Chapter Thirty-Five Kion #3
“Shut up, Knox,” Mahina signs, rolling her eyes and holding one hand up before pinching it closed and then pointing upward with her index finger.
“Honestly, I have to admit I’m frightened,” whispers Isla, her freckled face abnormally pale. “Isn’t anybody else?”
“I am,” mutters Adriel on Kion’s left.
“So am I,” confesses Taissa, to Kion’s surprise. For some reason, he still thinks of her as fearless. Her eyes are wide, glittering in the firelight, and her hand squeezes his so tightly that he wagers her knuckles are shining white.
“I would be,” agrees Kion hoarsely, “but—” He cuts himself off. Fucking hells. The last thing he wants to be is cheesy. But his teammates are looking at him curiously.
“Why aren’t you afraid?” asks Isla, propping her head on her hand and gazing curiously at him.
“Aw, look,” gloats Knox. “Captain’s blushing.”
“He’s feeling warm, cuddly feelings,” Bronte agrees with a knifelike smile. “Aren’t you, Cap?”
His throat works. They’ll make him say it, won’t they?
Pests, all of them. Bloody pests.
“I just meant,” he says, more gruffly than he means to, “that I’m not afraid because you lot are here. My team. My—family.” Kion blames the alcohol for his sappy speech and glares down at his mug like he can wreak revenge on the goblin rum.
It’s not that they haven’t called themselves that before—family, he means.
Just not in a while. The losing streak had fractured them, pairing them off, separating the once cohesive team.
Adriel and Mahina. Bronte and Isla. Knox and óríon.
Him and James. Samara and her partner. Near the end of it, they’d rarely ever seen the other Robber: She’d barely been in the Nexitory at all.
Once a whole unit, the team split, right down the middle. He barely saw his players outside of practice. There weren’t any team lunches, or evenings spent drinking and teasing one another like there’d once been.
Maybe it didn’t help that Kion, as captain and coach, shouted his lungs out at them after every failed game.
But ever since Taissa joined, well, it’s like they’ve rediscovered their footing.
He’d realized it with their first collective effort to mock their Wily Witch shoot, but the notion had grown only stronger as time passed: playing Head-to-Head, gathering around his telly to watch that damned commercial, scrimmaging, laughing and joking and jibing like the old days.
Not split off into pairs, but…together. Something about her brought them back together.
Kion expects his players to laugh at that, but they fall strangely silent.
When he glances back up, he sees that their expressions—even óríon’s, although he looks pretty drunk—have softened.
They don’t know, of course, that he grew up in the Waywardly Home.
Nobody but James—and now Taissa—knows that Kion’s made up every single thing about “Emilia and Alec Locke,” his South London bookseller parents.
His records won’t show it: Lionel took care of that for him after the arson incident.
Gave him a chance to start fresh without old wounds being constantly opened.
“Yeah, mate,” Knox says, clearing his throat.
“I mean, you’re mine, too. My family, that is.
Even you,” he adds, elbowing óríon in the ribs a little too hard for it to be completely friendly.
As óríon growls, Knox raises his mug. “This is the one place I’ve never been told that I’m ‘too much.’ So—to family. The one we choose.”
“To family,” his team echoes, lifting their glasses.
“To family,” Taissa murmurs, a little late, and her eyes are strangely glassy as she looks at him.
“Fjolskylda,” óríon mutters, burying his pointy nose in his mug. From the waver in his voice, Kion can confirm that the other warlock is indeed drunk. His brows raise. This rum isn’t especially strong…
“He spiked his drink with vodka,” Adriel whispers to Kion. “Like, a lot of vodka. There…might be more vodka than Gobbworth’s in that thing.”
Well, that explains it. Before a big game, Magnússon usually “self-medicates.” Just a bit, to take the edge off, to cancel out the nerves. But none of those games had as much at risk as the Wild Hunt does.
Merlin’s cataracts. How much did óríon pour in?
“Fjolskylda,” mutters óríon again, swaying slightly in his seat, tuft of almost-white hair sticking up from his head after he racks a hand through it. “Family. I had one, once. Not this”—he waves a hand at them and hiccups—“pretend thing, although it is nice—”
“Rude,” mutters Knox peevishly, and Bronte shushes him. Magnússon never talks about his past. Ever.
óríon scoffs, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the worn Polaroid of the girl with light blonde hair, the same as his. Kion watches as he stares at it blearily. “Selka. My sister.”
“I didn’t know you had any siblings,” Isla says curiously, big brown eyes intrigued.
óríon thumbs the old Polaroid, eyes clouding. “She did not deserve what happened.”
There’s a long pause that chills the air. “What happened?” asks Adriel quietly, even as everybody thinks it. óríon’s never mentioned Selka before. And that look on his face…
Magnússon laughs bitterly and takes another sip of his drink as the room falls dead silent save for the faint crackle and pop of the fireplace.
Its sudden loudness in the stark quiet takes Kion by surprise.
He flinches, a trickle of sweat sliding down the nape of his neck, but inexplicably finds himself relaxing as Taissa lifts his hands to her lips and presses a knowing kiss to his knuckles.
None of the others notice; all eyes are on Magnússon.
And for good reason. This is the closest óríon has ever come to revealing his past—and as much as Kion wants to get away from the fireplace, he can’t bloody miss this.
“She was murdered,” spits óríon, voice shaking with emotion. “My father. He killed her. Moreingi,” he snarls. “And for what? He had it all; he was a king. But he had to take her life, too.”
It’s like Kion’s been gutted. He’s never seen óríon tremble like this. He’s never seen even so much as a gleam of tears in his eyes, but he does now, and it fucking scares him. He looks at Knox, and the lad’s face is drained of all color.
“óríon,” signs Mahina, blinking furiously as she fingerspells his name, “We had no idea…”
He shrugs, tightly. “I do not like to think about it.”
“Wait,” says Adriel softly. “Your father was…a ‘king’?”
“In a way.” óríon’s lips curl disdainfully as he thumbs the old Polaroid. “ ‘King’ is not the right word. ‘Boss,’ maybe.”
The word hangs ominously in the air.
Boss. Boss?
Ah, hells.
If they mean what Kion thinks they mean…
Suddenly the men sent after óríon make a lot more fucking sense.
Maybe they’re not the government like he’d thought.
But who would have known that Iceland has criminal empires?
In his head, that country’s always been a serene place of fjords and northern lights.
Not bloodshed and violence. That’s the danger of bloody stereotypes, he supposes.
Apparently much more shit goes on in Iceland than he realized.
Knox is staring at óríon, his eyes widening in a way Kion knows means he’s connecting some dots. “What…Please, oh, Merlin, tell me I haven’t been antagonizing a member of some bloody Icelandic gang…”
“Not just a member,” spits Magnússon, accent thicker than Kion’s ever heard it; probably something to do with the sheer amount of Gobbworth’s he’s downed in the past few minutes alone.
“Prince. My father…” An unintelligible string of harsh Icelandic follows.
“He did not like it when I tried to leave. All that murder, it was not for me. That disgusting—what is the word? Corruption. Country and syndicate both. Carriwitchet—it was my way out. So I played.”
Oh, he’s fucking drunk all right—óríon is gesturing with the mug, the rum sloshing out onto the table. Kion’s never seen his teammate so out of control before. He makes eye contact with Knox, who nods minutely, glancing at the mug and apparently timing the best moment to take it from Magnússon.
“ ‘Stupid game,’ my father said,” óríon slurs. “I said—” Another cascade of Icelandic. “He did not like my tone.” He’s smiling now, head lolling.
“All right,” Knox says, wincing as he tries to grab the mug from óríon. “Time for bed, methinks.”
“Nei,” óríon insists, shaking his head, and it’s almost like some clarity comes back into it. “You have to know this, all of you.”
Realization settles on Kion’s shoulders like a heavy blanket. This is a confession, in case óríon dies tomorrow in the Hunt—a possibility more real than any of them have wanted to admit until now. Knox falters as well, eyes widening.
Kion grimaces. If Magnússon is scared…
Well, that doesn’t bode well.
At all.
“My father and I, we came to blows.” óríon blinks like the room is spinning. “I was dying. The gang, they are not scared of dipping from the Dark Well. My father knew…Torture glyphs.”
Kion tastes bile in the back of his throat. He has an idea where this is going.
“Selka rushed in. She tried to help me…He knocked her down the stairs. She died. Just like that. And I”—óríon stares hard at a point just past Kion—“I killed him. After all those years of being scared to do it, it was…easy.”
Isla has a hand to her mouth, her eyes full of tears. Adriel and Mahina have matching expressions of slack-jawed shock on their faces. Knox looks about to keel over, Bronte’s face has gone very still, Taissa’s hand is trembling in his own, and Kion…
Kion looks at óríon and sees, not for the first time, a reflection of himself staring back.
A world-weary man that has been torn down and shredded apart far too many times to even try to count.
Black eyes meet blue, and something deeper than words passes between them.
A sort of understanding, as dark and fragile as a raven’s broken wing.
óríon looks away first, blinking drunkenly.