Page 41 of A Taste For Lies (The Apex Kingdom #1)

Chapter 41

ALORA

Ten Years Earlier

I ’m barely past my fifteenth birthday when my heightened auditory sense hits me like a blow to the head.

Our cottage is set back, close to the woods, at least two miles from any other dwellings. But that distance doesn’t stop me from clutching my head in agony at the screeching voices of our neighbors, the Skoies, as they fight about whether or not to sell their old nanny goat. The Skoies are Thalassarian. They speak not a word of Veridian, yet I understand every syllable as though it were my mother tongue.

My father is beside me when it happens. He shouts my name multiple times before realizing his mistake.

By the time the Skoies stop arguing and I can finally remove my hands from my ears, he’s figured out what is happening. What has happened.

My emergence.

I come to with my head in his lap, his calloused fingers smoothing my hair.

“Concentrate on the sound of my voice,” he instructs in a low whisper. “Let everything else fall away. Let it fade to a dull murmur. ”

Two hours crawl by. He keeps talking me through it, infinitely patient. How does he know what to do?

“Can you feel your creature?” he asks finally. His voice is hoarse from the long hours of whispering.

Tears stream down my face. Half from relief, half from sheer joy at this beautiful, divine connection. I’m whole in a way I never imagined possible. The final piece of my soul slotted into place. “She’s a lynx.”

“Your lynx is your other half, Alora,” he murmurs, his voice cracked. “Embrace her, and there is no end to how powerful you can be.”

My father leaves me in the stables while he goes into the cottage to tell my mother. I think he hoped the barn walls and the animal bodies would muffle their conversation, but they don’t. Even with straw pressed against my ears, I can still hear them.

My mother wants to turn me in to Lord Winters. My father wants to take me and run.

My mother is afraid. She knows what will happen if they attempt to hide an Apex from their lord. Especially a useful one who can speak languages and hear whispers from miles out. The beast prince has already emerged, and his ability to track down Apex is well known. She doesn’t see any means of escape.

My father is worried about what will happen to me. A young female Apex enslaved to the palace or at our lord’s house. He wants us to run, together, as a family.

My mother eventually agrees. But…it’s a lie.

She must slip out to inform the lord’s men after my father has gone to bed. In the wee hours before dawn, I am awakened by my father clasping a delicate chain around my neck. He tells me he loves me, shoves a pack in my hands, points me towards the Shanterran border, and says, “Run.”

But I am fifteen. Too young. Too scared of the dark forest to run far.

When Lord Winters’ men come for me, I am still close enough to see.

Close enough to see them slit my father’s throat as he tries to tell them he has no daughter.

I take off running. But my auditory sense emerged only hours before, which means it is still unwieldy and sharp, so sharp.

I must be at least a mile away when they begin to torture my mother. They made a grave mistake. In killing my father first, they took away the one person who knew where I’d gone. So in their rage, they torture my mother for information she can’t give.

I never stop running. And still, my mother’s screams and pleas for mercy assail my ears over and over. The trauma of it breaks me, forces a dissociation—a fracture.

A black shroud envelopes my mind, my lynx fades from my consciousness, and I forget.