Page 3 of Fractured (Royal Sins #3)

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I blinked but the view in front of me didn’t change.

There was a man lying on the floor, dressed in old, torn clothes, a golden beard touching his chest, his eyes half open as he tried to hold onto Hessa.

Hessa, who was crying silent tears and pulling him to sit and kissing him between these small whimpers that broke my heart.

The face of that man didn’t change. He was still Helid, the uncle of the Seelie Prince I’d come here to save, the same man who’d sat in my father’s kitchen what felt like years ago and convinced me to come to the fae realm.

The same man that Lyall said was in the Unseelie Court, that he had gone there right after I saw the prince’s dead body with a knife buried in his chest, lying on his bedroom floor. The very same place where Helid’s shirt was torn and stained red.

Illusion.

Lyall hadn’t created an illusion of his body with a knife through the heart out of nothing. It had been Helid’s body on the floor that night, and he—or his mother—had made it look like Lyall.

Anger and pain crashed in my chest, igniting the ice—that’s what it felt like. It ignited inside me like flames, until Hessa’s wide, tearful eyes met mine—“ Help me! ”

Fucking hell, I’d been standing there like an idiot and I hadn’t even realized it.

The pain and the anger stepped aside, and I suddenly found myself with my hands around Helid’s arms, pulling him at the same time as Hessa did, the torch discarded on the floor.

It worked.

“N-Nilah,” I thought he whispered, but Hessa told me to pull him all the way up to his feet, so I did. With all my strength I pulled, and then Helid was just barely standing, his arms wrapped around our shoulders so we could support his weight.

God, he was so, so weak…

Hessa put her hand over his chest, right where his shirt was torn and the blood had long dried.

A blinding white light flashed and took away my vision, and suddenly I was thrown back into that meadow, looking up at the boy with the pointy ears as he asked me if I wanted him to heal me.

So fucking hard to imagine that that same boy had grown into the man Lyall had become.

So fucking hard not to want to burn this whole fucking place to the ground because it wasn’t fair.

He’d been kind…hadn’t he?

Or just very good at manipulating everyone around him since he was a fucking baby?

A sharp intake of breath, and Helid’s eyes opened wide.

“He hasn’t eaten. He’s lost a lot of blood—his wound opens every night for an hour. We have to carry him, Nilah,” Hessa said, her voice a shaking mess.

“We will, we will,” I said and pulled him toward the door. “You’ll be all right, Helid. You’ll be?—”

“The mirror.”

Every drop of blood in my veins turned to stone, yet somehow, when Hessa kept moving for the door, I did, too.

I made it up, I just made it up, I thought as I carried half of Helid’s weight, and I was moving, but…

“N-Nilah, the mirror.”

Again, Helid said that word. Mirror.

“Hush, my love, save your energy,” Hessa said, and no, I was not surprised at what she called him because I was shocked at what he was saying to me.

And then we were outside in the hallway. My legs were still moving—I couldn’t tell you how.

But Helid wasn’t interested in saving energy because he said, “Find it at all costs.”

So many things went through my head. I saw nothing ahead, only moved, my mind busy with questions— how the hell do you know about the mirror? Why are you in a jail cell? Why have you been stabbed? Do you mean the mirror in the hands of the Ice Queen?

I had no voice to bring these questions to the outside world, though, and Helid kept chanting, “ Find the mirror, find it. Find the ? —”

The bright light that basically melted down the barred door of the cell room we’d come through cut him off. The energy that came from it crashed onto us like a wave, picked us up and threw us back like we weighed nothing at all.

Hessa screamed. I couldn’t—my vocal cords were still locked down by shock. Even when I hit something with my back, fell, and rolled on the ground, I still couldn’t make a single sound.

My eyes were wide open, though. The shock erased any trace of pain from my body, too, so I sat up at the same second I fell, and as the dust slowly settled, I was able to see.

The Seelie Queen was standing just inside the cell room, the guards Hessa had left unconscious on the ground still there, the metal of those barred doors melted into shiny pools at her bare feet.

“I told my son you were not to be trusted, but he’s become blind by his confidence.”

The words weighed on my shoulders like fucking bricks.

I thought I was the one she spoke to, but it took me a few blinks to realize that the queen wasn’t looking my way at all.

She was looking at the other side of the cell room—at Hessa, who was standing, pushing back the hair that had fallen on her face, her dress dirty, her teeth gritted.

“You traitorous?—”

That’s as far as the queen made it before Hessa attacked.

Once more, blinding golden light took away my vision, and my instincts reacted, and I was crawling on all fours, moving toward the other body on the ground—Helid, who’d fallen on his side and couldn’t even sit up.

Could Hessa beat the Queen of the Seelie Court in a fight?

I had no fucking clue. But what I could do right now was grab Helid and make sure we ran together the moment we could. It was the only thing that made sense to me in this chaos and the only thing I could let guide me.

Except pulling Helid up all by myself was more difficult than I expected, and I couldn’t even tell you why. He wasn’t a big guy, wasn’t bulky, but it took all my efforts to pull him to even sit up and drag him a little closer to the wall.

Meanwhile, the golden lights behind me continued to flash as the queen and Hessa fought—which, by the way, what the actual fuck?!

“You’re okay, you’re okay,” I kept chanting like an idiot, trying to pull Helid up, and he looked so strange with the beard, with his hair all over the place, with his golden eyes half open while he struggled to breathe.

He was most definitely not okay, and the wound Hessa had tried to heal on him was bleeding again. I realized it when my hand fell on his chest and came out wet—with blood.

“Listen to me, mortal,” Helid whispered, and I barely heard him because of the screams and cries of the women fighting behind us. I even turned to look, but Helid’s hand closed around my wrist and he pulled me so hard, I was in shock all over again.

“My sister has set the curse in motion,” he said, eyes closed, his lips barely moving.

“Helid, please,” I said, simply because I had no fucking clue what else to say, how to tell him that he wasn’t making any sense at all.

“It’s coming for all of us, Nilah. You must find the mirror,” he said. “You must?—”

Another scream, and then a body was thrown against the ground just a few feet away from us.

Hessa.

I stood up and turned around, heart in my throat. I wasn’t even sure that I was breathing, but I was certain that there was ice spreading underneath my skin .

The Seelie Queen was still standing, wiping blood from her nose, murder glistening in the gold of her eyes.

Yet when she took her hand down, she was smiling, her teeth bloody.

“Brother dearest,” she said, both hands lighting up—and I was ready. She was going to attack me and throw me back just like she had done with Hessa, and I was ready for it. I was going to fight, too—use that magic that I’d used in the mermaid cavern and with those werewolf men in Mysthaven, too.

Except…just before the queen attacked, I remembered that I was no longer bound to Lyall.

I remembered that the heat that had always been inside me without my even realizing it was no longer there.

I remembered that I couldn’t make shit float on air anymore, and I couldn’t just throw people twice my size off me—I remembered much too late.

All my hope crashed and burned, and my limbs were locked down—not just by fear, but by this ice that had spread all over me. I knew that I was going to explode any second now, either from this cold inside me or from that light that was burning brighter in the queen’s hands as she laughed.

But the night wasn’t done shocking me yet because neither happened.

Instead, I heard Helid choking for air the next moment, and I heard Hessa screaming, and I turned.

The same light that was in the queen’s hands was also burning on Helid’s neck. It was there, underneath his skin, just on his Adam’s apple, and it was easy to see that he was choking because of it.

Something came over me and suddenly my limbs were able to move again. I had no plan, no idea what the hell to expect at the end of this, and that was okay. I just ran for the queen with my arms spread to the sides as she laughed, and in my mind, I screamed but I wasn’t sure if any voice left me.

Then there was darkness.

I was three feet away from the queen, about to slam onto her and take her to the ground, stop whatever the fuck she was doing to Helid—but I never got the chance.

A wall of darkness rose up in front of me out of nowhere, and I tried to stop in time, but I had too much momentum.

I slammed onto it face first, and my body recognized the cold of it immediately.

Rune was here.

I wasn’t entirely sure when my legs gave up, but when I came to again, I was on the ground on my side, my eyes half open.

Surreal. Rune was pulling at Hessa, who was screaming as she tried to run back to the body on the floor—the body of Helid.

Eyes closed. Chest still. As motionless as the stone blocks of the walls of this room. Dead.

Rune was speaking, saying something as he pulled Hessa back, and then she stopped screaming.

The sound of it had been piercing my ears, it seemed, and when she stopped, I could think.

I could try to sit up and look back to where the queen had been, but all I saw was that black wall of magic that Rune had undoubtedly put up.

I could have sworn I saw light pulsating on its other side for a moment, but it could have also been my imagination.

Then Rune was right beside me, his arms underneath my legs and around my back, and he pulled me up before I could blink or think to tell him that I could walk on my own.

“Rune,” I said—his name like a prayer leaving my lips, and he was really there. Eyes dark and hair in front of them, teeth gritting as he looked at me.

“You’re freezing ,” I thought he said—but again, all of this was blurry, and reality had the quality of a dream, so I wouldn’t bet that I’d heard him right. All I knew how to say was his name.

“Hold on. Just hold on,” Rune whispered, and these words made it to the very center of my chest, slipped into my bones. “We’re going to get out of here. Just hold on tight…”

Whatever kind of magic Rune possessed, when he spoke, I listened. I believed.

I let go.