Chapter 16 The Time Has Come #2
I stagger out of his arms, and I’m practically stumbling to embrace my sweet sister—to protector her from the sights of the devilish man behind me.
I pull her in hard against me until the golden curls of her hair tickle my nose, and still I hold her tight.
I press her so hard against me I feel as though I could just absorb her in and shield her away from every terrible part of this realm.
“Why are you here?” I breathe those words out on a breath of anxious terror.
“He killed them. He killed mother,” she sobs and my heart shatters in my chest.
“Please take a seat.” Prince Ravar is by her side in a flash of blurring dark colors. With wide, glassy eyes I watch as he pulls out the chair from our table for two.
And like an obedience-trained puppy, she takes a seat.
Right in front of the glass of poison.
The drilling of my heart is so apparent that a sheen of sweat sticks my hair to the edges of my face.
“I brought you a gift from your disgusting Upper Realm. What’s wrong?” the Prince asks as he holds my chair out for me as well.
Does he know?
It isn’t even a question. The question is, how much does he know?
“Nothing.” The smile plastered against my face isn’t charming at all. It’s tense and vomit-containing. It holds back all the sickly feelings turning in my stomach.
“Then sit down.” His smile is no longer carving. It’s gone entirely. Vicious rage is in his eyes, his posture, in the very stance he holds.
A blade not at all worthy of a dinner party lines the table on my left-hand side. It’s ornate with glittering black gemstones, and it curves up in a hard ark that’s intended to maim.
He knows.
He knows everything.
In the midst of my panic, Nyra lifts her glass to her pink lips with trembling hands.
My heart stops.
The noise in the room halts as I watch her with wide, terror filled eyes. I can’t wait another second. I have to act. Now.
Abruptly, I shove the wine glass from her. It tumbles against the black-clothed table and rains down on the rock beneath our feet. The shatter of the glass is resounding. It’s a clattering sound of anxiety that matches how I feel entirely.
And now every pair of eyes in this room are staring up at us.
The Prince finds his smile, and he looks out at his people below him. “I present to you my beautiful but inelegant bride of the century,” he tells them in a booming voice.
A few shifters chuckle. But most are smart enough to gauge the room.
And the room is on fucking fire, my friends.
“Clap for her!” he roars, his face blooming red within the dim lighting.
Applause erupts all around us, and a quiet sound pulls at my attention. Sobs. Hushed tears fall from Nyra’s eyes, and I can’t imagine how she must feel.
She wanted a normal life. She didn’t want chaotic adventure. She wanted love and babies and…peace.
I’m such a fuck up.
My hand finds hers beneath the table, and I try to focus on her energy. She’s my family. She’s my blood. She’s just like my father.
And I need the one thing my father kept me from all those years.
I need my beast.
My eyes close hard, and I think about all those times that energy rattled awake inside me. I think about the untamed power lying dormant within my soul. I think about my Goddess and how much I need her in this moment.
The table in front of me shakes hard as a fist comes down and cracks the wood just beneath my own hand. A plate shatters to the floor. My lashes fly up, and I meet the inky depths of his gaze before glancing down at the dagger he holds in his fisted hand.
“I’d like you to brand your belongings, my lovely,” he says like a lover’s secret.
I blink at him slowly, but I feel the hate radiating off of him.
“W—what do you mean, my Prince?” The quiver in my voice is very real, and I hate how weak it sounds.
“Your Goddess Moon is important to you. You’re a wolf shifter, correct? Not a hell fae?” The skepticism in his tone tells me everything.
His beloved queen was a hell fae. And he thinks I’m just like her. Worse yet, he thinks I’m conspiring with her.
He’s not entirely wrong.
Nor is he right.
“I swear it, my Prince. I am not a hell fae.” Honesty stings my tone, but still, he glares down at me.
“Then brand your belongings with the symbol of your Goddess Moon.” His gaze shifts slowly, and then he’s looking at my sister. With a jerk of my wrist, he turns over my palm and forces the hilt of the blade into my hand with intent.
“No,” I declare so loudly I hear chairs scrape across the floors below.
And I just know it’s one or possibly three overbearing men.
I have to protect them, and Nyra, and every one of these people this man is hurting day in and day out.
My fingers slip over the cold jewels along the hilt. Something inside me purrs to life as I hold his gaze. A blaze of power crawls through me. Fiery heat licks at the flesh along my arm, my neck, my face.
And then, I lunge at him. The sweep of my arm and the curve of the weapon is a fluidity of motion that’s set to kill. The flash of quickness he puts into shoving away from me is faster than my eyes can see. But it doesn’t slow me down.
His body tightens every single muscle, and he’s storming toward me just as I’m rushing at him. We meet with a collision of fury. My hand arches back, but he is just too fucking fast.
My wrist is in his fist within the blink of an eye, and he holds me back with a smile cutting across his features.
“My sweet, sexy bride. You’re weak,” he whispers like a sentiment.
Weak. Weak. Weak.
The single word from his lips is enough for the beast inside me to roar awake. Its hostility growls through my entire body, and even the Prince himself seems impressed by the waves of power radiating off of the hidden creature within me.
Until my elbow flings forward and slams over the bridge of his nose so hard he doesn’t immediately react. Blood spews from his face, and his hand lifts slowly to find that it’s his own blood.
Real surprise darkens his face.
“You’re a weak bitch,” he repeats more violently.
Power shakes through me as vicious teeth extend in my mouth. It’s something I’ve felt a time or two in teens, but I’ve never welcomed it so much in my entire life as I do right now. My knees bend, and I’m leaping at him in seconds.
He’s just faster.
Strong arms wrap around me. It’s a vise of a grip as he twists me until my back is to his front and he’s hauling me with him as he drags me to my sister.
Her tears are loud and shaking now. Her pretty face is stained with wet, blotchy sadness. My beast shrinks back at the mere idea of harming her if it gets too close.
“Carve your fucking moon.” He twists my arm until the blade in my hand is so near her soft cheek.
“Fuck you,” I grind out, my head flinging back to slam into what I hope is his bloody, broken nose.
A roar of anger pulses through his body as he grips my hand so hard the metal of the weapon cuts into my palm.
“It’s her face or your fucking life, Cersia!” He brings the curved edge of the blade harder toward her, and it nicks her flesh just slightly.
A drop of blood stains the dark iron.
I struggle through it all with wide, desperate eyes, but it all happens so fast.
Nyra jerks the weapon from my hand, and in a single stroke, she slices the blade from her chin to the corner of her brow.
The scream that cuts from her lungs cleaves through my own chest.
“Nyra.” I’m gasping out her name as I kick and beat against the arms that hold me. All I see is her blood, and all I hear is her hurt. “Nyra!” I’m screaming for her, but she isn’t aware of me at all as she stares down at the bloody dagger in her unsteady hand.
Ravar is fighting me as I’m fighting him, and it’s the most chaotic moment of emotions flooding my mind and soul.
Then a gleam of blackness walks from the shadows. A slender arm reaches forward. Her ebony nails wrap around the hilt. And in the single blink of an eye, the Night Witch slings the dagger right at me.
It twirls like a dance suspended in time. A shine of candlelight gleams across its edge like fire sparking in the darkest sea. It’s all I see, and I can’t think about how she and I got here in this mess of our lives.
But at the last moment, my head turns as far as Ravar’s hold on me will allow it.
A thudding sound hits hard. I stumble on my feet. He never lets me go. The fall to the ground is quick. The pretty lace of my gown catches in my kicking feet. His arms are viced around me so tightly I feel I can’t breathe. The impact beneath me is hard and jarring. My skull cracks into the rock.
I blink through the pain and it’s then that I realize I’m looking into the cruelest eyes.
His body broke my fall. The Prince’s blood soaks into me warmly as he continues to hold me even as the light in his dark eyes fades little by little.
His gaze clings to mine, and a whisper is caught in his chest from where the blade is embedded into his heart.
“She—she’ll kill you too,” he murmurs with a deadly smile.
Those words haunt through my mind as I stare up at the cavernous ceiling above. Applause—real applause—screams through the room as people chant for the queen they lost centuries ago.
The attention of the High Hell look down on me as the three hellacious shifters crowd around me to look for wounds.
There are none physically.
But the cutting smile the Night Witch slices my way, it’s deadly indeed.
And the Prince was right.
If I’m not careful, she’ll kill me too, in the end.