Page 9 of A Storm in Every Heart (Enchanted Legacies #2)

KASTIAN, PRESENT

D eep breath in, deep breath out.

There is nothing. Fucking. Happening. There’s no need to react.

Deep breath in…

Odessa throws me a wicked smirk and brushes past me on the way out of the room. I unintentionally breathe in a lungful of her intoxicating scent.

Fuck.

She smells like the ocean and something sweet and floral, like the tropical flowers that cover Hydratta in summer. It’s hypnotic and simultaneously infuriating. I shouldn’t be looking at her, shouldn’t be interested in her, and yet I can’t stop.

I clear my throat and begin again. Deep breath in…

Jett leans against the table, smirking at me. “You alright, mate?”

I yank my gaze up to his. We’re alone in the room, everyone else having already left to go back to whatever they were doing before a bombshell fell in the middle of our afternoon.

I clench my jaw and do my best not to launch myself across the room at him in a fit of inexplicable rage.

“I’m fine,” I grunt, then turn on my heel and leave the room before Jett can say anything else.

The last fucking thing I want—aside from picking an unjustifiable fight with my friend—is to be reminded that I’m acting irrationally. I’m all too aware.

I march down the long hall and outside into the courtyard, all the while trying to keep my breathing even and my heart rate down.

The breathing is a tactic I learned quickly in Dyaspora, where the only way to survive was to choose your fights wisely and otherwise keep your head down and your mouth shut.

In the beginning, it was almost impossible.

Every single flat expression and even response was a hard-won battle, but eventually it became second nature not to react.

I’d almost forgotten what I was like before self-control became my own personal deity.

Until her.

Odessa makes it impossible to remain calm even in the face of the tiniest, most insignificant interactions. She makes me do insane, out-of-character things like spend all afternoon searching the village for her or pick fights with my friends.

Jett flirts with everyone—female, male, old, young, married, single—it doesn’t matter.

He even comes on to Alix now and then. If Daemon, with his notoriously short temper, can handle his friend being overly friendly to his bonded mate, then there’s no excuse for whatever the fuck I’m feeling right now.

Except that he made her laugh, and the best I can ever get out of her is indifference, and at worst, outright hatred.

Deep breath in…

“Kas!”

I turn instinctively at the sound of my name and see that Daemon is striding out of the barracks behind me.

He’s alone for once. Lately, he’s never alone—either Alix is with him, or he has a pack of guards trailing him wherever he goes.

We both find the guards annoying, but it’s an occupational hazard of being the king.

I know that better than anyone, because I spent the first twenty-ish years of my life dodging my own guards.

“I thought you went back to the house,” I say as he strides toward me.

“Not yet.” Daemon stops in front of me, his expression searching. “You alright, mate?”

“Yeah, of course I’m fine. Why the fuck does everyone keep asking me that?”

“Who else asked?”

I shake my head. “Never mind.”

Daemon raises an eyebrow. “Maybe because that was a heavy conversation? Sorry about that. I wanted you to be the one to tell the story.”

I blink in confusion. “What?”

He looks equally confused. “About your family.”

Realization dawns, and I immediately feel ten times as stupid as before. We’re not talking about the same thing at all.

Daemon is asking if I’m upset about discussing my long-dead family while I assumed he was talking about Odessa and this insane proposal.

“I’m fine,” I grunt again.

Daemon grumbles in acknowledgement and runs a hand through his coppery-brown hair. Neither of us is exactly chatty about anything, let alone feelings, but I can tell he knows me well enough to know I’m not actually as fine as I’d like him to believe.

“Want to get a drink?” he asks, jerking his head vaguely toward the village.

“It’s the middle of the day.”

“So what?” he claps me hard on the shoulder. “That just means there won’t be as many people in the pub to stare at us.”

I shrug and then nod. He has a point. Anyway, a drink—or five—sounds good right now.

We make an unspoken agreement not to invite anyone else to come with us, and set off together down the winding cobblestone road into the picturesque town of Storia.

The villagers and merchants milling around the main street all stop whatever they’re doing to smile and call greetings at us as we pass.

Going anywhere with Daemon in Vernallis means tacking an extra hour onto the journey so he can stop to kiss babies and wink at old women, all the while insisting that he isn’t suited to being king.

At the end of the short street, just past the trinket shop from earlier, is a thatched-roof pub. We duck inside, and I’m pleased to find that it’s as empty as Daemon promised it would be—only a few older Fae playing cards in the corner, and a group of mouse-like pixies chattering away at the bar.

I make a beeline toward the unoccupied end of the long, weathered counter, and Daemon and I take a seat. The elderly tavern owner bustles over and plops two full tankards in front of us before we’ve even flagged her down.

“Good afternoon, Your Majesty.” She beams at Daemon before turning an equally wide smile on me. “And Lord Kastian. Can I get you anything else?”

Daemon pulls a handful of gold out of his pocket and tries to hand it to the woman. “Nothing else right now, Madam Magdalena, but you can take my gold this time.”

“Oh, no, I couldn’t do that, Your Majesty,” she gushes.

“You’d be doing me a favor, really.” He gives her a stern expression. “I won’t have anyone saying I don’t pay my debts.”

“I’d take that seriously,” I tell her with a wink. “He once tracked me down in Dyaspora to pay off a decades-old wager.”

Her eyes go wide, and finally, she opens her hand and takes the money. “Oh…alright then, but I’m going to bring you something to eat at the very least.”

She walks away, and Daemon shakes his head. “I wish the villagers would stop trying to give us things. It should be the other way around.”

“You’re giving them enough, just be grateful,” I reply, taking a sip of my drink. “Or at least, don’t stop accepting gifts until after she’s brought over the food. We missed lunch.”

Daemon nods in agreement before taking a sip of his own drink. “Fuck, I needed this.”

I don’t bother asking what he means. It’s been around-the-clock work for all of us to pull Vernallis out of the free-fall that Daemon’s half-brother, Thorne, sent the kingdom into.

“You need to take a break,” I comment.

“Maybe,” he grunts. “As if this week wasn’t busy enough, it never occurred to me that anyone would ask my permission to marry Odessa or that we’d have to have fucking council meetings about it.”

Deep breath in, deep breath out…

I refuse to overreact to this. I should be able to talk casually about Odessa without letting her completely invade my thoughts—not least because Daemon is practically her brother and every time I’ve ever had a hint of an impure thought about her I feel as if my best friend somehow knows .

It’s both horrifying and helpful because it keeps me from letting my fascination grow into an obsession.

“Would you have let her go to Hydratta if she’d agreed?” I ask calmly.

Daemon barks a laugh. “I don’t think I’d have much of a choice in the matter. Odessa doesn’t need anyone’s permission to get married, least of all mine.”

“Not if she wanted to marry someone average,” I say through gritted teeth, “But this would be an alliance and you actually would have to weigh in on that.”

He looks unconcerned. “I hadn’t really thought about it. I think if I tried to tell Dessa what she could or couldn’t do, she’d do the opposite just to spite me. But it doesn’t fucking matter, anyway. Obviously she’s not going to go.”

“True.” I suck down another large sip of my drink.

“I think these royal marriage customs are bullshit, anyway. Do you remember when Thorne went to Hydratta to meet your sister?”

I shake my head, grateful for the change of subject. “Only vaguely.”

He looks at me sideways. “Really? I remember it vividly.”

I shrug. I remember the event he’s talking about in principle.

I was perhaps seventeen or eighteen when the then-Prince Thorne began his tour of Ellender searching for a royal bride.

He’d set his sights on my oldest sister, Serena, looking for a similar alliance between the kingdoms as Magnus is looking to create using Odessa.

Thorne brought a large group of courtiers with him, including Daemon and his mother, but it’s been so long that I hardly remember the details.

“A lot of the years before Dyaspora are a blur. I remember only flashes from before the coup. I think I must have blocked it out.”

Daemon’s eyes flash with understanding, and he clears his throat. “Right, of course. Sorry, mate.”

I shrug and take a sip of my drink before clearing my throat uncomfortably.

Every part of that meeting seemed designed especially to torment me.

First, talking about my family, whose memory I go out of my way not to dwell on.

Then, Magnus, the fucking bastard who betrayed all of us and murdered them.

And finally, there’s Odessa…who I really shouldn’t be thinking about at all.

“Magnus makes me fucking nervous,” Daemon muses, clearly following his own train of thought. “He’s calculating, and it’s not as if he hasn’t gone out of his way to conquer a kingdom before.”

My stomach lurches unpleasantly. “You think that’s what he’s doing?”

“Do you?” he asks, turning the question back on me. “You actually know him.”

I take a long sip of my drink and actually think about it, because I know Daemon wouldn’t ask unless he was seriously concerned.