Page 8

K ing Theodore took slow steps into the hall, and the crowd split like water around a stone to let him pass.

His chamber was on the same level as my own, and if I knew Nemea at all, he’d put him in the worst accommodations the fort had to offer.

A small, drafty chamber at the northeastern corner, with crumbling exterior stones that had been harassed by the winds since the day they’d been stacked.

Flanked by his guards, Theodore started up the stairs.

His every movement was filled with muscled grace, and when he neared the top, our gazes crashed together.

His eyes rounded, and I could only imagine how shocking I must have looked.

Severe in my black wedding gown, dark hair windblown, blood smeared on my cheeks, smattering my chest like gruesome freckles.

He still beheld me with disapproval nearing abhorrence, but his gaze dipped to my injured hand, which I held protectively against me, and his full lips flattened in what looked like concern.

He might help. He might say yes.

“May we speak?” I whispered, before he could stride away from me, down the northern wing.

He paused for what felt like a lifetime, but finally, reluctantly, he dipped his chin in the barest of nods, then continued toward his chamber.

I didn’t miss the tension strung through his body, the lingering anger that trailed him like smoke.

He was everything Nemea had always said he was—haughty and honorable and righteously indignant—but I did not wish to break him of those qualities, like Nemea did.

I wished to use them.

The crowd in the entryway below me began to disperse.

Some made their way out into the courtyard; some huddled together toward the throne room.

I made my way down the hall on what felt like new legs.

Four Varian guards flanked the farthest door.

Their golden armor glinted in a pool of light that slipped through the narrow window beside them.

As I reached the end of the hall, one of the guards swung the door wide for me to enter.

“Thank you.” I took a tentative step inside.

A fire popped in the small hearth. The hinges whined as the door shut behind me. The chamber was only a bed, a wooden chair by the fire, and a single window that King Theodore peered out of with his back to me.

“There’s a cloth and water by the door,” he said, his voice a deep, warm resonance in his chest.

“I’m all right, Your Majesty, thank you.”

“Wash quickly. I’ll wait.”

I bit back my protest and wrung out the cloth. It came away from my cheeks with fat smears of pink. There was something in the action of it, in being commanded to clean up the blood he’d spilled on me, that made me feel almost as insignificant as I did with Nemea. The feeling hardened my jaw.

I finished cleaning and cleared my throat.

“Speak,” he said.

“Your Majesty, thank you for giving of your time—”

“No.” He locked his hands behind his back. “Speak about why you are here.”

I gulped down the ball of nerves that clogged my throat. “I—I came to ask for your help.”

He blew out a long breath. “Agatha sent you, didn’t she?”

“I beg your pardon?” I shook my head. “No. Agatha has no idea I’m here. Why would she send me?”

Finally, he turned. The firelight accentuated his strong nose, the sharp line of his jaw and cheekbone, and I could not help but stare.

He was captivating, even more so with the way his fury still sparked in the air around him.

“She came to me last night after the feast. She said it was imperative you leave the fort before your wedding.”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “Did she tell you… did she explain why?”

The kingdom of Varya was a peaceful one. Sirens lived among the ancestral Varians there, but still, the thought of anyone knowing my secret while I stood upon Serafi soil filled me with abject terror.

“She did. But the revelation that you’re a Siren was no shock. I told you I knew you.”

That insouciant surety of his gnawed at me. I longed to ask him more, to ask him how, but his gaze turned incisive. I stilled while he dissected the shape of my eyes, my nose, my mouth. His gaze lingered on my lips for a breath. Then another. As he stared, he slipped into some faraway place.

“Your Majesty,” I said softly, trying to bring him back. “What answer did you give Agatha?”

He blinked, then cleared his throat. “Despite my many concerns about your current arrangement, I told her no.”

“No.” An ugly emotion surged through me. “May I ask why?”

“For one, you didn’t seem like you wished to leave.”

“Forgive me, but how could you presume to know what I want?”

A deep furrow carved his brow. “Lady Imogen, I have eyes. And though I cannot fathom the pairing—a secret Siren and her hunter—you couldn’t keep your hands from your fiancé last night. The captain spent half the evening with his lips on your neck.”

I prayed it was too dark for him to see the rush of embarrassment that heated my cheeks. “The captain also spent half the morning telling me of his plans to force a blood bond between us.” He froze at that. “You saw how easily he sliced my hand in that ritual room. How thoughtlessly he hurt me.”

Anger seemed to reignite within him. The heat of it filled his eyes. “Agatha left me with the impression that your identity is unknown here—that you both take great pains to keep it that way. How does the captain know what you are?”

I pressed a hand to my chest where my heart thudded against my ribs. “He… did not know until last night.”

“Before the feast or after?”

“After.”

His patience snapped. “Tell me plainly how he knows.”

I hesitated, and he gave me a withering look. It surprised me, how desperately I wanted his poor view of me to change.

He strode toward me and stood so close that I had to look up to meet his eye. “Answer me or leave.”

“I shifted,” I said suddenly. “In front of him.”

Confusion narrowed his gaze. “How is that possible? A Siren’s power is tied to the sea. You shouldn’t be able to change this far away from it.”

“I…” My eyes dropped to his chest. “There was… sea salt… on his skin.”

He paused. “On his skin?”

“Yes. And I… well… I tasted it.”

“You tasted —” He pinched the bridge of his nose.

“Are you without both honor and self-control? Giving your blood freely, and now this—” He paced away from me, mumbling to himself in a pious fit.

“What kind of coward stays in this place, scraping to Nemea’s whims?

You’re an imbecile to marry a man whose job it is to kill you. ”

Fury filled me, alarming and hot, and I heard Nemea’s scathing voice in my head.

It is easy to be good when you’re blessed by the bloody fucking Gods.

“How dare you!” I balled my hands to fists so I wouldn’t shove them against his chest. “I belong to Nemea. What should I have done? Should I have told him I prefer to not marry? Tell me how you would treat a subject who denied you, Your Majesty.” But he didn’t.

He merely watched me in quiet, wide-eyed shock as I went on.

“I have twisted and broken myself to survive here. You could never understand what that is like—”

“You should have tried to leave a long time ago.”

“Yes,” I snapped. “I should have. But I am trying now. ” I held his gaze. “Will you help me?”

We stood in tense, heavy silence, breaths speeding and mingling. Then he gave a frustrated grunt. “Give me your hand.”

“I’m sorry?”

“Let me close that cut.”

I looked down at my gouged palm. I’d been so angry I’d forgotten about it, but he hadn’t. He had the Great God Panos’s power over life, the power to grow and mend. Slowly, eyes locked with his, I extended my wounded hand. “This is not the help I’m requesting of you.”

“I know.” His fingers were impossibly warm for the temperature in the drafty chamber. With a strong but gentle touch, he inspected the cut. “It’s deep.”

“Yes.”

“There’s too much scar tissue here.” The anger in his voice had dulled, and all that remained was tension. “I can’t prevent it from becoming another scar. I’m sorry.”

I’d never received such an earnest apology. I spoke carefully, trying to hide my surprise. “I am not imbecilic enough to think I’d be undamaged, Your Majesty. What’s another scar atop many?”

He gave me a quick, curious look before a heat built in his hands. A heat like the sun, coming from inside him. I held my breath and watched the red flesh around the gash start to soothe. “It would start a war,” he said, his focus on my wound. “If Nemea knows I helped you escape.”

Slowly, my skin began to knit together. I pulled in a shallow gasp as I watched it—a network of pale, fleshy lace, its stitches growing closer and closer together as the heat he poured into me spread.

“Forgive me,” I said, my voice breathy from his ministrations, “but you have not seemed all that intent on fostering peace between the two of you. Your every action, your every word, has been inflammatory. Why did you truly come here in the first place?”

His jaw tensed and he finished checking his work.

The wound had become a thin white seam across the mound of old scars in my palm.

His warm hands remained on mine. “As you guessed, I came to see the state of this place for myself. To see Seraf’s horrors.

To see just how cruel Nemea had become.” The calluses on his fingers scratched as he finally, slowly, let me go. “I have a deep hatred for the man.”

“Then take me from him.”

His gaze shot to mine.

My words tumbled forth in one desperate breath. “Nothing would hurt him more than to lose what he considers his.”

“That’s my fear.” He shook his head, and he gave me that strange, lingering look once more. “I have a kingdom to protect. A war would put it in jeopardy.”

“You came to witness his cruelty firsthand and then do nothing about it? If there is any person in Leucosia who has the power to alter the awful things that happen here, it’s you.”

Theodore ran a hand through his dark hair. He seemed to grapple with something, shut his eyes for a long moment. When he looked at me again it was with something akin to anguish. Pity coated his unsettlingly soft words. “He’s done such a thorough job of diminishing you.”

That hollowed me out. I stood before him, feeling bare and ill and embarrassed, and fighting to keep it hidden.

He moved back to the small window. “I will send you help. I leave tomorrow—I have no desire to stay for your wedding. When I’m back home, I’ll make a plan to get you off Seraf. But it will take me time. It can’t look like I was involved.”

“I don’t have time.” I curled my healed hand, my nails cutting into my palm. “The wedding is tomorrow night. By the time you send me help, Captain Ianto will have already bound us. How will I leave him then?”

He straightened his bloodstained coat, and it was as if he’d donned a suit of armor. He looked at me down the line of his nose. “There are draughts to sever such bonds.” His features smoothed into kingly austerity. “The appropriate response to my generosity is ‘Thank you, Your Majesty.’”

I reeled back. “If you expect me to thank you for giving me the opportunity to suffer, then you are no better than King Nemea, Your Majesty. ” His flinch filled me with satisfaction.

I wrenched the door open, letting it crash into the wall.

“Move,” I yelled to one of the guards who blocked my path.

Panic scurried up my throat, blocked my breath.

Agatha’s chamber was on the lower floor.

I could keep myself together until I reached her, but as I made my way down the hall from King Theodore’s chamber, I faltered.

Two of Nemea’s guards, clad in their ominous black armor, stood before my chamber door. They wore helmets that only showed their lower faces. One guard, whose jaw was covered in red spots and pock scars, shoved the other with a gangly elbow when he saw me. “She’s there.”

The older guard offered me a quick half bow. “Into your chamber, my lady.”

“You have no right ordering me around.” I spoke with authority, even as my heart plummeted. “I’m the king’s ward.”

“You’re the captain’s lady now,” the pock-faced boy-soldier mumbled. “And he’ll make my life hell if you’re not in that room when he’s back.”

“I’ll not be a prisoner in my own home.” I trudged onward, but he reached out a single wiry arm and scooped me up.

I yelled as he hefted me toward my open door.

I thrashed and clawed before I was unceremoniously dropped to my rug and shut in.

“I’ll have the king skin you for this.” The door rattled in its frame as I beat against it.

“Forgive me, my lady.” The guard sounded unrepentant through the heavy oak. “Captain’s orders.”