Chapter 32 #2
Kal risked another peek through the curtain and studied his uncle.
Karrick might as well have been hewn from stone.
His father’s back was to him, but Kal caught the furrow between his mother’s fair brows.
More muted conversation filled the space, but Kal was far enough that he couldn’t hear.
He couldn’t stop staring at the little golden girl, thinking how terribly unfair it was that his uncle should be forced to marry a child.
When his parents and Karrick finally quit the throne room, Kal stood beside the column once more. His father nodded, expression unreadable. His mother’s face was smooth, but her eyes held something he couldn’t place. He followed them back toward their assigned quarters.
Kal was suddenly very tired. He missed Devereux and Ophelia, climbing the Whiteshore Cliffs, hunting for sea urchins in the shallow coves, training with his sword, and his horse. He missed the morning chill, the smell of ocean air, and the crying gulls. He missed home.
Finally, they reached their chambers. Karrick, still silent, turned down the adjacent hall that led to their shared room. Kal paused.
“Mo—er, My Lady?”
The Lady of Brightsea looked down at her son and smiled. Something in her eyes seemed sad. Or scared. Kal didn’t like that. Meridia Albright wasn’t scared of anything.
“When are we going home?”
“Tomorrow, darling,” she promised, squeezing his hand. “Tomorrow we’re all going home.”
But they didn’t go home. None of them. Kal’s mother and father had been murdered in their bedchamber that night. Slaughtered in their sleep.
Kal woke to rough hands grabbing him. He kicked out in a panic, tangling himself in his sheets, and fell out of bed, cracking his head on the side table.
But it had been Karrick’s hands hauling him up, Karrick’s hushed voice urging him to be silent.
Kal knew something was wrong, but he didn’t know what.
He only followed in a daze, blood dripping from his temple, as his uncle dragged him down shadowy, winding corridors in the dead of night.
The scent of iron clung to Karrick, hanging thick in the air. It frightened him.
“Where are we—”
His uncle hushed him with a hand over his mouth and pulled him into an alcove, cloaking them in darkness. Two of the faceless, black-clad guards whispered past toward his family’s chambers.
They stepped back into the hall and hurried in the opposite direction. Kal was breathless by the time Karrick shoved him through another doorway into an empty room. He rounded on his uncle. “What the hell, Karrick? What’s going on?”
But his uncle did not answer. He only paced the confines of the room, fisting his hands, his footfalls and ragged breathing the solitary sounds in the stillness.
Karrick’s already dark eyes were full black, the pupils dilated.
He twitched at every minute creak or sigh of the villa’s walls.
Kal had been about to demand an answer when a woman entered the room.
The pretty servant. The one that Kal saw Karrick sneak away with on their first night in Asteros.
Karrick and the woman shared a look, and whatever passed between them made Kal’s insides go cold.
“We must hurry,” the woman said, reaching for Kal’s hand.
Kal pulled away and found his uncle suddenly close. Karrick gripped the back of Kal’s neck and pressed their foreheads together. Dread curdled the contents of Kal’s stomach.
“Whatever you do, whatever you hear, do not come back to this place,” Karrick said. “You get out. You go home.”
Kal shook him off, confused. “Karrick, what are you saying? We can’t leave without them.” His mother and father were still in their chambers.
“There isn’t time, Kal.” Karrick looked at the pretty maid. “Mela, take him.”
Kal jerked away. “No!”
But his uncle’s grip was an immovable shackle about his arm. “Godsdamnit, Kal!” Panic laced his tone like a vein of poison in the drinking water. “I swore I’d get you out! I vowed to see you safe. You will not make a liar of me.”
“But my parents,” Kal began.
His rebuttal died. Kal’s vision sharpened, and even in the dark, he saw the raw pain in his uncle’s expression.
His heart became a lead ball, heavy and hard behind his ribs.
He smelled the blood on his uncle’s clothes, a familiar tang.
He heard the gravel in his uncle’s voice.
Felt the despair war with disbelief at the words that would change his life forever.
“They are gone, Kalevar. You are all that remains of us. And now you must go.”
Kal pulled an unmarked amber bottle from the top shelf and poured a healthy serving into a squat glass.
Across from him, Kitty’s expression remained carefully neutral. She’d been so engrossed in his tale that her food sat untouched.
He tossed back the bourbon, fire carving a path through the age-old ache in his chest. He rubbed his sternum. Let her think it was the spirit’s burn.
“The maid snuck me out. Left me in an alley and warned me to stay as far from the castle as possible,” Kal said.
Kitty frowned, her mind chewing through the particulars. “But what about your uncle? Why didn’t he leave as well?”
Kal hadn’t told her who Karrick was. He couldn’t bring himself to reveal that his own flesh and blood was the Primordial Male. Couldn’t admit that his uncle was her fated mate. The thought sent anger coursing through him. Never mind saying it aloud; he could barely stand to think it.
He also omitted seeing her in that throne room, skipping over his memory of her golden dress, coiled hair, and cherubic face—the young Prima. The thought of her as a sweet child, innocent save for her traitorous blood, and his pre-pubescent reaction to her were too difficult to voice.
But the rest? The rest had spilled out of him like milk tipped from a carafe, pooling on the tile. Kitty soaked up every word, and he kept pouring it, trying and failing to fill her.
Kal lifted a shoulder in a lazy gesture. “He didn’t say.”
“Is he—I mean, have you heard—”
“He’s gone,” Kal said, voice flat and cold. Not dead. Somehow, Kal knew Karrick lived. Bound by another vow, the weight of another title. Yet gone just the same.
“You were fourteen, Kal,” Kitty said. “There was nothing you could have done.”
“I know.” It didn’t matter. The understanding of his rational adult mind did nothing to assuage the boy’s guilt. That regret, the incessant what-ifs, had carved into him, hollowing him out like the cliff caves he’d explored as a child.
Kitty turned introspective. “How is it that you don’t hate me?”
“I might have, at one point,” he admitted. “But how could I hate a little girl for being born to shitty parents?” She winced, but he continued. “You didn’t plot their deaths. You didn’t spill their blood while they slept. You didn’t even know it happened.”
“I wouldn’t fault you,” she said, voice quiet. “If you did.”
He studied her. “If I hated you at any time, it was a grieving boy’s hate. I am a man. My emotions are not permitted such power over reason.” Her eyes connected with his. Kal tried a smile. “Besides, I don’t often cook for my enemies. Or confess to them my woes.”
Kitty’s lips tipped up at one corner. “Or teach them to fight? Or tend their wounds?”
“Not those things either. And I certainly don’t let them sleep in my bed.”
“Or kiss them.”
Kitty’s cheeks warmed, and Kal leaned forward, appreciating the flush of color. She dug into her plate, refusing to look at him. He wanted to kiss her now. Wanted to do more than that. Instead, he sat quietly and watched her eat.
If he were being honest, the only thing Kal hated where this woman was concerned was that she hadn’t felt she could confide in him.
Kal didn’t say it, though. How could he when he still kept things from her?
When he couldn’t even bring himself to say her name, for what it did to him. “It’s you who should hate me.”
Kitty froze, a bite halfway to her mouth. She lowered the utensil. “Because you want to kill my parents?”
Not where his thoughts had been, but accurate nonetheless. He nodded.
She reached forward, fingers tentative, and touched his hand.
He opened it, and she slipped inside, the soft skin of her palm sliding over his calluses.
“I don’t know if I have hate in me,” she admitted.
“I hate what my parents have done. I hate that they stole your childhood, your family. I hate that they’ve allowed my people to suffer in my name.
But I can’t hate them. I don’t know how.
” Her golden green gaze caressed him. “Even if you took them from me, even if you became the monster you fear yourself to be, I couldn’t hate you. I could never hate you, Kal. I—”
He lifted her hand. Kissed her palm. “That’s alright,” he said. “I have hate enough for the both of us.”