Chapter 62
ARYELLA
The night before the wedding, I could barely sleep.
Gemma, Marin, and Mina arrived bright and early, with my silk-and-satin long-tailed dress, sheer veil, and everything else they needed to make me the perfect bride for my betrothed and my people.
“Is this what you want?” Marin asked me as she fastened one of about thirty pins in my hair, done up in curls too intricate for my liking. Fitting for a royal bride, though. “This feels… quick.”
My eyes shifted to hers in the mirror, away from the light, elegant makeup they painted on my face and gemstones dangling from my ears.
“I want people to stop dying,” I told her.
People like Ezra. People like Isaiah Cross. Anyone who had ever senselessly lost their life in this centuries-old conflict.
Older than that, maybe. I would find out if it was the last thing I did.
I looked back into the mirror and wondered what my dress had looked like four hundred and three years before.
I pictured my hair loose and down, not up.
Some small white flowers. A flowing cotton dress that I could run in, that made me feel comfortable and free.
It would have been around this time of year that he married me, then lost me.
Gemma adjusted the laced cap sleeves of my dress. “I think Elias really does love you.”
Elias only loved what he knew. He hadn’t seen all the dark, angry, empty parts. If he saw those, he’d probably run. How long would I manage to hide?
“I know.” My throat ached, and my gaze lingered on the loose fabric of her pale pink dress shifting gracefully over her slightly swollen belly. All that mattered to me now was keeping all of them alive and free.
I still hadn’t fully processed my revelation from speaking with Simeon, and he would be no help in doing so.
Something— someone —had silenced him. Marriage to Elias was a small price to pay for any sort of edge in a battle the magnitude of which I was only beginning to understand.
When I acted on impulse and surrendered myself to Molochai eight months ago in Brinnea, I’d been thinking with my heart. Now, I was thinking with my mind.
When he died, Gavin Smyth took my heart with him, anyway.
A knock on the door recentered me. The twins’ mother, Fiona, poked her head in and said, “Five minutes until they want you outside the hall.”
“Do you want to wear this?” Mina stood up from the chair at the vanity. “You usually do.”
In her hand was the thin silver chain with my wedding ring on it. I had forced myself to take it off after getting out of the bath. And then I vomited.
Now, I felt awful and empty and bare, even with the shiny golden ring with a giant, clear, and sparkly diamond now adorning my left ring finger.
“I shouldn’t,” I managed, sucking a ragged breath back in. Gemma’s hand shot up to brush away my tear with her thumb before it could fall.
I wanted Damond to escort me down the rose-petal-covered aisle, but he told me it would be suspicious not to have Simeon do it.
I couldn’t help but wonder if today would be anything like my wedding had been over four hundred years ago, but I knew the truth.
If it were Gavin instead of Elias at the end of the aisle, I wouldn’t walk. I would run .
Instead, I was stuck to Simeon, unable to look at him.
I couldn’t look anywhere else in the hall other than blankly forward with a false smile plastered on my face.
I avoided taking in the details because I wanted to get this over with, and I didn’t want to remember it.
Maybe one day I would love Eli, but this wedding was only a show.
A beacon of hope for our terrified people. He had said so himself.
“You’re doing the right thing,” Simeon muttered before we began to walk. “I’m proud of you.”
My jaw tightened. Fuck him.
“Let me be clear,” I whispered low enough for only him to hear.
“I am not doing any of this for you. If you didn’t have information I need, you’d already be dead.
” His arm stiffened around mine, and I felt fear radiating off him in waves.
I relished it. Plastered a fake smile on my face to make it look like I couldn’t possibly be threatening his life.
“I’ll play your games and make appearances for now, but may the gods have mercy on your soul when I learn why you really took me from him.
I will burn you alive , Simeon. And once I find out what you did with our child —” I exhaled, voice breaking as I leaned closer.
“—I will bring you back just to incinerate you all over again.”
I ignored the ecstatic, admiring whispers that followed us down the aisle. A sweet melody was being played on strings. Alistair Winterton stood at the front of the hall before my throne with a leather-bound book in his hand and a proud, beaming smile on his face.
This was all a display, and I was the centerpiece.
Simeon handed me off to Elias when we reached the end of the aisle.
“You’re spectacular,” Elias whispered as he lifted my veil, then took my hands in his and pressed a kiss to my cheek. “Just perfect.”
My eyes, fixed on the space just next to Elias’s head, glazed over as Alistair began to speak about love, duty, hope, and all the things the people needed to hear. All I could hear was my own voice, speaking to him.
I’m sorry I’m doing this. I’m sorry I failed you.
Everything else was a blur. My heart was numb. My calves ached and my back itched beneath this gown. All I could think about was getting through this and out of this dress and back into the library with the book from Peradine. If I could just…
Heat burned in my core and throbbed in my chest.
I looked away from Elias, toward the other end of the hall.
The air stood still, like a humid summer’s day. Right before a rainstorm.
Did everyone else feel the silence? The calm ?
The doors of the hall burst open. Screams of terror and panicked shouts erupted from the back, swelling into a horrified frenzy when shadows billowed in, their forceful entry displacing the back five rows of the crowd from their seats.
Bodies fell. Cries rang out as the crowd scrambled toward our end of the hall, away from the doors. Shera leapt onto the platform to guard me. Her silver fur was stiff in alarm until oddly… it wasn’t.
“It’s Molochai.” Simeon ran to my side, hands trembling. “The wards.” He positioned himself directly in front of me. “They’re down.”
“Completely?” I snapped.
Elias growled, “ What? ”
I pushed them out of my way, holding power ready at my fingertips as I moved toward the edge of the platform, staring into the thick, grim shadows that dove and leapt in a rampage.
“At the ready!” Elias roared. Every armed soldier obeyed.
The darkness cleared. A towering figure emerged from the corrupted, suffocating fog. Had Gemma not locked her steel grip around my forearm, grounding me, I would have collapsed onto my knees.
It wasn’t Molochai.
There, at the end of the hall, flanked by vicious, soul-devouring shadows, covered in blood, sweat, scars, and tally-mark tattoos, was Gavin Smyth.
His eyes were locked on me, and mine on him.
I acted before I knew if he was real. When armed soldiers lunged at him from all directions, I outstretched my hand and sent Sussurro’s wind ripping through the center of the hall, spiraling around him in a squall that blasted every single weapon and body away.
“ Aryella ,” Shera warned me mind-to-mind. “ Don’t do anything you’ll regret. ”
But I surged forward, down the steps of the dais, unable to take my eyes off the feral, scarred warrior staring back at me.
If I did, he would disappear into the shadows of this cruel, beautiful dream, never to be seen again.
I needed to feel him, make sure he was real and not a projection of lost sanity that had been slowly whittling away inside me.
“ Aryella! ” Shera urged.
“Your Highness!” Elias called after me. “Ary, stop!”
“ ARYELLA, LISTEN TO ME! ” Shera roared in my head with otherworldly authority. Her voice hit me with the force of all twelve gods, ripped the air out of me, and stopped me dead in my tracks. “ If they know the truth, they will destroy him! ”
“ I won’t let them hurt him! ” I told her, panicked.
“You’ll have to kill them all to stop them! That’s no solution. You cannot go to him. You must think !”
But Gavin thrust his blades to the floor, the jarring clang both a threat and an echoing surrender. The desperate longing inside a harsh but living gaze that only ever softened for me begged me not to stop but to run . To him .
Elias approached my side and drew his sword to guard us. Gavin’s nostrils flared at the movement. At me in this opulent wedding gown and the claim my betrothed was making.
His hickory brown eyes darkened into pools of infinite onyx. At me, and at Elias standing so close. And the shadows— his shadows—thrashed around him in agitated fury. His lethal rage ignited parts of me I thought had died as he growled out three vicious words.
“I. Fucking. Object. ”