Chapter 3
HARK
‘She could eat you alive, you know,’ Jack said, settling in the chair opposite where Hark was slumped in the settee beside Seb.
‘I know.’ Hark sighed, rubbing his hands across his face.
She could do more than eat him alive. She had bewitched him like some sort of sorcerer.
He would carve out his own heart if she asked him to, he thought.
‘But I won’t let the people down again. If I have to go out every day into those mountains for the rest of my life, I’ll do it. I owe them that much.’
‘You aren’t your father, Hark. They know it wasn’t you. But you can’t keep this up. You’re exhausted.’ He loved Seb like a brother, but in that moment, he wished he would keep his opinions to his fucking self.
‘Elrod was after the magics before. There’s nothing to say he won’t come for them here too.’
‘If that happens, we’ll be ready for them. You have the King’s Assassin, for gods’ sake. She went up against Kastonia and broke you out of your own castle. If anyone can keep the people safe, it’s her.’
He’d known Seb had taken a liking to Arla, but for him to defend her as loyally as he would Hark … it meant more than he had the words to explain.
Hark couldn’t stop the laughter that bubbled in his throat. ‘She’s something else, isn’t she?’
‘Who’d have thought it?’ Jack said, rising to his feet with the help of his cane. It made something in Hark’s stomach flip. ‘The King’s Assassin and the Crown Prince of Kastonia.’
‘Ex Crown Prince of Kastonia. There’s no way in these gods-damned kingdoms his father will let him stay as heir. Little Reuben is up.’
Little Reuben. His little brother – though there was nothing ‘little’ about him now.
At nineteen, he was as tall as Hark and had enough charm for the both of them.
The memory of his brother laughing with Arla over dinner filled his ears with a roaring that threatened to send him jumping off the balcony.
‘If he’s still alive.’ The thought made his heart stutter, but it was a possibility all the same.
‘Your father won’t kill him. He has to have an heir,’ Jack said.
‘Reuben freed me. If he’s alive, he won’t have any of the freedoms he was granted before. My father will be working hard to turn him into a smaller version of himself.’
‘What has Arla said?’
Hark hadn’t dared mention to her his fear for his brother’s life.
He couldn’t begin to untangle what it meant to care for Reuben when he had spent his whole life being jealous of him; of the way it all came so naturally to him; of how his brother would make the better ruler; and of how Reuben knew it too.
Because if he did mention it to Arla … he knew the girl would go down fighting to get his brother out of that castle and bring him to the safety of Flambriar.
He’d watched her almost die once, and he didn’t think his heart was strong enough to watch her do that again.
To be so lucky as to find someone willing to do that all for him …
it was a gift from the gods. It was the gift of his life, and he’d do anything to keep her safe, even if it meant freezing his arse off every night in the mountains.
‘Enough talk of danger and threatened siblings, we’ve got a dinner to prepare for.’
Ah, dinner.
They’d made it a rule that they would regularly dine together like a proper court because it would do them good to follow the structure that other kingdoms set out.
He’d sat through enough of those court dinners to know that it was no different from any other dinner, aside from the fact that they all wore outfits that were more dazzling than comfortable.
It felt too much like being a king for his liking.
But he’d do it for Arla. He knew it was bothering her – the way Flambriar was entirely different from anything else she’d ever known, and the fact that they weren’t following the same structure as other kingdoms at all because he didn’t fucking want to.
But he might just do it for her.
The woman who swept into the dining room that evening stole his breath.
Red silk dripped from every curve, every lean muscle, every delicious, glowing glimpse of skin.
Heels clicked against the stone floor, their height as dizzying as the woman strutting towards him.
Hair swung in loose waves around her shoulders, and her eyes were such a rich coffee colour that he fought not to devour her in front of his friends.
‘I do hope I’m not late,’ she purred, a smirk settling on her lips that took him back to the first time he had met her in the throne room at Castle Grey. She had been wild then … now she was a whirlwind threatening to bring down his entire being.
It was Kase who spoke, Hark’s own voice still lodged in his throat at the sight of Arla. ‘You’re late to everything. It’s not something to be proud of, assassin.’
Arla’s lips parted slightly, and she ran the pink tip of her tongue over her teeth before she said through her smile, ‘It’s ‘Dragonhart’ to you.’
The whiskey he had been about to swallow caught in his throat, and he was choking on it before he could stop himself. Jack was there, clapping him on the back, forcing him to breathe as Arla looked at him with a perfectly raised brow.
‘I thought we were eating tonight, not watching the pair of you spar over the turkey,’ Jaz said, his first words all evening.
He had been quiet and sullen, almost since Hark had brought Arla here.
Hark would have to speak to him soon and tell him to stop holing himself up in the library and avoiding them all when the rest of his crew were working hard to run this kingdom and keep the people whom they had spent years rescuing safe.
And if Hark didn’t approach Jaz soon, he could almost guarantee that Arla would. A smirk teased his lips at the thought of it.
‘Indeed, I’m starving.’ Arla took her seat at the head of the table and began pouring wine into her glass with a vigour by which Hark was almost impressed by.
Dinner passed them by so quickly he couldn’t contain the sigh that escaped him when the maids began clearing the table.
Arla had charmed them all, of course – even Kase, who had tried her hardest not to smile but had burst into laughter over a story of Arla walking in on the King of Hadalyn with his chief advisor.
He had never known Arla to be so … animated, so intent on actually speaking to them all.
He’d known her for almost two and a half years, had seen the masks she often wore and the pretty smiles she could offer men to get them to do her bidding, but this …
he didn’t think it was a mask. He didn’t think she was playing a game with them that they had no hope of winning.
And when he met her gaze across the table, he felt every piece of himself coming undone.
The others saw it too, he thought, because when Arla rose from the table and left the room as elegantly as she had arrived, he followed her, and his friends didn’t say a word.
He was two steps outside the door when a blade came whistling past his ear and planted itself in the wooden beam beside his head.
‘Oh dear,’ Arla tsked. ‘Too slow, Stappen. You’d be dead by now if I had wished it.’
He pulled the blade out of the wall, surprised at how deeply it had struck, before marching towards her. She let him come closer, closer, closer until he had backed her up against the windows, their chests flush against one another as he pressed the blade against her throat.
And she grinned.
‘Gods, you will be the end of me.’
She straightened against him, the scent of jasmine intoxicating as she lifted her chin higher. ‘Oh, I will be the end of many things, Hark, but you are not one of them.’
He lowered his lips to hers, a brush so featherlight he wasn’t sure it existed. To rip himself away from her now would be torture. Her hands roamed his shoulders, arms, torso, the black shirt he wore suddenly too stifling for the heat of Arla Reinhart.
‘Arla,’ he growled, low in his throat, and she laughed lightly against his lips.
‘I’ve missed you,’ she breathed, the words a dagger to his heart. He hadn’t spent nearly enough time with her in the past weeks, and he was going to tear himself away from her any second now.
‘Is that a weakness I detect, sweetheart?’
The tiny noise that escaped her lips was enough to send him hurtling off the top of the mountain. Everything everywhere around him screamed Arla, Arla, Arla!
And then the moment was shattered with the slamming of a door and the sound of booted feet.
‘Why is it always me?’ Sebastian groaned, covering his eyes before marching past the two of them. Arla snorted, the sound so foreign to Hark that he couldn’t help the laughter that bubbled up against what he was about to do.
‘I’ve got to go. I’ll see you tomorrow?’
He watched her face fall. Watched the light in her eyes dim as she looked between him and Seb, and the explanation she didn’t need.
The red silk that had looked so resplendent only seconds ago seemed to drown her now, as if she were soaked in blood.
He hated the way she was looking at him.
It was too close to how she had looked at him when she’d walked the halls of Castle Grey – like he was a prick.
It was all gone in a heartbeat, replaced with the mask of Hadalyn’s assassin, the girl he had seen do vicious, terrible things.
‘Have fun scouting the mountains for imaginary soldiers, Stappen. I’m sure your kingdom will be fine without you. I certainly will be.’
Ice speared through his chest as she shrugged out of his grip then marched down the hallway, heels clicking with a ferocity that would have made him pity whoever it was she was going to kill, had it been a few months ago.
‘She’s going to be the death of you,’ Sebastian muttered.
Wasn’t she just.