50. Chapter 50
Lunette
One moment I held Coryanthus’s life on a thread of my will. The next, Vaustin Maeron had an arm around me, a belt dagger pressed to my throat, and eyes the color of pond scum fixed on mine.
Cold streamed through the open balcony doors, lifting gooseflesh across my skin. Vaustin had seemed to appear through the opening rather than enter it. Perhaps it had been magic. Perhaps the violence rumbling beneath our feet had swallowed every warning.
I hadn’t sensed his aura until his arm was already around me. By then, reacting was all I had left.
So much more dangerous than he seems.
Vaustin didn’t say a word as he peered down at me with an unnerving glint of salacious anticipation for the pain that awaited me.
Everything went unnaturally still inside me. My heart beat. My lungs worked. But the familiar place where Owain existed beneath my thoughts had become a void.
I reached for my rending magic. But nothing came. No. No, no, no!
Vaustin’s smile widened a fraction. He knew. He’d felt me try to attack him.
I tried to reach for Owain, but our connection was severed too. Even during my years of isolation in Selmont, I’d never felt so alone.
“A little something from the family,” Vaustin offered, his voice easy and conversational, as if we were back at that first luncheon and he was talking about something as mundane as his bloody hair color. “Don’t be alarmed. The Assembly has no interest in harming something so valuable.”
Something?
I tried my best to hide the way my heart was pounding—so hard it felt like it was trying to escape my chest. I composed my features, deliberately slowed my breaths, and desperately hoped the master performer looming above me hadn’t seen any of it.
The dagger was close enough that even swallowing my regrets would be a mistake.
A tremor shuddered through the wall beside the corridor—not from below, like the last one. Fighting had reached the hallway.
Vaustin glanced toward the noise and smiled faintly, as though the chaos pleased him.
He leaned in, deliberately making his proximity a tangible reminder of exactly how much control he had and how little I did.
Every instinct in me screamed to put distance between us, but the edge of the blade pressed to my throat was a constant reminder of all the things I couldn’t do each time I breathed.
“Give me the device,” he said to Coryanthus.
He pointed toward Berian’s body. “And do something about that. He will draw attention when our other guest arrives.”
Owain.
Coryanthus’s expression turned disgustingly smug as he reached into his doublet. He withdrew the chunk of obsidian and tossed it in a clean arc. Vaustin caught it with his free hand, nearly cutting my throat in the process.
I felt the rapid buildup of magic. Then Berian’s corpse,mouth open, eyes still staring in judgment, vanished. In its place stood a perfect simulacrum of a fur, so convincing that even I could not feel the illusion beneath it.
Behind me and without a word, the dagger smoothly transferred from Vaustin’s grasp to Coryanthus’s, its cold edge never moving a hair’s breadth away from my skin.
Where Vaustin had been coldly impersonal as he intimidated me, Coryanthus settled into position with a proprietary press of his body that made my jaw ache from clenching it. The way his arm wrapped around me wasn’t about holding me back—it was about declaring his ownership.
I stared straight ahead and refused to shudder, even as every inch of my skin recoiled and my stomach threatened revolt.
Vaustin lifted the device, turning it once in the firelight. He smiled at it as if it were his newborn babe, full of all his hopes and dreams. “Decades of work.” He drew in a slow breath. “Now we begin our push in earnest.”
I really didn’t like the sound of that last part.
Hurry Owain. But he was still fighting. I could feel it in the tremors beneath my feet.
A pulse of magic stirred from the obsidian.
Then a sharp harmonic wrongness filled the room, like a breath sucked violently backward and all at once, but it kept going.
When the device had been used on Berian, magic was ripped away.
Now, more magic than I would’ve thought possible from something so small was flooding into Vaustin.
However many lives’ worth of magic, however many pieces of living, breathing souls it had torn out were becoming a part of the monster still holding me at knifepoint.
Berian was in there. Owain’s mother might be too.
Fire rose in my chest.
Vaustin lowered his hand and something off crossed his expression too fast to name. I prayed to the gods that it was regret, pain, or even doubt. Those would make him weak.
Then his gaze snapped past me toward the latch. A figure in white burst through it, slung on a tether of shadows. Thibault hit the stone floor with a thud and stayed there, crumpled and motionless. If the sound his body had made was any indication, he wouldn’t be getting back up.
Coryanthus shifted nervously behind me. But my heart nearly sang.
Owain’s shadows moved through the opening like the leading edge of a tide—dark tendrils sliding through every gap, flowing across stone. Seeing them, some of the tightness around my heart relaxed.
When he emerged, his eyes had gone entirely; no iris, no white, just black that caught the low light and gave nothing back.
Shadows threaded up his neck and across his jaw, branching into the lines of his hands like living ink.
His face mirrored his inner turmoil, with every subtle shift and twitch of the streaks proclaiming his fury for all to see.
My mate rose to his full height and went absolutely still when he saw me.
“Don’t move,” Coryanthus whispered, too close to my ear. “I like you exactly where you are.”
Beneath him was what he meant. His self-importance was directly proportional to the inferiority of those around him.
His grip shifted at my back, fractionally, and this time the dagger caught lightly on my neck. My heart skipped a beat with the sudden, sharp pain then resumed its erratic pounding.
Across the room, Owain flinched.
If he felt that, we’re not completely cut off from each other. Thank the gods.
I kept my breathing slow. My eyes locked with his, and I willed him to understand all that I couldn’t say, through the look itself. I’m okay, I love you.
His answer was the rage and terror writhing in black swirls across his skin. The only thing holding them in check was the restraint making his body tremble faintly.
Vaustin and Coryanthus’s eyes strayed to the door as a heavier blow rattled it on its hinges. That had to be Camrick and the soldiers trying to break in. But Owain remained stock-still, his eyes not straying from me.
Despite the thunder at the door, Vaustin drifted to the edge of Owain’s periphery. His polished boots moved across the stone in unhurried, contemplative circles. Owain had been right about him enjoying suffering. He was taking his time. Relishing this moment of triumph.
Even so, the muscles along his jaw twitched now and then, as though he were fighting some private impulse. Once, his expression flickered altogether—as though another reaction had tried to wear his face before he forced it back into steadiness.
“Smart man,” Vaustin drawled as he got closer to Owain. “I worried your Nocthel rage would have you acting rashly…”
So they’d known about that too and never told him.
“All that power,” Coryanthus said behind me, voice too bright and conversational for a moment like this. “And he flinched at the sight of a drop of her blood. I always wondered what would break the tainted prince.”
I wanted to sink my teeth into him until he screamed.
But Vaustin had stopped paying attention. He tilted his head, his attention caught as if another conversation were happening below ours.
A nagging suspicion began to grow in my mind.
Coryanthus opened his mouth to repeat himself, but then Vaustin’s disconnect melted away all at once. A focused, more unsettling delight took its place.
“All that cozying up during the luncheon. Now shared pain,” he said, glancing at Owain with something as close to appreciation as a monster could get.
“My father warned me about mate bonds. Said they were…” His eyes unfocused for a breath as he searched for the word.
Then he smiled. “Inefficiencies. But I think I see the opportunity in them.”
His attention moved to me, appraising. “He will be a constant source of power—and we will acquire an Arcanist’s womb.”
“You slowly murdered a queen for eight years and called it healing.” My voice shook, but I no longer cared. “How many others?”
Vaustin only tilted his head and smiled faintly.
“Quiet,” Coryanthus snapped, “the men are talking.”
Hateful swine. I breathed in. Breathed out. Owain did enough glaring for the both of us.
I wanted to drive my heel into the top of Coryanthus’s foot.
Wanted to tell him exactly what I thought of men who said things like that.
To hold him at the tip of my rending magic like he was holding me with the dagger, but Vaustin still had my magic in a chokehold, and Owain was held back by the blade at my throat.
My pulse stumbled. Owain’s Nocthel magic still bled through his skin, dark tendrils curling out from his palms. Vaustin hadn’t smothered his magic. That meant he could only suppress one person's magic at a time.
I needed to get away from this blade so he could act.
Pausing his circles, Vaustin set the device down on the mantel too slowly, as if he’d suddenly become unsure of his own hands. For a long moment, he said nothing. Just breathed unsteadily and stared at the fire.
Owain kept his sharp gaze trained on him, waiting for the first opening. I didn’t dare meet Owain’s eyes for long. Every time I had, I saw how close he was to the edge. I couldn’t be the thing that pushed him over it too soon.
Vaustin turned and opened his mouth as if to answer someone. Then cut himself off. His eyes narrowed as though he’d nearly said something aloud he hadn’t meant to.