Chapter Fifty-Five
“Avery?” Someone shakes me. Groaning, I roll over, swatting away their hand. They shake again, hissing: “Wake up!”
I blink in the sunlight. For a moment, I think I am outside, until I register the scratchy rug beneath my skin, the heavy male arm slung across my stomach. And the horrified expression of Lila, staring down at me.
“Lila?” I mumble.
“What—what happened?”
I struggle to prop myself up on my elbows, the weight of the king’s arm, and his leg, lying over me.
I wince at what I find: Maxian and me, half-dressed, tangled in each other in front of the dead fireplace in the king’s bedroom.
His shirt slides off my shoulder, and I catch a glimpse of my purple chest. My stomach drops, and Lila gasps.
“It’s not what it looks like,” I say, pushing the king’s arm off me. He mutters in his sleep. Last night, we cried for hours, incoherent, raw, painful tears. We cried until we fell asleep. I squirm now, under my friend’s scrutiny. “I swear—”
“You are covered in bruises!”
“I’m fine—”
“You don’t look it.”
I glance up at Lila again, fresh-faced and wearing a blue day dress. “What are you doing here?”
“Carter and Fern sent word of what was happening. I could only get to you by agreeing to Hector’s terms. The executioner escorted me—”
“What’s happening?” Maxian groans, eyes still closed.
Lila reaches down, hauling me to my feet.
The room spins, my stomach bottoming out.
Other than a few bites of cheese, I haven’t eaten anything.
My legs give out, little wounds from the glass reopening, and my friend struggles to catch me.
Rivulets of blood curl around my ankle bones.
Were the cuts this deep last night? It looks so violent now, in the light of day.
“What did he do?” she seethes.
“Nothing,” I say. She’s getting this all wrong.
“Avery, I—”
“Stop it.” I yank his shirt to cover myself, wincing.
“Lila?”
I spin. The king stands in his rumpled nightshirt and pants, hair sticking up on one side, hand rubbing his neck. He looks boyish.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Everything’s okay.”
He gives a sheepish smile. “Hi, Lila.”
My friend trembles. He is not a handsome stranger I could love in the dark corner of a tavern in another life. He is not the knife on which I can cut myself to feel something. He is the monster who mangled my friend, who tortured her. And I? I am the cunt who let him touch me.
“Lila,” I start. “I am so, so sorry—”
“No.” She shakes her head.
“Please, I—”
“Don’t excuse him.”
Him. Not the king, His Magnificence, our lord. Him.
The plane rumbles around us, Maxian’s eyes flashing. “We are two consenting—”
“Don’t start with that,” Lila snaps, and my heart plummets, truly plummets, as I watch my friend who has always faked the brightest smiles in the shadow of a mountain finally give in to her fury. “I don’t want to hear that.”
He folds muscular arms over his chest. “It’s the truth.”
“But not the entire truth. You are the king.”
“And you would do well to remember that.”
“This is my fault,” I say, stepping between them. “I got—I got—”
“What did he offer?”
“Nothing,” I say, quickly. “Nothing, I—”
“Nothing she wasn’t willing to give,” Maxian says behind me. “A couple of coins, that’s all. And it wasn’t even for her debt.”
He will not reveal what he has asked of me, and why should he? I am to be like his mother, unnamed and unknown, a scrap of faded fabric in an abandoned room. Never seen.
But Lila’s gaze slides to me now. I do not find judgment, or disappointment. Just an unbridled rage in a faerie who has kept it in for so long.
“Benji?” Lila asks.
For a moment, I think—terribly—that she doesn’t understand. She can’t. It is something I can’t explain to others. It is no different from what Kassandra and I are to each other. Except, perhaps, in that silver bathroom, when she rejected me.
I will never again take you, Kassandra said. Not like this. Not when your only option is to give.
I shake my head. “I wanted this.”
“You wanted Benji’s freedom!”
“Then why did she beg me for it?” Maxian says. “Why did her pussy shudder around my hand?”
Lila glares at the king with pure hatred.
No, no, this is all wrong. Hector brought Lila here to smile at him, adore him, see good in him and reflect that back—not this.
Not this seething, simmering faerie. I came to the Pith to offer myself to the king, hoping it was enough to deter his attention from my friends.
“This was my choice,” I say.
“Choice?” she yells. “What choices do we truly have in this place?”
I flinch at the compassion Lila flings my way, a compassion I do not deserve.
“Come now, Lila. Don’t be a prude.” Maxian’s presence grows behind me, the plane murmuring around us. “So your friend is a whore. Who cares? Most female faeries are. Avery accepted this about herself long ago. It’s time you did as well.”
The words die in my mouth. The temperature in the room drops.
When I glance at Maxian, his expression is disturbingly tranquil.
It is as if in Lila losing her calm, he has finally found his.
He looks to her, lips quirking into a smile.
She glowers, her skin starting to glow, herbal magic flooding the plane, and suddenly I know that I do not know how powerful she is.
She has always held back, held her tongue. But not anymore.
“We should all take a breath,” I say, tugging her arm so that she looks at me. “I think—”
“I think Lila is jealous she didn’t get to watch.” He looks to me. “Or is it that you got off more on betraying your friend in secret? Though maybe friend is the wrong word. For Lila to be yours, you’d have to act like one, too, I suppose.”
Lila yanks me to her side, wrapping an arm around me. “You wouldn’t know a friend if they stabbed you in the back! For that is what you do to yours,” she snarls to the king.
The plane heaves, and I wince. “Lila, please, let’s—”
“You still defend her, though she slept with your tormenter for some attention and coin?” Maxian steps toward us.
I shrink back, but Lila holds her ground.
“I know her. I love her. Not even a king can come between us.”
The royal’s eyes blaze, nostrils flaring, as if he craves what he cannot comprehend.
“What is it you really want, Lila?” he finally spits. “Why are you here, in my House?”
She squeezes my hand, and I know she means she’s here for me. But there is something else, too.
“To see the center of the Pith.”
I suck in a breath.
“We are in the center of the Pith,” he says.
“The true heart of it.”
A slow grin breaks across the king’s face. “And why would I show you that?”
“Because I want to learn why you’re so magnificent.” Only a fool would perceive her tone as defeated and not calm, regrouping.
A vein throbs in his forehead as he scans her face, searching, almost desperately, for any emotion. “You want to see what makes me magnificent?”
Lila does not reply, does not move or look away. She just raises her chin, stares down the monarch and holds me.
“Fine,” he says. A curl flops in front of his eyes, and he swipes it away, the plane grumbling.
I take a shallow breath as the perspective of the king shifts in front of me again, for the last time, the true character under all that pomp.
With caring or cruel eyes, above all, Maxian wants to be seen.
“So you’ll take me?” Lila asks. “Unless someone else can?”
“We go now,” he says. “All three of us.”