered council members slain.
“I want you to handle this,” he had ordered me one night in his sitting room.
And I refused. “I will not have deaths of innocents on my hands.”
He wanted to kill entire lineages, right down to the youngest children.
He wanted to rebuild a council out of untitled landowners.
Men who worked under the previous lords but never held real positions of power.
I suspect he believed that if he gave them titles and money that he’d gain their blind loyalty.
I never outright defied my father. My insubordination was usually underhanded, never blatant enough to require harsh punishment.
At least, not until I chose Jovie over Irina and the Strou alliance.
He blamed me for the problems my darling sister and my Match created when they killed his entire council.
And when I swore to him in that moment I would not kill on his behalf, he looked at me as if I was the enemy. As if me not being a blade for him to wield, meant that I might as well be nothing.
I left his sitting room feeling sick to my stomach and it was the first time I felt like I was seeing a glimpse of who my father was for the first time.
“You’re going to have to kill him,” Wells says.
“I know.” I figured as much the moment Wren walked into my father’s sitting room but it was confirmed when he revealed his newly acquired magic in my bedchambers.
“I had a chance, and I…” Swallowing around my shame, I dare a look at my friend and am grateful to find there’s no judgment in his gaze. “I didn’t take it.”
“It wouldn’t do any good right now. Without Wren’s army, Kenta would fall, and Wren and Chryse would be there to scavenge your crown off your dead body.”
“Nevertheless,” I say, straightening my back and hardening my resolve. “I’ll handle my father after I have an army to back me.”
A wry smile pulls at Wells’s mouth. “And what’s the plan, exactly? You’ve yet to reveal anything aside from just wanting to make it to Maile’s wharf without being identified, but then what are you going to do? Stride up the palace doors and knock, bold as brass?”
“With Olivia, yes.”
“My wife?”
“Jovie has been begging Olivia to seek asylum in Maile until the war is over.” His eyes jump between mine, searching for a clue as to how I was able to find this out. I grimace at the truth I’m about to reveal. “I intercepted one of their birds.”
At first he appears perplexed by the idea of a secret his wife has been keeping from him, but then anger replaces any confusion, his jaw hardening. “You have to control everything, don’t you?”
I shake my head, because he’s got it all wrong.
“I was jealous,” I admit. “Olivia had been in contact with her when I couldn’t and I was sick with the need to know her thoughts, to read her words.
To have a single scrap of her, even if it wasn’t intended for me.
” The smell of wildflowers barely clung to the parchment.
That’s one thing Wells can wholly understand. Pity shines in his eyes, and I’m not even bothered by it. Not when I feel it so deeply for myself.
He cusses, shaking his head as he turns back toward the main deck. The second crew shift maintains our course while the rest sleep. Although at least half of them are playing a card game on deck, drinking ale.
“Olivia didn’t tell me because she knew I’d want her to go.”
“She would never leave without you.” My voice comes out sharper than I intended.
“All this talk of my wife, but you haven’t once mentioned what you’re going to do about your Match once we’re there.”
“You’re going to tell me your opinion on the matter, anyway, aren’t you?”
“The smartest and most obvious tactic would be to seduce her. Again.”
While the thought is appealing … “I don’t see how that would be possible with my wife in tow.”
A grin tugs at his mouth. “It’s not like it stopped either of you before.”
“That was different,” I insist, leveling him with a hard stare.
He rolls his eyes. “Groveling it is, then.”
The mere thought alone has my lip curling in disgust. “I’m not sure that would look advantageous while I’m negotiating a possible alliance for military support.”
He bumps his shoulder into mine, leaning in and forcing me to look him in the eyes. “I just want my best friend to be happy.”
“You should temper your expectations.”
“Fine, but making up with Jovie accomplishes two things at once: ending your current state of celibacy, and gaining possible sway with her mother.”
It’s not like I hadn’t thought about that—wait. “How the fuck do you know anything about my sex life?” Or lack thereof.
He looks at me like I’m stupid. “I’m Matched, remember? I know how the Bond works.”
The memory of my wedding night with Irina comes to mind.
Jovie appeared like a phantom across the room.
Thin and ghostly white, frozen stock-still as she took in the sight of Irina straddling my lap.
I had been dreading the wedding night, but one look at Jovie’s stricken face had ignited the need to hurt her just as much as she had me.
For her to feel the same pain in return.
So I dug my hands into Irina’s flesh, urging her on, keeping my eyes locked on Jovie’s as Irina’s mouth descended onto mine.
At the time, I loved it. Reveled in the pain splashed across her face.
She broke the connection before it went any further with Irina, disappearing from my presence, but I was determined to finish what I had started, fueled by spite.
I stripped Irina bare and threw myself into the final act.
It could have been anyone underneath me and I wouldn’t have cared.
All I wanted was a release. An escape. Anything to fill the open wound of my heart.
I couldn’t even register which part of her my mouth was on. There was no taste or feeling or sound.
Then, like a growing inferno, a sensation unlike any other filled my chest. I tried to disregard it at first, but it became unbearable, to the point where I had to tear away from Irina’s flesh, feeling dazed.
It took me a moment to realize: I was going to cry.
The urge was so violent that I leapt from the bed and ordered Irina from the room.
She undoubtedly thought I was crazy, barking at her like a madman when a moment before I had been all over her. Nothing could stop the tears.
“I thought I was just experiencing Jovie’s feelings,” I say.
“You likely were,” he explains, expression contemplative. “And I think that’s the point.”
For reasons unbeknownst to me, the Bond made it to where Jovie could see into my mind, where I could only sense her emotions. And while I could always sense Jovie’s emotions through the tether, I never experienced it quite like that. Potent. Brutal. Unrelenting even when I put on the mangi stones.
I never touched Irina after that night.