CHAPTER 32: THIRTY TWO

Lucien

Zyra Duskharrow extends her gift to me--a crystal vial of perfume. Her blue ringlets sway with unseen breeze as she lowers herself into a courtesy that lowers the neckline of her corset. "For you, my King, made with my heart’s blood. One drop is enough to have a room enthralled with you."

Soft ’oohs’ and ’aahs’ of appreciation fills the air.

Leaning forward, I take the crystal, dark amusement curving my lips as her fingers deliberately run along mine. Perhaps, if she knew the last woman who touched me without my permission was nailed to my bedpost, she would desist from it.

Can you blame her? Beauty is catching; it’s a plague I happily suffer. When I look in the mirror, I do, in fact, gasp. Call it pride if you will, but what use is a pretty face if not for the pleasure of adoration?

"Most appreciated, Zyra," I purr, turning the vial so the light shows off its sparkle. "Though, it is slightly insulting that you think I’d need a bottle to make people adore me." I lift my gaze to the assembled. "They already do."

Laughter bellows through the hall, cheers drunken on the high of gaining my acknowledgement. Fools, the lot of them. None greater than the fools on my council for putting me through this torture. My solace lies only in the goblet of wine in my grasp and the thought of punishing my newest pet for escaping his cell.

It was petty, laying the trap for him in the first place, but forgive me if my only entertainment around here was fucking with the one person who didn’t look at me the way everyone else does. They either wanted to fuck me or be me. Valerian looks at me like he wants to kill me. And it is no surprise that it tickles my fancy.

I’ve always been attracted to women who might actually kill me. Toxic trait, I suppose. Oh, but I have too many of those. And it would seem I could add something new to my list. That I was fucking straight as an arrow, but the thought of hurting Valerian, breaking him to my will, making him fall to his knees and grovel before me and oh, those lovely tears of his...

Enticing, even more so that he is the enemy. And a man. Something I can’t want and have.

The Lady’s brown eyes dart to her father, Eryx, on my left and I catch the flash of disappointment in his eyes. They may pretend this is all for my sake, for the sake of the Kingdom, forcing my hand like this, but in truth, this is a war of chess, a grapple for power and each House has put forward it’s best, most cunning and beautiful pawn forward to usurp the place of the Queen and eventually, that of the King as well.

I hand the crystal to Trent as Zyra joins the rest of the Maidens in their designated sitting area. Trent nods at the herald and the doors and opened once more, ushering in the fourteenth maiden.

"Princess Evadne of House Kaldrith!"

She emerges in a leather corseted gown of deep forest green, her skirts slit high to reveal short legs and boots lined with wolf fur. My lips quirk up at the absolute lack of regard of courtly fashion and an even bigger disregard for the lips curling in disdain at her presentation.

Evadne halts before me, and when she moves to take my hand, I let her. She brings my knuckles to her lips and kisses me softly. "My King." Leaning back, "I have brought with me a beast trained to sniff the enemy from miles away and kill at a single command. This is House Kaldrith’s gift to you, that you may never ride alone, ever again." Her voice drops low enough that only I can hear. "Lulu."

Such is the nature of my relationship with my cousin. She irritates the fuck out of me, takes it upon herself to bestow upon me an assortment of names that would have earned her a vacation to the gallows, if she wasn’t all the family I had left from my mother’s side. Lucy-bear. Lulu. Your Darkness. Candle snuffer. Your Royal Pain in my cunt. Every time we meet, she calls me something new, daring me to react.

Problem is, Eva just might be the only bearable person in my life. If I didn’t know she was more into women than she was men, she might have been my first choice. With her, I knew I’d never have to be something I’m not and she wouldn’t ask it of me, either.

The side door parts and the guards hold a cage. In it resides a red wolf with a line of black slit separating it’s golden irises. It snarls against the guards, baring its teeth with feral intensity, and when I tilt my head in interest, it’s eyes lock onto mine. It stills, its ears laying flat on its head as it lowers it with a soft whine.

I clap, truly delighted. "A red wolf. A rarity." Eva’s cheeks pinken at my approval. "A gift to remember."

A cheer rises up in the air, almost deafening, and Evadne courtesies once more before making her way to the firepit.

A disquiet ripples along across the hall and on the dais beside me as murmurs of the name Lilith carries on the wind. Tension tightens my muscles as my should-be

bride, the Council’s most hated, yet most necessary choice, is announced to the hall.

"Lady Lilith of House Blackspire!"

The candles in the hall dim as the sole figure threads along the carpets, controlling the scones in the hall with but a fraction of her mind.

"Show off," Margot grumbles in her seat beside me. House Nythorn has no daughters to offer me, cutting down the maidens to an uneven number of fifteen. I’m sure that if Margot wasn’t currently on the council, she’d be down there with them, batting pretty lashes at me and asking my hand. Even if she was once my father’s wife and the last Queen before him.

The hall cries in delight as twin flames glide over Lilith’s head, forming shapes of entwining crescents, and then, a burning moon as she makes her way to me in a gown of pure white silk edged in gold thread so bright, it nearly blinds. A halo-like crown of filigree rests above her flaming her and my grip on the throne tightens as I realize what she has done.

Thrown back by centuries to a time when all that mattered to me was the approval of the very people in this room. Green and foolish. When I’d paraded my love for the world to see and shown them my one weakness, just so they could use it to break me.

And Ilya had walked this very path to me, dressed like she was already my chosen bride, in a devilish white and gold dress that had the very air stirring with lust. She’d borne me no gifts, but oh, did the world burn with passion from her display.

Lilith’s black eyes meet mine, a knowing smile lifting her blood red mouth as she notes my silent seething. I’d rejected the dame once, told her she could never be Ilya and in retaliation, knowing she was the best choice I’d make tonight, she’s taken it upon herself to throw it in my face that she could, in fact, be my dead mate.

I breathe ice and death, claws curling to pierce through her slender neck. But I stay my hand.

Rather than make her way to me, Lilith stops before the dais, sparing a cunning glance for the rest of her competition, and irritation flickers in my blood her eyes return to mine, her courtesy low. The silk is sheer, doing nothing to hide her nakedness underneath. It isn’t that Lilith isn’t beautiful. She might easily be the most beautiful woman in this gathering.

But she never did know how to keep her desire for me in check or her hands to herself, even while I was mated to her sister.

"Majesty," she says, voice tinged with humble submission and yet nothing of it’s like. "There is no gift I might place in your hands that would not wither with time. No flame burns eternal, no ember lives without breath to feed it. Yet, if I cannot grant you a fire that endures, then let me gift you a blaze that devours. A vision to sear itself into your mind, bright enough that even when the ashes fall, you will remember its heat."

Leaning my chin against my fist, wondering how much more colorful her display might be with her innards spilled across the floors and the white soaked in blood, I wave a hand. "Very well."

Then it blooms. Flame slides down her arms like bracelets, curls around her wrists like a lover. She spins, slowly and the fire obeys, carving golden arcs through the air. The crowd holds its breath. So do I.

The same steps my Ilya made for me. Almost.

Lilith’s hips sway to the drumbeat, her feet whispering across marble, and the fire dances with her. It clings to her waist, climbs her curves, kisses her skin without devouring her. My mouth dries. My pulse stutters.

She bends backward, hair brushing the floor, and fire explodes from her fingers, wings of light that stretch toward the throne. The people gasp like she’s a goddess.

She rises, smiling, dragging the flames into two pulsing spheres, like hearts torn from chests. She claps. They burst. Embers rain down, harmless, beautiful, a lie dressed in gold.

And then, she sets herself alight. Wrapped in a living cloak of flame, her body vanishes inside it. For one perfect heartbeat, she is fire. She owns it. She commands it--

Something else catches my attention. Perhaps it is the soft scent of night blooming jasmine and marigold that makes my head snap up or the familiar growl from the Captain of my Guard.

"Get back here, wretch!"

But I see him, wrecking havoc as he flees from the guards trying to close in on him, in search of an exit. My eyes brows lift in amazement as Valerian slams into the servants and my guests, spilling wine and muttering a breathy apology for the ensuing chaos, and proceeds to make a ruin of my Selection, running this way and that like a lost puppy.

Positively distracted from the display in front of me, I watch in utter fascination as he slips through Nath’s fingers, slamming his fist into the bigger man’s nose and Nath’s answering howl cleaves the hall’s attention on Lilith in half.

Slipping under the arm of another, he rams his knee into Orlo’s gut and I laugh, beguiled.

When I had the trap laid out for him, I’d wanted to see where he’d go first. For all his bickering of loyalty and his people, would he take his first chance at escape and leave them behind or would he go straight for the dungeons? And in the event that he did succeed in breaking them out and happened to run into the guards laying in wait for them, would he have laid down his life and fought? Or watch them die knowing there was nothing he could do to save them even if he did fight?

Would it break him? Or would it make him more petulant? It was an experiment, really, and the last place I would have thought to find him was... here.

Gods, but he’s beautiful in defiance.

Like a rat scurrying through the sewers, Valerian squeaks, avoiding a blow to the back of his head and I see it the exact moment his eyes of living flame, hotter than any Lilith can conjure, lands on the exit on the right side of the throne, and without thinking, without seeing, he bolts centre stage, knocking Lilith flat into the ground.

Or it would have been so if Lilith didn’t have instincts honed by centuries of practice. And at the last second, right before the collision, she whirls, hand directed at Valerian, and even if I cared enough to yell a stop command, it wouldn’t have come fast enough to stop the spear of flames that shoot from Lilith’s fingers.

And Valerian erupts in flames.