CHAPTER 29: TWENTY NINE

"You knew my father."

Margot leans back in her seat, smoke curling in the air about her. "I did. For a handful of years." The black in her irises expands and for the first time, the smile that spreads across her lips isn’t laced with venom or hate. It is soft. "He kept me hidden in his decrepit hut. Saved my life when they left me to burn."

I clench my jaw. "You must be mistaken. My father was no wood maker. He wasn’t even alive two hundred years ago. He was sixty-five when he passed on."

My voice cracks on the last sentence, but Margot merely peers outside, a long look on her face. "How did he die?"

I look down at my book. "He was ill for a long time. It ravaged him quickly."

"I see."

"Are you..." I gnaw on my bottom lip, trying to bite back the question. But I want to know more. I want to understand why. She had refused and the timelines suggest otherwise, but truth is, I couldn’t look at her for one minute straight without seeing my face in hers. It is right in front of me, right here in the open, and still, she refuses to acknowledge me.

"Did you lie to the King about being the woman who birthed me?" Not mother. Never mother.

The wind lifts her golden locks of her shoulder and a world of silence passes between us, in which the air grows thick with tension. Finally, she says, "Eldric and I shared... a moment of weakness. A misstep." Her amber eyes, ringed with kohl, lift to mine. "That union gave me a child. A daughter. But she never drew breath long enough to be named. You are not mine, Valerian. Even if, by some sorcery, you switched your cock for a cunt overnight, you would need to be over two centuries old to fit."

"But--"

"Enough, boy," she snaps. "My past is not yours to sift through like ashes."

I clip my lips shut.

"Whispering is not merely a gift. It is a craft. The ability to control perceptions, weave illusions so convincing, they could rewrite memory and break the mind of weaker things. Including yours." She weaves her fingers in the air and the ground beneath my feet begins rumbling. Shaking. Splitting. A cry splits from my lips as the ground yawns wide and swallows me whole.

The dark abyss grows eyes of molten gold and sensuous lips. "It’s all in your head,"

it whispers.

I blink and I’m back in Margot’s chamber, heart thundering with the aftermath of the fall, all while she stares at me, bored.

"How did--" My hands fly to my chest. "How can you do that?"

"It is a craft. "It is craft," she says coolly. "One that lives in blood, and one I would sooner let rot with me than share with the murderer of my child." She points at the books. "Take them. Learn what you can from dead pages. But do not darken my door again

The sight of you disgusts me."

*****

The castle is busy, maids darting through corridors with armfuls of linens, trays, and gowns, their hurried steps echoing off the stone. The air hums with nervous, yet excited chatter and clattering dishes, and I’m relieved not to be noticed by whatever frenzy has taken hold of them all.

"What’s happening?" I ask the closest guard to me. The only one of the four who doesn’t seem to hate me that much.

"There’s a Selection tonight," he starts, then lowers his head as a pair of courtiers dressed in ridiculous garbs and faces powdered too pale pass by. "The King is choosing his bride. It has the Kingdom in an uproar. There hasn’t been a Queen in centuries."

Oh.

"Don’t talk to the prisoner, Sam," Nath growls behind us. Rather than take the stairs that lead to my holding cell, we pivot, heading for the first wing of the castle.

"Where are you taking me?"

"The King has summoned you to his chambers."

The floors change from white marbles to black, gilded with gold. The walls transform, portrait after portrait displayed of previous rulers dating back to Tiber, whose picture hangs besides a statue of Thandric. There are lesser maids on this floor, and the few that run around are dressed differently, all clad in slips of clothing and all painstakingly beautiful in their own right.

We come to a halt in front of the largest set of doors I’ve ever seen, a couple of guards manning each opening.

A burly man with beady black eyes and red hair grunts in greeting at Nath. "Careful. He’s in a foul mood today."

My brows rise at that. Was the King ever in a good mood? From what I’d seen in the weeks spent leashed to him, the man only ever smiled when he was seconds away from killing someone. I swear he jerks off at night to the sound of screaming and suffering.

There is more chaos within.

The King’s chambers are large enough to swallow a banquet hall, but it feels suffocating the moment I step inside.

Servants and pages dart about, arms full of silks, boots, goblets, anything he’s tossed aside. A cry maid runs past me with a shattered glass on her tray. A goblet bleeds out on the map of Ebonheart, ignored.

At the center, King Lucien stands half-dressed in finery, glowering as the royal tailor fusses over the fall of his cloak.

"Too tight," he snaps, jerking his arm away, sending pins clattering across the marble floor. Pale as sheet, the tailor scrambles after it, while another servant rushes forward with yet another embroidered doublet, hands trembling as though she carries burning coal.

The air smells thickly of fear. No one dares to breathe or speak too loudly.

Nath stops behind the King who stares in the mirror with a pointed scowl. "Sire. The prisoner is here."

King Lucien turns in a smooth ripple, violet gaze landing on me. "Ah, yes. Delightful."

The mark on my neck begins tingling again and I look away sharply, before disgusting thoughts can begin to pilfer through my mind.

He shrugs off the jacket and a maid catches it before it hits the ground. Someone else slips a robe onto him and he ties it absentmindedly around his torso. "Come with me."

My feet move before I can fully process the order and I glare at his back as we walk away from the chaotic din, entering an inner chamber that smells softly of burning incense. A king sized bed large enough to fit twenty lays in the centre, silk sheets rumpled like he’d spent the entire night tossing and turning.

It takes a second too long to realize I recognize this bedroom. And the very spot I stand on, the rug of animal skin, is where he’d snapped my neck the last time I stumbled into his dreams uninvited.

"Did you enjoy trifling through my memories as you pleased?"

I blink slowly, tearing my gaze away from the portrait of the naked woman on the wall. The King leans against the largest window I’ve ever seen, spanning from the floor to the high ceilings. "It was an accident."

He cocks his head in a way that reminds me of a python recoiling for another sting. There is no hint of gold in his eyes today. I would soon come to learn that his eyes changed, depending on what he was feeling. And today, his eyes are a violet so dark, it could be mistaken for black. "Yet, you stayed."

I clutch the books tighter to my chest, as if it could stop me from looking any less vulnerable. Ever since I arrived here, it feels like my life is moving too fast to catch up to. It’s one thing every other second and I haven’t even had the time to look in the mirror. To notice the clothes I’m clad in, or do a simple thing like drag a comb through my hair properly. Hell, I barely even have the time of the day to think.

My mind has been a battlefield. Eyes roving every corner, searching for a way out of here before I fully lose my mind. Then remembering that Leander is somewhere beneath the castle, and if I do leave, he’ll be the first one to die. Or that my mother is currently being abducted, which stands if Rafe hasn’t already done something to her. Or if the grief hasn’t already killed her.

Two days here and it feels like I’m in a hellish limbo where the course of my life doesn’t even belong in my hands anymore.

"I cannot control it when it happens," I explain, even if I don’t particularly feel like it. "I can assure you that the last thing I want is to be a third wheel in... all of that."

He lets out a soft laugh. "You would prefer to participate, then?"

"What? No," I say quickly. Too quickly. And my cheeks flame when he shoots me a knowing smile. "That can be arranged."

"Why have you summoned me?" I growl, irritated.

He blinks at my tone, but says nothing of it. He merely inclines his head toward the plush white couch with gilded forearms and the several parchments scattered across it, spilling to the ground. I peer closer at them and see outlines of faces.

Portraits, I realise. Of women.

"You see, I am being punished by my own Council," he murmurs, folding his hands behind his back. "I should not have ridden to war, they said. I should not have risked my royal visage. Now, I must choose an heir from the other houses. Or make one."

My lip curls. "What does any of that have to do with me?"

King Lucien’s jaw locks so tight a vein throbs at his temple, and his mouth twists as though the word poisons him on the way out. "You touched what no one else dares, and now I want more of it."

Huh? "What?"

"You do not understand what it is to lose an Erasthai." His chin lifts, fangs bared in something raw. Pain. "We are not shackled to fate like your kind. We choose who we mate with. But once we do, once the vow is sealed in blood, it lasts for a lifetime, more potent than any bond that exists. There are no second chances for a redo. That is why many of us resist the bond. Because a lifetime... truly means forever. When your Erasthai dies, you die with them.

"And if death doesn’t take you, something worse does. We call it The Rage."

A terrible stillness settles over his features, his face twisted into disdain, his gaze hollow, locked on a memory I cannot see. "You wander in a form where time does not exist. No control. No sense. Just endless hunger and pain. Until one day you return, half-mad, empty, and discover years have vanished. Whole decades devoured by the beast. And when you finally try to remember them, their face, their voice, the way they smelled, it’s gone. All of it. Stripped away. You are left with only the ache of missing them, gnawing until it tears you apart from the inside."

For some reason, my hands won’t stop shaking. I feel an ache inside that doesn’t belong to me, yet it holds me at a standstill.

You killed my Erasthai! Suddenly, the madness I had seen behind the woman’s eyes feels heavier and the sweat on my palms feel slicker. Like the blood of a love I had ripped away.

"Last night was the first time since my Rage that I recalled her face," the King says, his face hard as stone. "Because of you. And tonight, because of what you have done, I must desecrate her memory by taking a bride. This is the very least you owe me."

My eyes widen. "You want me to..."

He extends a hand, beckoning me closer with a smile that fills me with terror. "Invade my mind, Valerian," he commands. "Take me back--back to the last night I betrayed mine. If it is the last shred of her I can hold on to, then let it torment me for eternity... until I learn to forgive myself for it."