Page 50 of Fated or Knot (UnseelieVerse: The Omega Masquerade #1)

50

KAUZ

L aurel was deep in the second stage of rest when I found her mind and wandered its paths a bit. I noted with a hint of wry amusement the vacuous space as I delved deeper in the tunnels of her psyche to the deepest reaches where her experiences and being were woven in pulsating strands of color.

And then I looked up and sighed, “Fuck.”

Torn, forgotten memories clotted her mind, shorn off with jagged edges and tangled in a disturbing, but all too familiar scene. The damage reminded me of what I’d once seen in Lark’s mind. Instead of being forced to forget countless small moments, however, Laurel suffered from fewer, but larger, memories removed. Deep gouges had been taken from the mermaid we had all brushed off and ignored, pushing her aside just as callously as she and Cymora had always done to Lark.

I reached for one and pushed past the pain that gripped me from attempting to make sense of what she’d lost. Cymora’s voice invaded my mind, risen to a forceful pitch. “…Is just a farmhand! You will obey me, you impertinent twit. Forget about him and set your sights higher. On someone you deserve , as my daughter. A male, or a pack of them, to elevate us.”

“Okay.” The response was a watery whisper. Flashes of a young merman flitted by my eyes. He was always dirty and sweaty, dressed in muck-stained overalls. But he smiled with open affection at Laurel, a fact now stained with an echo of her regret. A male she was forced to forget. Jerrin.

I released a soft sound of denial and sat down along one of the paths of her memories. My pack usually wasn’t this sloppy. Just because Laurel didn’t announce her compulsion as clearly as, “yes, Stepmother” didn’t mean she didn’t also grow up under a female who had no qualms about trapping children in cruel vows. We’d completely missed that she was in the exact same situation as our mate had once suffered.

I held my forehead and thought back. When Cymora gave her a direct order, Laurel said…okay. I was pretty sure she always said “okay” and that fragment of memory seemed to support it.

Far too easy to overlook, in the tapestry of family dynamics we’d had to decipher on the train ride to Serian. And while I doubted my brothers would care much that we’d overlooked the bratty beta’s suffering, we all understood that missing even one small aspect of a complicated situation could have dire consequences.

I waited for her to settle into the third stage of rest to take a peek at her short term memory. But I suspected I would need to dive deeper to see her perspective on more than one event to truly understand her side of things.

Don’t empathize with her too soon, I tried to tell myself. If the fishling had chosen to ally with Pack Ellisar and somehow assisted their disappearance, she would have to die just like her mother. No matter what she’d suffered or that we hadn’t helped her when we could’ve.

But I was already looking back, turning over the stones of the past with how we’d interacted with Laurel. Was there something more there, hidden underneath her immaturity?

I sensed her mind relaxing and her short term memories went zinging by me. Those threads halted when I held out my hand, gathering up everything her mind was processing toward storage. Certain ones buzzed, signaling trauma or strong negative emotions. I started there, plunging into Laurel’s recollections.

I viewed the world through Laurel’s eyes, a hitchhiker in her head for the duration of her memory. “Hurry up,” hissed a male alpha next to her. Laurel’s thoughts supplied his name: Dalstin. The middle brother of Pack Ellisar, wearing a hooded cloak too heavy for the mild spring weather in Neslune. A faint halo of illusion magic over the cloth smoothed out his bark-covered appearance.

I’m going as fast as I can, Laurel replied without words. She was singing to his mind? It was surreal to witness. She couldn’t carry the wordless tune, which had a heavy physical weight in her lungs, and rush through the familiar halls of the palace at the same time.

Pain radiated from her chest as she maintained her haunting song. Her thoughts were hopelessly fragmented, nearly panicked as she tried to remember where to go in the deeper recesses of my home.

“Shut up,” another male snarled at Dalstin. This voice, I recognized from Lark’s worst memories as belonging to Ellisar himself. He also wore a cloak, though he didn’t have his hood drawn, revealing a dryad illusion layered over his face.

You don’t see us. You don’t notice us, Laurel sang. I observed guards, servants, and other palace officials turn their heads away or simply continue about their day like Laurel and the two alphas weren’t there.

I thought, Oh, stars. It couldn’t be. But there was only one kind of magic Laurel could be wielding to achieve this.

The siren’s song. In our darkest days of war, Unseelie had butchered countless mermaids to force this particular ability into extinction. Yet here it was centuries later, wielded ponderously by a beta. As a fellow beta, I could label what history would call her: some random nobody. Not an illustrious omega or a powerful alpha. The fishling sang with the willpower-altering magic that her ancestors had bled and died for.

Her role in Pack Ellisar’s disappearance slotted into place perfectly with this information. Laurel was incredibly dangerous. I should’ve withdrawn from her memory and destroyed the delicate inner workings of her psyche to disable the threat she represented, but something about the details around her gave me pause.

She was seized by deep agony, and it was only growing worse the more Unseelie she passed and ensnared in her song. Pain pulsed down her throat and pooled in her lungs until she could hardly draw breath. Tears streaked her face as she led the two Ellisar brothers to the prison and descended one jarring step at a time.

A firm hand swatted Laurel’s ass. She stiffened from the unwanted contact. “Guess you’re worth something after all,” Ellisar sneered.

She quivered in fear, immediately afraid he’d do something else while the guard on duty at the front of the prison had his gaze averted. He didn’t see or notice them, just as her song instructed.

This clearly wasn’t a willing partnership. Laurel thought in her usual whiny tone, “Don’t touch me! As soon as we do this, I never want to see you again.”

She pictured her old room in Osme Fen with longing. Back when she’d had some control of her surroundings and a clear path ahead of her. The Omega Masquerade and everything that’d happened afterward had ruined her life. And that, as she thought with the equivalent of a mental stomp of her foot, was “so unfair.”

“Where do you think they’re hiding him?” Dalstin whispered.

Her. My mother first, like we agreed, Laurel insisted in her song. She wove a request into the guard’s mind, asking where Cymora and Floris were being held. He smiled vacantly and pointed at the first two interrogation rooms across the hall.

They went to the first room and Laurel cautiously sang at the threshold while the two alphas ranged ahead of her.

“Just your mother in here. Close the door,” Ellisar said.

She passed through the small viewing area, still singing, her chest feeling heavier with dread.

“She doesn’t know. What is she going to do when she learns about the song?”

It was one of the only secrets she had, something she was proud of. As soon as she’d figured out what kind of magic she’d manifested a few years ago, she’d used it in subtle ways to avoid the worst of Cymora’s rages.

Also, she didn’t want to be Lark, wrung dry of her essence because she had a useful magical talent. She wasn’t thinking about how fearsome Cymora would be with the siren’s song under her thumb. She was just protecting herself the only way she could, which meant her demanding mother didn’t harp on her about another thing she couldn’t do perfectly.

Because, as powerful as the siren’s song was, Laurel didn’t understand how it worked, only that it did. Usually. And if she sang for too long, there were unpleasant consequences.

She resigned herself and walked into the interrogation room to see what’d become of her once proud mother. The Ellisar brothers were cutting her bindings as she hacked with a nasty cough. Cymora had dropped a dangerous amount of weight. The knobbiness of her joints and the prominence of her collar and cheek bones were stark. She was dirty and unkempt.

The older mermaid still lifted her chin and beheld her daughter and her magic for the first time. Laurel didn’t flinch from the hollows that darkened her face or the state of her body, but she did recoil from the glassy-eyed madness that looked back at her. That was new. Very new.

She thought about Cymora’s original order to save her, made shortly after they’d arrived at the palace. I recognized that they’d had their last visit before Cymora’s torture had truly begun. Compelled by her mother’s instructions to do whatever it took to get her out of that prison, Laurel had returned with the only allies she could scrounge up.

“She’s dying. This is hardly saving her,” Laurel thought. “Why couldn’t they have just killed her?”

“He was worth something after all. I thought he was full of air about the power hidden in his seed,” Cymora said in a husky slur as she took in her singing daughter. “But look at you. Magnificent .”

Cymora tried to stand. Her too-thin legs trembled as she put her weight on them, becoming a violent shaking as she attempted to straighten her swollen knees. After collapsing back into the chair, her eyes rolled back and she laughed discordantly.

Laurel rubbed a chill from her arms and watched as Dalstin lifted her mother’s body while shooting over a look of warning. They had an agreement, after all. Laurel had saved them from death at the train station in exchange for their assistance with rescuing Cymora. But they had pushed it off until last night, when they’d sensed Floris’s capture and overnight torture. Now the agreement was a simple exchange: they would save Cymora and Floris both.

Thankfully, the last Ellisar brother was in the next room over. Laurel went first, re-ensnaring the mind of the guard on duty, plus two more that happened to be walking by. The weight in Laurel’s chest inched down further from disabling the guards. Yet somehow she’d excluded Cymora and the Ellisar brothers from the effect of her song.

Dalstin shouted a warning before they entered this interrogation room. There was someone else already there, twirling a tool between his fingers. Click click snap. Click click snap.

Laurel recognized Rennyn as Fal’s father, and a cold, distant figure who’d scoffed at her when she’d whined over being confined to a palace bedroom. She swallowed nervously and wished she didn’t have to do this. But she had to enter the room first, so she did, and her heart nearly stopped when the dark elf king swung to face her, before his eyes glazed over from her song.

She nearly gagged. Putting him under thrall had been far more difficult than most of the other fae they’d met.

Interesting, I thought. My nerves rose independently of Laurel’s memory to have this many enemies near one of my fathers while he was rendered helpless.

The undisguised barkfolk in the interrogation chair looked up listlessly and mumbled when Ellisar took hold of his cheeks and exclaimed, “Fuck! Floris, look what they’ve done to you. We’re going to get you out of here.”

Laurel tilted her finned ear. Floris was wheezing, “We have to leave. We have to leave now . She’s not worth it.”

She looked at him with a curled lip, disgusted by the state he was in. She’d never seen anything like it, it was as if he’d been torn in to by a wild animal. His bark was stripped away in several places, revealing spots of rent skin surrounded by dried blood and sap. “Ew, gross!”

“She’s not worth it. She’s not. She’s not,” Floris lisped.

“Did this fucker torture you?” Dalstin interrupted, inclining his hood toward Rennyn.

“Y-yes. Yes he did. He hurt me. They hurt me.”

Even in this memory, my heart threatened to stop as everyone’s attention shifted to the motionless dark elf king. The barkfolk had armed themselves with daggers, and Ellisar shifted his hold on his weapon into an underhand grip.

A bead of sweat drifted down Laurel’s nose to blend in with the tear tracks across her face. “Oh no. I have to do something,” she thought.

She didn’t have any love for us. The feeling was completely mutual. But we Unseelie hadn’t threatened her with bodily harm or other assaults. We’d been as cordial as could be expected toward the preferred daughter of an entitled, abusive female.

In comparison, Pack Ellisar fully intended to replace Lark with Laurel in a twisted echo of fate, if they could not secure my pack’s omega as their mate. And because she’d granted them partial immunity to her song—somehow, she didn’t know how she had or how to take it back—she was vulnerable to being bitten into their pack with no way to fight back against three alphas.

Suffice it to say, Laurel hated these barkfolk just as much as we did, if not more. So, she did the one thing that could’ve gotten them all killed on the spot.

She stopped singing with a dramatic choking noise that wasn’t entirely for show. As the siren’s song faded and the last notes hung in the air, she bent double and vomited up the liquid weight that’d settled in her lungs. Pack Ellisar scrambled and cursed her for being worthless, abandoning her in that room as she threw up blood. It leaked from the seams of her gills too, drowning her in metal and tears.

The sheer unpleasantness had me cringing, but I stayed with her, needing to know if my father escaped this situation, or not.

When she straightened, it was to come face to face with the dark elf king. The misty befuddlement had faded from his gaze. He tilted his head, regarding her with a blank expression. Not his usual cheerful act, nor the smile of Unseelie mischief, and not even the air of calculation he tried so hard to mask. “That looks quite unpleasant, girl,” he said.

“Sorry,” she croaked. Her stomach lurched and she swallowed bile, trying not to puke on his fine leather boots a second time. The blood and pain always came after she pushed her magic’s limits too far and this had been a taxing song to carry.

“Why am I apologizing? He’s going to kill us all!” Laurel knew the Ellisar brothers had to be huddling just beyond this room with Cymora. Without her siren’s song, they couldn’t get out of the interrogation room without alerting a guard.

More tears blurred her vision before they fell. If she wanted to get out of this alive, she had to put him back under thrall and escape to her uncertain future with her damaged mother and the lecherous, cowardly pack relying on her.

She wasn’t going to die to spite them all, not today. It was better to be a coward too and survive to see another day. “I’m really sorry,” she sniffled.

Rennyn looked through her as she drew breath and his blank expression tightened with understanding. She felt like a butterfly pinned to a board. That red gaze was piercing straight through to the truth of who she was and what was happening. Something within her, a kernel of self-preservation, warbled a warning.

She began to sing and pain razored through her lungs anew. Before the first notes could confuse his mind, he covered one of his ears. His gaze remained shrewd on hers. You didn’t see me. You won’t remember me, she sang in his mind to the haunting melody of the siren’s song.

It wasn’t working! She’d messed up, just like she always did when put under pressure. She never did anything right, but at least this time she would take Pack Ellisar down with her.

“I will remember. How could I forget you, li’l fish?” Finally, he blinked, and let his hand fall from his face. The flash of pity in his regard faded as his eyes misted over once more.

Laurel flinched away from him, her heart thundering in her chest. He could’ve hurt her with the sharp-edged tool he still held, before they’d rescued Floris. A quick stab to the throat and there would be no more song. He’d heard her singing, but remained unaffected by it while he held one of his ears closed. Yet, he’d surrendered that power and let her put him under the song’s thrall once more.

“Why?”

She wondered why he would let her escape throughout her group’s trip back out of the palace, and presumably beyond. I only lingered in her memory long enough to confirm that she escaped without doing any further harm to him. When I emerged and released her memories of the day, she was already well on her way to dreaming.

The quiet of my own mind enveloped me. After experiencing Laurel’s jittering nerves for myself, it was a relief to have a sense of stability back. I didn’t need to dig into any more of her memories to understand what had to happen next.

Instead of her mind blooming with color, it darkened toward dreamless unconsciousness. This made finding the manifestation of her dreaming mind a little harder, since dreams always centered their dreamer in a way I intuitively understood. I found Laurel in a corner of her mind. She waited for morning with her chin resting on the knee joint of her mermaid tail, fully unfurled in its glory of silvery teal fish scales. She’d fallen asleep unhappy and the feeling clung to her now, lingering overhead like a cloud of melancholy.

“Laurel,” I whispered, rousing her mind gently to the fact that I was here with her.

She blinked slowly, before her gaze turned toward me and focused. “Hi, Kauz,” she said, still waking up enough to talk to me. Fear marked her face with pale strain after a few more moments. “Wait, it’s really you, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said mildly.

She retreated further into a tight ball, starting to tear up and weep. “I’m sorry.”

I shook off my first impulse to look down at her with pity, just like Rennyn had. I’d only known her by her bratty behavior, but in this case it seemed the tears were warranted. She was in danger. “No, I’m sorry. If I had paid more attention, I would’ve noticed you’re under Cymora’s compulsions too. Are you sleeping in a safe place?”

Sniffling, she nodded.

“Has Pack Ellisar…touched you?”

She pressed her lips together. “Not yet. They won’t bite me into their pack until…” She gave a watery little laugh. “Floris lost his fangs. His designation is already changing. You guys did it for Lark, but it saved me.”

I tilted my head. One of my brothers must’ve been the one to rip out Floris’s fangs. He’d change into a shade of himself, reduced to the equivalent of a beta with a severely damaged pack bond. Alpha fangs weren’t just for show, after all. “Well, thank the stars. And if no one else says it, thank you for saving Rennyn. He’s like another father to me.”

She nodded, dropping her gaze. “I can’t tell you much else.”

“That’s all right. I have experience with cruel vows now.”

“You’re talking about Lark.”

“Aye.”

Laurel stewed in a moment of guilt before asking, “Is she doing okay?”

“Better than ever.”

She offered a fleeting smile. “I’m glad she has you all.”

Here was the opening I was waiting for. I regarded her with sympathy, reflecting on how she had no one. Her mother was still ill from the royal pack’s tortures, and Pack Ellisar had proven to be rotten helpers. She was a female in need of a change of fortune. Just like Lark had been.

“You could have our help as well,” I said quietly.

She shrank away further when I held out my hand. “What do you mean? Your pack hates me,” she mumbled.

“Nay.” I forced a smile and kept my hand extended. I hoped she felt the calm that radiated off of me, something that seemed to come and go at the whims of my magic. Sometimes, it was helpful to have around. “Judging by how things have gone, it would seem we never truly got to know you. I don’t know if I can offer you friendship, Laurel. But I would like to be your ally. You need help, and I need someone who can assist us in ending Pack Ellisar’s threat for good. What do you say?”

Several emotions played out over her expression. Hope warred with fear and doubt as she had to wonder if I was being genuine. I was. I knew that Lark would do the same thing if she was the one standing here. She didn’t hate her stepsister, either, despite being pitted against her for most of their lives.

Laurel unfolded herself from the lonely corner of her mind. She reached out and shook my hand.