The Serpent’s Throne (Bloodlines #3)

Chapter 1

ONE

Raziel Nostrom was dead.

He remembered the water filling the silvered casket. He remembered it filling his lungs. Screaming, clawing at the lid of the box where his brother and sister had placed him—exiled him—for all eternity.

Death… versus the reality of what was now sinking into his thoughts.

Sinking.

But it wasn’t death that greeted him. It wasn’t death that his siblings had tried to pay him—it was an eternity of suffering.

Killing him would have been one thing. Killing him would have been mercy. It would have been kindness. It would have been an act of love. They loved him, didn’t they? Sure, they were all out to kill each other—they had been destined for that since children.

Grandmother Lilivra had seen to that. And then his dear mother had placed the seeds of division between them and grown them like the vines of the Wild. The two matriarchs of the Nostrom clan had ensured that he, Mael, and Lana were bound to rip each other to shreds by the end of it all.

They each had been given a prophecy, certainly. Lilivra must have whispered into the ears of his brother and sister just the same as she had whispered into his, so long ago.

Raziel wasn’t a fool.

He wasn’t the only one with dreams of grandeur—with aspirations of solitary control over Runne and the family empire. This bloodbath had always been inevitable.

Moreover, it was by design.

So why, why?

Why such cruelty?

Why cast him into the ocean where he would suffer for eternity…?

Why such betrayal?

Because they never loved him.

Because they never cared about him. Because for all his bloodlust, for all his dreams of murdering Mael and Lana, Raziel had never wished them to suffer. He had wanted to win. But he had loved them.

They were family.

Clearly, he was alone in his madness.

No.

He was alone in his weakness.

That was what had led him here. To this point. To this death.

To this pit of suffering.

To this unfathomable failure.

Weakness.

Raziel Nostrom was dead.

Because he had been too weak to survive.

Raziel Nostrom was still in that casket. And there he would remain. There, he would leave him. Screaming and begging for help.

Retching up more water from his lungs, he shut his eyes.

A hand fell on his back.

His assassin.

His fae.

The only one in this world who understood him.

The only one who dared to stand beside him.

The one who might understand why Raziel Nostrom had to die and stay dead.

He would let her live. He would let her stay, even if she was his greatest weakness.

Because he knew she might be strong enough to survive what he would have to become.

Besides, he would have need of her.

“Welcome to the Wild, Raziel Nostrom,” she had said, not realizing Raziel Nostrom no longer existed.

He needed his fae to guide him through this new torment. To take him back to the place he knew so he could burn it all down. Straightening up, he spat the last of the saltwater from his lungs onto the stones at his feet and took stock of his surroundings.

The water of the lake behind him might as well have been made of obsidian, the surface was so smooth and black.

The only disturbance in its glassy surface was the silver coffin on the shore, half-dragged out of the water, its lid carelessly tossed aside, the silver chains draped haphazardly over the rocks of the cavern, revealing the fact that its prisoner had escaped.

The cavern looked like some pit of despair where souls like his were sent to suffer after death.

But despite the blackened surroundings, the environment wasn’t truly dark.

Everything was bathed in a ghastly purplish-blue hue, cast by the thick vines that burst through the walls and the ceiling some hundred or so feet overhead.

The vines pulsed with their own organic light, like the veins and arteries of a living creature, spreading out and thinning as they tangled over each other and spiraled and grasped every surface.

He could see creatures—things the like of which he had never witnessed before—flitting from branch to branch. Animals with too many wings. Too many limbs. Too many eyes. They chittered and called to each other in sounds like shattering glass.

He reflexively bared his fangs.

The Wild.

He wanted it all dead. To crush it beneath his heel.

And moons, the smell of it. It was everything at once—earth and decay and growing things and water and something else, something raw and untamed that made his vampiric senses scream. The air was thick and humid, pressing against his skin like a living thing.

He put his hand in his pocket and blinked in surprise when he felt a small, circular object there.

Pulling it out, he stared down at it. A golden coin.

And on both sides, a serpent, twisting around itself.

On one side, it devoured its own tail. On the other, its jaw was open and its fangs extended in violent victory, another snake dead beneath it.

It was one of his favorites, for obvious reasons. He had put it in his pocket prior to Lana’s doomed wedding and had entirely forgotten about it in the chaos that had ensued. Shutting his eyes… Raziel laughed.

The sound was haggard and wet. He still had water in his lungs from his brief-but-still-too-long stay in the coffin at the bottom of the ocean. But he laughed all the same.

Because he was now convinced, with his entire being, that the gods did exist. Throughout his childhood and his many years of life, he’d been certain they were a lie.

Just some fable told to idiots who needed to make themselves feel bigger and safer.

Who wanted to believe they might matter in the emptiness of the void once their little meaningless lives ceased to burn.

But, no. The gods were real. They were sentient. For what other reason would he still be alive, and here of all places, with her of all people, if the gods were not real?

What an unexpected gift.

A reminder of who and what he really was.

Of who and what really mattered in his life.

The gods had stripped it all away from him. Taken everything from him that he thought had mattered to him. His riches. His resources. His men. His guns. His cars. His home.

All of it.

Raziel Nostrom was dead.

Because he had been weak.

But now? Now?

What remained… was only the Serpent.

Grinning, he let out a long, wavering sigh.

Wiping his soaked, dripping hair back away from his face, he considered all the bits and pieces of his life that had led him to this singular disaster. Finally, he took a slow enough breath in that he could form words. “How long?”

“How long what?” Nadi was watching him carefully, clearly disturbed by his strange behavior.

And he did not blame her. He was acting erratically.

She wasn’t wearing her glamor, save for her human legs.

And in the bizarre, purple glow of the vines that arched along the cavern’s ceiling far overhead, her pale blue-green skin took on an almost iridescent sheen.

The way the color reflected in her spilled-oil-black hair was almost hypnotic, like looking at moonlight on water.

How odd to realize that this was how she was supposed to look.

Beautiful. Other. Somehow even more alluring than she had been before.

He wanted to reach out to her and draw her close.

Something about her reminded him of the firebugs that he recalled seeing out the windows of the ruined estate at nights as a small child—ethereal and impossible, too beautiful to be real.

Suddenly, keenly, and violently—he wanted her.

Wanted to throw her to the stones and fuck her.

To take her right there and sink his fangs into her throat and drink her dry.

His little fae assassin. The Serpent’s toy.

He wanted to reclaim her and ensure she knew precisely who and what she belonged to.

But he was half-drowned.

And she was holding a pair of bolt cutters like a weapon, staring at him warily. He might be a serpent, but she was no fool and was a dangerous animal in her own right.

He had no desire to get his jaw bashed out of place.

There was a time and place for everything.

The Serpent would have his fae. When she least expected it. Prey had to be hunted, after all. He forced himself to focus on the matter at hand. Where was he? When was he? “How long was I”—he gestured at the silver casket in revulsion—“in that?”

“Five days. Maybe five and a half.” She paused, then added more gently, wrinkling her nose, “I can’t imagine how long it felt. I got away from them as fast as I could.”

Grimacing, he bit back accusations. She wouldn’t have crawled into Mael’s bed. Or Lana’s. That wasn’t like his little murderer.

Five days. It had felt like decades. Like centuries. Like an eternity spent in that silver prison, the water in his lungs keeping him trapped as his body betrayed him with each involuntary attempt to breathe. But the memories, which had once terrified him, now felt… distant and cold.

Like he was looking down into the casket that contained his own, cold corpse at a funeral.

Raziel Nostrom truly was dead.

He was smiling. He probably shouldn’t be.

It was making poor Nadi nervous. He forced his expression into a more neutral one.

“You came back for me.” The words felt strange in his mouth.

Foreign and impossible. When was the last time someone had come back for him?

When was the last time someone had chosen to save him rather than destroy him?

Especially when it was so very clearly the wrong choice.

“You don’t get to die until I say so, Nostrom.” Nadi lifted the bolt cutters and placed them against her shoulder. “We’ve been through this.”

“Trust me, I know.”

She turned her attention to the cavern, and let out a long, wavering breath, taking in the sight around her with an unreadable expression. “We’re in the Deep Wild. Far from the surface. No fae clans live down here. It’ll take us a while to get close to them—and it won’t be easy.”

Naturally.