Page 10 of A Bond so Fierce and Fragile (Compelling Fates Saga #3)
Lessia
H elp us! Help me!
She wasn’t sure if she was dreaming when air finally traveled into her lungs, but she continued screaming at the voices that now drifted further and further away.
Help! Please!
As the fog in her mind lifted, the large shapes that had danced before her eyes, who had turned their heads in her direction when she screamed at them but who hadn’t spoken back to her, faded until only darkness remained.
“I’ll do anything, Rioner! Please stop this. Please! She’s my daughter!”
Her father’s raspy voice was the first thing she heard as she came to, but the coughing fit that followed swallowed all other sounds.
Lessia hacked with a raw throat, tears streaming down her face, until the choking sensation finally left her, although both her nose and throat still burned from the salt in the seawater Rioner had forced down them.
“You’re a fucking coward, Rioner.” Kerym’s voice was stronger than her father’s. “You’ve always been. She’s a fucking Faeling!”
“Careful, Kerym,” the king said in a low voice. “Your brother isn’t doing too well. You wouldn’t want him to take her place, would you?”
“Oh, fuck you.” Thissian’s deep voice didn’t waver either. “You’ve already ruined our lives. Do you think you can hurt Kerym and me more? You can’t. You’ve already taken everything. I’d gladly welcome whatever you can muster with that water and more if it just ended the misery that is this life.”
“Is that so?” Rioner mused. “And you, Kerym? Did losing your mate also break you?”
Lessia focused on her shallow breathing as Kerym’s silence told the king everything he needed to know.
“What about you, dear brother? You’re still fighting? Is it because of them? The halflings?” Rioner must have started walking around because a chill breeze peppered Lessia’s bare back with pebbles, and she pulled her legs up, trying to keep some of the warmth, to cover herself as much as possible.
“I-if you had… found your mate… you’d never do this.
Please . Y-you saw… our parents. Y-you saw…
what losing Mother did to our father.” Alarin was begging now, sobs interrupting each word, and the sound was so horrible that Lessia closed her eyes even though she still couldn’t see anything with the blindfold.
Chains rattled before her father continued, his desperate voice rising.
“T-they’re my children! Lessia is twenty-five years old!
Frelina a year younger! They haven’t lived !
I-I know you… believe this prophecy… but what if it was just a way for the gods to get to us one last time?
Y-you’re the one breaking apart the Rantzier family right now, brother! ”
Rioner only laughed. “Those two are no Rantziers. But you all have given me an idea, so thank you ever so much for that. Torkher, take off her blindfold but hold her in place so she doesn’t get any ideas, will you?”
Before Lessia had time to react, the Fae guard she couldn’t stand the smell of—as pure evil wafted directly from his skin—dragged her into a seated position, ripping the fabric from her head, and gripped her shoulders when she wrapped her arms around her front.
The first pair of eyes she found were her father’s tear-filled ones.
Then Frelina’s panicked ones.
Then Kerym’s blue ones, darkened with pain.
Thissian’s ocean-colored ones waited for her next, and she wasn’t sure why his were the worst, but perhaps it was because she’d believed him to be almost numb from how he’d spoken before, but now…
Fear flickered within his eyes.
“It’s all right,” she tried to tell them, but her throat hurt too much for words to form, so instead she mouthed them, trying for a weak smile after.
Her father and Frelina both let out gut-wrenching sounds in response, but Kerym kept her gaze, mouthing “Hold on. He’s coming” back to her.
Thissian didn’t move, his eyes flitting to the king before moving back to her, and she didn’t like the look contorting his features.
She didn’t like it at all.
Lessia couldn’t even nod as Kerym yet again mouthed “Hold on” as Torkher violently shifted her so her back rested against his chest, and she shuddered when his lips tickled her ear. “You’re dying today. And he won’t get here in time.”
Lessia stared straight ahead, refusing to let Torkher’s words sink in.
“He’ll find your broken body floating amidst the waves beneath us. Unless any of the creatures in the sea eat you first, of course,” the Fae spat, but still Lessia didn’t react, forbade herself to even swat at the hands that roved over her bare skin.
The king spoke again as he waved forward the other two guards behind him. “Get my brother up here.”
Lessia watched silently as they unfastened her father’s shackles, an ember of gratefulness trying to warm her chest when Kerym stopped her sister from getting in their way.
Catching his eyes, she wrangled to offer him a smile, but it mustn’t have been too encouraging, as Kerym’s face fell as he stared back at her.
The two guards dragged her father’s body until he was only a few feet away from where Lessia half sat, half lay against Torkher.
Placing Alarin on his knees, they tied his hands behind his back again, then straightened, staring at Rioner standing somewhere behind her.
Despair filled her father’s eyes as he looked at her, and she willed her own not to mirror it, tried to give him hope, tried to send him the belief that she would find them a way out of this.
But her own fragile hope was fading quickly.
Especially when the image of Merrick finding her body that Torkher had conjured earlier pressed to reveal itself in her mind again.
She’d clung to the glimmer—the chance that those shapes she’d seen when the water enveloped her were what she thought they were—but when nothing stirred within her again, those voices worryingly silent, Lessia realized it might have been a fool’s dream.
“Give him the antidote,” the king ordered, shattering the silence, and Lessia barely had time to understand what was happening before one of the guards pulled out a small vial and shoved its contents down her father’s throat.
Her father’s eyes bulged as he nearly choked on whatever they’d forced him to drink, but the Fae behind him wouldn’t relent, pushing his head up until a loud swallow reverberated within the square cabin.
More tears spilled down her father’s cheeks when his eyes found hers again, and she couldn’t help the hiss escaping her lips at the pain that tugged at his expression, that curved his usually straight back, that had his hands ball into fists.
But when she tried to turn her head to glare at the king, demanding to know what he was doing to her father, Torkher wrapped his hand in her hair, pulling it so hard she yelped.
Kerym and her sister growled in outrage when Torkher only chuckled as he tugged even more, forcing her to nearly rest the back of her head on his shoulder.
“Don’t get any ideas, halfling,” he snarled into her ear, and when a heartbreaking sound pierced the silence that followed—one she wasn’t certain who it came from—she forced herself to utter some sound of agreement.
As Torkher released her, her eyes flew across the room, and her brows snapped together, intensifying the ache in her head when she realized it must have been Thissian who let out that awful, sorrow-filled cry.
His eyes touched hers for only a second before they fell, the sorrow in them spreading to his entire frame as he hunched over, folding into himself where he was chained next to her sister.
“Thissian, what is it? What’s happening?” Kerym urged, but his brother wouldn’t respond—he only pressed himself further into the wall, making himself as small as possible.
“I knew you were the cleverer brother.” Rioner snickered as he approached her father, carefully keeping his back to Lessia. “I believe dear Thissian might have begun to grasp what I’m thinking.”
Kerym’s brother let out another soft cry, and the hair on Lessia’s neck rose when Kerym stared from Thissian to the king, then slowly shifted his gaze back to Lessia, the crease between his dark brows deepening.
Even though her mind was muddled, she tried to rack her brain for what the king could be planning now—to prepare herself or to come to terms with it, she didn’t know.
He’d given her father what he called an antidote…
She stopped herself from trying to move her hands to press against her pounding temples.
If Torkher struck her again, it would be even harder to think.
As her eyes snagged on the blindfold on the floor instead, she realized they’d kept her from using her magic with the blindfold, as she needed to meet people’s eyes to use it.
For the others…
They must have been using Vincere.
So the antidote would be to allow her father to use his magic again.
But why?
While useful, his magic only undid other magic…
What had they been talking about that could have given the king ideas?
Lessia’s eyes flew open, and it was impossible to stop the rush of air that forced its way into her lungs.
She started shaking her head.
Then she did it more violently when she met her father’s eyes and saw the same realization dawn in them.
No.
Please no.
She couldn’t help it.
A whimper followed the gasp.
Then a sob.
Frelina’s eyes fought to meet hers, and as soon as her sister’s amber ones bore into her own, Lessia knew it was true.
Huge drops of tears rolled down Frelina’s round cheeks.
Thissian began rocking back and forth beside her.
Kerym’s face whitened, and the smirk he’d fought for his life to keep whenever she’d glimpsed him drained from his face entirely.
A sound she didn’t even know she could make escaped her as the king and Torkher began laughing.
“I should thank you, brother.” Rioner began pacing back and forth, stealing a look at Lessia when that sound—the otherworldly sound she didn’t even know how to describe—continued to pierce the air. “I would never have thought of it if you hadn’t been going on and on about your mates.”
Please.
No.
Help us!
Help me!
Help!
Please!
Lessia started begging.