Chapter Eleven #2
I hate her. I hate that my service to her cost me everything. Yet I want to heat her blood. The closest I can get to spilling it—taking control from them as they have taken from me.
“I’m looking right now,” I murmur.
“Stop.” Her eyes flick over my thin cotton dress as a breeze picks up. Its coolness pebbles my nipples against the fabric. She looks forward again, crossing her legs on the bench.
“Avery.”
My heart thunders. “Yes?”
Then her body goes rigid, hand abandoning the loose thread of her skirt I will need to repair.
“The king is here.” She clears her throat. “He has company.”
The intimacy of the moment vanishes like the last of the sun’s rays. The garden falls into soft shadows. A rumble of air, then a figure materializes in front of Kassandra.
The king steps forward from nothing, an inverse of Jeremee’s death.
My mistress perks up at the arrival of my best friend’s murderer, extending a hand to be kissed. Once again, we are the player and the played, my safety like a pawn in those delicate fingers.
The king wears a loose white tunic and brown riding pants, casual but of quality. The luxurious leisure feels stark against the memories of kneeling on marble lined with pink grout, the glint of the Golden Whip, the crook of the crown.
The royal grins. “Kass.”
“Max,” my mistress breathes, a sultry facade that grates against me, as if we had not just been…
looking at each other. The pink flush of her cheeks and sparkle in her eye paint her as the perfect blushing bride.
I ate from her palm like a bird, and once again, it is hard to tell what is an Illusion in this place.
The thick floral aroma of the garden is sweet and heady and nauseating, like strong perfume sprayed in a confined space.
“Hope you don’t mind the presence of Death,” the king is saying.
“How else would we feel alive?” Kassandra asks.
Maxian barks a laugh. The air behind him darkens. Smoke with no source pours onto the gravel, wisping across grass. The plane petrifies. The king’s executioner emerges from the black cloud.
My vision swims, my legs weakening.
“What’s that smell?” the king announces. “It’s like a bloodbath out here.”
A bloodbath. My fear saturating the plane, bloody as the gentle mist my friend became.
My knees sink into damp soil, my fingernails digging into grass. Someone clutches my elbow to keep me from collapsing entirely. A phantom hand, firm but assuring.
A familiar, cold voice says, “She’s unused to lacing, you see. A weak thing.”
“Faeries always fold to great power,” Maxian says. “It’s simply their nature.”
A new emotion rises from the depths of the swamp, like a shoal, like anger. I lean into that sensation, like trekking onto a desolate island where the sand burns the arches of my feet. It is grounding, painful. I breathe again, and this time my head steadies, my vision coming back into focus.
When I glance up, the king stares down at me, his golden skin seeming to glow in the evening light.
Draped on his arm, small fingers trailing along his muscles, is Kassandra, her face impassive once more.
They are like a marriage portrait, striking and grand and distant, and I feel like a thief caught with a blade in hand before I could cut the canvas.
Something must shift in my face, because the king quirks a brow.
“She’s back,” he mutters, then waves a hand. A goblet of water appears, and he holds it out to me, lips twitching into a smile. “Here you are, faerie.”
My hand itches to smack the glass from his grip, shatter it across the ground. How dare he? How dare he bestow charity upon me as easily as he sent my friend to death and a child to impossible debt? As if I could forget his malice in the face of a smiling offer.
“Avery,” Kassandra quips, voice tight and high. “The king is gracious enough to overlook your blunder and even seeks to aid you. Do not insult him with your slowness.”
I lean back onto my feet and stand. Head down, brushing dirt off my palms, I mumble, “My apologies, Your Magnificence. It was the grandness of your power that overwhelmed me.”
“I can understand that,” the king acknowledges, like a benevolent handler.
The goblet of water floats before me, but not on some precarious phantom wind like Illusion magic. My ears roar with Reign power as one side of the goblet is blurred, as if stitched into the plane itself. He is, in a way, lacing again.
I take the crystal, surprised to find it heavy, the real thing, and take the expected sip. Cool liquid calms me. The king nods in approval, and Kassandra tugs him toward the bench once more.
“That wasn’t necessary, Max, but it is appreciated,” she coos as they sit side by side. Across the garden opposite me, the king’s executioner watches the scene.
“You seem surprised,” Maxian says.
“More so impressed. Even as king, you have kept your kindness.”
“My mother wouldn’t have allowed me to be any other way.”
“May she wander well.”
“May she wander well,” he echoes. “How is your father?”
“Aging.”
“As we all are. Though I can’t complain in your case. You’ve grown into a magnificent female.”
“As magnificent as you?”
“You tease, but I see you’re already flushed.”
I wrinkle my nose. Glancing away, my eyes catch the amber ones of Death, glowing like coals in a dark hearth. I push my repulsion back like bile.
Kassandra clears her throat. “Some privacy, perhaps.”
A laugh. “Then why are we stationed beneath your brother’s balcony?”
The stone balcony that overlooks this courtyard.
“He’s out,” she snips. “Would you rather sit beneath my father’s, where we can feel his stale breath?”
“What of yours?”
“You know a lady cannot do that.”
“Ah, yes, and you are the finest of them all. Even with that mouth of yours.”
Wincing, I glance at Dominik’s glass balcony doors, which remain dark. You did say you enjoyed the faerie’s mouth. Now you can enjoy it almost every night.
Does the king truly dole out the same lines to fae females and faeries? Has three hundred years of flirting left the males of the Upper Court lazy even in their vileness?
“Careful now,” Kassandra tuts. “Talk like that won’t give our onlookers time to leave.”
“I see,” Maxian growls.
He grips her waist and hauls her sideways onto his lap. Her slipper flings off a foot, and she squeals in delight. I head for the hedge where the Illusion still shimmers. My fingers graze the mirage, the image of the leaves rippling like a reflection on a pond.
I’m not sure what makes me look back. Perhaps it’s the sudden change in Kassandra’s demeanor, my genius fumbling to feel if she has fallen under Reign magic.
Yet the plane hums pleasantly, consistently, around us.
The king slides his hands through her silvery hair, his broad back to me as he cradles the fae in his arms. Kassandra’s head tilts, and Maxian claims her mouth.
Our eyes meet, her gaze glittering in the dark. She watches me as he kisses her. Indeed, she is flushed, but I know it wasn’t his doing. Like any king, he is merely taking credit for another’s work.
An unseen force shoves my shoulder, and I fall through the Illusion.