48. Chapter 48
Lunette
The soft scrape of wood on stone and the feeling of two new auras announced unwelcome additions to the prison they’d made of my room—one to which Berian had handed them the key.
A passage I hadn’t known was there opened in the floor.
They know about the escape tunnel.
The dark below seemed reluctant to release the two figures, clinging to their black Assembly robes as they rose.
The first was the mage who’d spoken at length about his cousin’s bloodline during the luncheon. He smiled at me now as though we were continuing that conversation, like he wasn’t stealing my freedom and silently promising worse. The second man was equally unremarkable but far quieter.
Too breathless to react to the newcomers, Berian could only stare, eyes widening in a flash of genuine shock. Did the thought only now occur to him that they would betray him?
The power he’d been clinging to seemed to abandon him all at once, leaving his expression as limp and useless as the legs that had just failed him.
I wanted to think that maybe he’d learn now, finally, but I wasn’t so certain.
Coryanthus greeted the mages like they were making the rounds at a feast. But then three pairs of cold eyes fell on Berian with nothing short of intention. Coryanthus reached into the front pocket of his doublet. His hand emerged holding the siphoning device, treating it with near-sacred care.
Oh gods. Reina.
The only way they would have it was if they’d already forced her to hand it over. Whatever was happening on the other side of those walls was not good.
Berian turned his head and saw the ravenous obsidian drinking in the firelight.
Realization dawned on his face, one emotion after another: first confusion, then fear, and finally, morbid clarity mixed with regret.
Everything that happened next transpired in the blink of an eye.
A low, unsettling hum filled the air as Coryanthus pressed it to the back of Berian’s neck. From a few feet away, I could feel it vibrate through bone and teeth. An instant later, Berian’s back bowed, as if an invisible force was yanking something within him taut.
I didn’t want to care. He thought I was nothing more than a tool. But, unlike him, I couldn’t shut off my humanity.
The choking fear gave way as a wave of pure fury washed over me. Berian was intolerable, but no one deserved to die like this. I didn’t think—I lunged forward. If I could just snatch it, I might be able to fling it into the hearth to destroy it forever.
But two of Coryanthus’s guards closed iron grips around my arms. I twisted, fought, tried to break free. Armor dug into my skin as I struggled. I could feel bruises blossoming, but their grip didn’t give.
I could defend myself, but there were four guards, three Assembly mages, and Lord Coryanthus. And only one me.
If they wanted to kill Berian, I couldn’t stop them even at the price of my own life. The horrible hum thrummed on, and my rage began to transform, hardening into a dense, inescapable weight: despair.
I could’ve endured cruelty—it was a normal part of life in Avanfell—but this was worse. Thibault held Berian’s hand tenderly as his body convulsed. Monstrous. He watched Berian dying like he was a patient succumbing to his natural end, not a victim.
I wanted to break down, felt like I would retch all over myself at the vile mixture of care and indifference the healer was showing to a man he was helping murder.
Berian’s eyes found mine. His gaze was almost accusatory, like I wasn’t fighting hard enough. It was the first time the cold had gone out of them. I could almost see the man—even the boy—underneath.
I had grabbed corpses by the wrists to drag them clear of rubble. I’d knelt in the frozen mud of border roads to close the eyes of people who’d still been breathing when I found them. In those years, I’d learned the particular shift that happened in a body the moment it stopped being a person.
I’d told myself, over and over, in the bleak arithmetic of survival, that what I was doing was victimless. That it was necessary, and even a mercy. Mostly, I’d been right.
But I’d never been the person standing by, unable to do anything.
The device’s hum deepened to a fever pitch. It was too easy to trick myself into believing that the worst wasn’t happening until I was forced to acknowledge it.
Berian’s hand twitched against the armrest. At the end, he was nothing more than an ordinary man, powerless against life’s brutality just like the rest of us. The device yanked away the last vestiges of his weak aura with the speed of yarn unraveling down a flight of stairs—gone in a blink.
His eyes never left mine as the light behind them slipped away with one final, shuddering breath.
I didn’t think it was possible to mourn someone you hated.
But Berian proved me wrong. He’d been a person, and he’d meant something to my mate.
I didn’t need any more reason than that to care.
Maybe that made me weak in the eyes of some, but I liked to think it made me human—more human than some people with rounded ears.
My captors kept a tight hold on me as I gave in to grief for one moment of weakness and slumped to the floor.
Now I needed to think, not react.
“I am sorry you had to witness that,” Coryanthus said, his voice dripping with insincere regret as I found my feet again. “Necessities are sometimes unpleasant.”
“The king overextended himself,” he said to the room, maybe to his conscience, as he walked around the other side of the corpse he’d just made.
He slipped the device back into his doublet.
“He pushed himself too far in seeking,” a pause, a toothy smile, “love. A tragedy. They’ll believe it easily enough. ”
He glanced at me.
“They’d never believe you killed him, so don’t worry,” he said, almost pleasantly. “You’ve been rather too publicly devoted to his recovery. Inconvenient, in some ways. But then, that was never the plan.”
“Why?” I asked. My voice came out far steadier than I felt. “What could possibly be worth the risk of regicide?”
He tilted his head and gestured at the mages standing behind him. “Promises. Ones the current crown would never give me.”
“Money,” I said. “Power.”
“Of course.” He said it the way you’d say, it’s raining. “But also guarantees. A bloodline. Security for the next generation.”
A cold knot formed in the pit of my stomach. “So they’ve offered you your pick of women to enslave.”
He casually shrugged one shoulder, as though the plight of half the people in the world was a detail too minor to warrant the energy of a proper dismissal.
“You’re going to help them collect women like livestock,” I said. “Just like they used to round up Fae women, and you shrug about it.”
“I only need one,” he said pleasantly. His eyes moved over me with an assessment that made my skin feel like something I wanted to shed.
He’s made a deal for me specifically. “I would never marry you,” I said coldly, standing stock-still.
“Of course not. I only need you for breeding. There are plenty of noble daughters who won’t mind living comfortably without the pressure to reproduce.”
I saw the plan now. The Assembly would have their Arcanist broodmare, a rich man who would do whatever he was told to keep her, and in a generation, they would have children with Fae blood who’d never known anything but their control.
No.
The simple, animalistic understanding that there was an escape nearby made my feet move. I released a sharp pulse of telekinesis that forced the door to swing open, ushering in a biting gust of cold air.
But the guards caught me.
My arms yanked back, shoulders wrenched with agony at the sudden tug. Muffin stared at me from the open doorway with his ears back. I covertly sent another push of telekinesis through the gap. I hoped it would be enough to open a hole in the mesh keeping Muffin inside.
Coryanthus decided he’d had enough. He crossed to the corner of the room and slammed his heel down to dismiss the illusion covering the hatch to the escape tunnel. The floor answered him just as Muffin wiggled through the gap I’d made.
Thank the mother goddess.
If Muffin attacked one of them, they’d kill him without a second thought. I needed him away.
The men holding my arms began to drag me toward the hatch.
Cold certainty dropped into my stomach like lead—if I went with them, I might live, but I would wish I hadn’t.
No one would find me. By the time Owain came back, there would be nothing left but a rumor about the woman who’d run with the body of the monarch in her room.
Owain.
I reached for the bond. He was there. Furious and on his way.
I wanted to weep tears of relief, but I wasn’t out of this situation yet.
Thibault and the two mages, who had stood by with an intolerable, quiet patience while one life ended and another was shattered, walked sedately over to help Coryanthus lift the latch.
Berian’s body was still in the chair, lifelessly watching me. I shuddered, unable to shake the feeling that I would have the same kind of ending.
I’d spent years as a thankless shield for people who’d measured my worth by how much of myself I gave away. Then I’d been reduced to a womb by a king, and a slave by his murderer.
I was so tired of being used. Of women being treated like we were only worth what we could produce. And I refused to lose the first person I’d chosen for myself.
Death had always known where I lived. She’d sat beside me at sickbeds, waited under bloody sheets, breathed softly in the corner while I worked.
I’d always closed my eyes while granting death as a mercy.
How fragile, how soft that girl seemed now.
How desperately the old Lunette had wanted goodness to mean clean hands.
But bodies had never been clean. Birth was blood. Healing was pus and fever and bones set with screams bitten into blankets.
Maybe justice was messy too. I wouldn’t close my eyes this time.
Magic flowed like a hot river down both my arms. I’d never done this to a strong, healthy heart before, and these tried to fight back, holding onto their structure with the stubbornness of the living.
The jagged holes I carved into them were instantly fatal.
By making it quick, I’d granted them far more mercy than they deserved.
Their grips went slack, and their bodies thumped to the floor.
I was still so drained from healing Berian that the effort hit me like a wall…but I couldn’t let them know that.
Thibault and the other mages turned ashen. Coryanthus stared at me. At that same moment, the guards standing at the door flickered and vanished, leaving only the mages behind.
A low, crazed laugh escaped me. The illusionist was performing the oldest trick available: making the threat seem larger than it was, trying to make me think I couldn't win.
But I was willing to bet against those odds. These men were cowards. At least one of them would run rather than fight.
My hands were steady. I showed Coryanthus my teeth in a predatory smile. From a distance, I could only aim my rending magic accurately enough to hit one mage at a time. I had to be cautious.
It took the mages still standing at the entrance of the tunnel less than a heartbeat to rush down it. I’d been right. Thibault followed right behind.
He stopped at the edge of the hatch, cast a quick look at Berian’s body, then returned his gaze to me, as if examining two interesting specimens. Without uttering a sound or a single care for Coryanthus, he began his descent.
“So,” I said, and my voice came out quiet and far more certain than I felt, “now I’m the most dangerous person in this room.”
Coryanthus took one step forward.
I projected a thread of intention across the knot at his throat. I kept my touch feather-light to show him that I was in control, not desperate. The thin line of red that appeared there was enough to make him stop.
“Take one more step, and I’ll push deeper,” I said pleasantly.
I let the pressure increase by the smallest fraction, just enough to make beads of sweat appear on his forehead.
“Or perhaps you’d like to know what it feels like…
From the inside… Since you find the experience so unremarkable when it happens to others against their will. ”
His jaw tightened. “They’re going to kill you for this,” he said.
“Maybe,” I said. “But you won’t be alive to see it.”
He’d started sweating under the collar of his fancy doublet. “The mages are getting help,” he said quietly. “There’s a company of soldiers waiting for us in the tunnel.”
So, this wasn’t just about stealing me. It was so much worse.
Then the balcony doors glided open, and my fury turned to ice. The true architect of my nightmare arrived. Churning dread replaced my fury as Vaustin Maeron stepped into the room.
I opened my mouth to speak, but the ground beneath us roared to life with seismic fury.
My mate was coming.
The relief lasted less than a heartbeat before Vaustin's expression changed.