“What?”
“This man who tried to kill you.” He grips Sterling’s hair, yanking his head back. A gasp slips from me at his bloody and swollen face, one eye completely shut while blood actively leaks from his bottom lip. “What is worth giving up so that he may live?”
“I— I don’t—” I shake my head again, my lips attempting to close around words that won’t form. What he’s asking is an impossible question with a terrible answer. And King Dolian knows that.
“Here is what I propose: his life for a night in my bed.” He releases his grip on Sterling, dragging his hand down his trousers before returning to stand next to me.
“Excuse me?” I whisper, my palms growing clammy.
“Well, I will have you on our wedding night regardless, but I have waited a long time, Rhea. I have been thinking of why you fight me so, and I realized that while holding to tradition may have worked if our relationship were at all traditional, what we have between us is new.Uncharted. As such, it must be approached differently. Waiting is only tearing us apart.” His eyes take on a sickening gleam. “I’m simply a man wanting to drink at the fountain of his beloved.”
I rear my head back as I wade through my grief and cling on to the last remnants of my defiance. “If you think I willever—”
“I don’tneedyou to agree to it, and you know this,” he cuts in. “So? Is a night without you fighting me before we are officially wed worth sparing the life of the man who tried to kill you?”
“I—”
Sterling tries to pull away from the guards holding him, his body thrashing until one of them sends a boot right into his ribs. A crack rends the air, and Sterling is reduced to whimpers.
The room narrows as I struggle to breathe, my fingers diving into my hair. I don’t value my life above anyone else’s, but what King Dolian is demanding… How could I agree to that? A shriveled part of me wishes he would justcommandme because at least then my culpability would be reduced to not being able to stop him. Butthis? This is not a choice. This is a consequence. This is the king demonstrating that no matter how vile and foul andevilI find him to be, he has the depravity to dig deeper. To show just how black his soul is.
“Perhaps it’s for the best that you’ll never seePrince Noxagain. After all, what would he say to learning that you not only have my markonyou butinsideof you?”
“Fuck you.” The words erupt without restraint, and regret immediately fills me when he steps forward and drags the dagger down Sterling’s cheek in one fluid movement. Sterling screams in pain, the hoarse sound adding to my anguish as I watch blood bloom. I look to the guards. To the advisors watching and, finally, to Xander. His jaw clenches, the only tell he lets slip, but even he doesn’t move to interfere. No one does.
“Come on, darling. Time is wasting.”
I can’t kill him, but towillinglygive myself to the king?Gods, I can’t. It’s selfish and cruel—I’mselfish and cruel—but I can’t do it. “Please, don’t do this,” I beg. Foolishly, I beg.
King Dolian snarls, and I know I’ve lost before his next words are even spoken. “If you will not give me what I want, then you will coat your hands in his blood.Extinguish him.” This time, magic backs his command. It rushes over me, thick and suffocating, as it stuffs my own wants and desires back and forces me to reach for the dagger in King Dolian’s hand. I hold it the way Cass taught me, devastated that the memory is now tainted. My morality frays at the seams as the inches between the tip of the dagger and the man’s chest disappear, all because I did something I never should have—I chosemyself.
My hand shakes around the hilt as I take aim.Extinguish himwhispers in my head, the command reverberating as if trapped.Extinguish him.My eyes widen as I suck in a breath at the thought, and with hardly any distance or time to spare, I plunge the dagger not in the center of his chest or near his heart but higher, beneath his clavicle with the blade pointed straight back. It will hurt, as evidenced by his blood-curdling scream—but the siren magic flooding my veins doesn’t protest the attempt. By incapacitating him, I’veextinguishedhis importance to the king. By hurting him, I’veextinguishedthe need for vengeance. It’s a loophole, but I realize too late when I pull the dagger out andmy gaze meets the king’s, that it isn’t one that is going to save Sterling.
“Clever,” he murmurs, stepping behind me as one hand rests on my hip, right above the brand, while the other clutches where I hold the dagger, forcing our fingers to interlace. His lips brush my ear, my body stricken with fear as he whispers, “But you only succeeded in prolonging his death.” He positions us closer to Sterling, commanding one of the guards to hold the prisoner’s head up so that my eyes are forced to meet his. When I try to jerk away, the action driven by my desperation, King Dolian forces me into submission with magic. “Don’t fight against me, Rhea. Look into his eyes as we do what must be done.” So I do. Together, our hands drag the dagger across Sterling’s throat, flesh splitting as his blood spurts out and coats my dress.
Though my chest heaves as if a scream is building, there is no sound. None that tumbles from me and none that I hear in my head as something dark and twisted shifts within. Sterling collapses to the ground, his eyes frozen open and forever burned into my memory. I had killed before, but it was never this intimate, and it isn’t until this moment that I realize I’ve been clinging to an innocence that was only mine to claim by semantics alone. But now eventhatis gone.
As Sterling’s blood begins to pool around his body, King Dolian tugs me to the left, keeping his body behind me as if I am a shield before he shouts, “Bring the next one in!”
There is the sound of footsteps and creaking armor, distantly I’m aware of the doors opening and someone else entering. But it’s all as if I’m trapped in honey, every movement just a fraction too slow. My own thoughts struggling to keep up as I stare and stare at Sterling’s lifeless body.
Suddenly, a woman is in front of me, kneeling in a tattered skirt as her head hangs low. Her blouse might have been a lighter color but is now the shade of dried blood. I drag my gazeup to her face, her lips cracked and swollen, her eyes faring no better. She looks from me to the king, her own attention slow to notice Sterling on the ground next to her. But then she does, and her lips part as a harrowing scream shatters the fog over me. All at once, the world rushes back in, sharpening the edges of my vision until my skin breaks out in goosebumps and I feel the heat of the king’s body at my back.
“Let’s try a new bargain,” the king says from behind me, grip tightening on my hip. “This woman is guilty of consorting with the criminal who attacked you. You will drag your knife across her throat”—the woman whimpers through her tears, her gaze still locked on Sterling as she struggles to break out of the guards’ hold on her—“oryou can say that you love me. That you areminein every way that matters.” He buries his face into the side of my neck, lips sliding along the sensitive skin there. “Vow in blood that you belong tome, and she lives.”
The woman in front of me blurs, and it isn’t until I blink that I realize it’s because of the tears pouring from my eyes. Despite how I hear my heart pounding in my chest, I don’t feel it. As if the organ has detached itself and is now outside my body, a stranger pounding on a former home’s door. And that’s how I feel, how I’ve felt, for weeks now. Like an interloper in my own life. But, whatever this version of me is now, even she does not want to do this. But how many people would King Dolian sacrifice to gain something that is not his—that never was? How many lives would Ilethim claim so that I can hold on to the one thing I desperately want to keep for myself? For Nox?
His rumble of disappointment at my reluctance is the only moment I get before he commands me to kill her. The magic of his demand overpowers me, and while the guards hold her in place and her dark brown eyes plead with mine, I slide the sharpened end of my blade across her neck, the king’s hand aiding in the kill.Skin splits. Blood splatters.
Her body hasn’t even hit the ground when King Dolian yells, “Bring in the next one!”
“Stop!” I cry, turning to face him, my arm twisted at an uncomfortable angle as he keeps me in his grasp. My entire body vibrates as my chest heaves, air cold against my cheeks from the tears that track down them. “Please,stop!”
Behind me, Xander’s voice cuts through the incoming footsteps and the high-pitched crying of the next person the guards have brought in. “Your Majesty,surely,a ch—”
“Do not speak another word if you hope to make it out of here with your head still attached to your body,” King Dolian interrupts, his gaze bright with feral intensity before he turns it down on me, making me flinch. “Give me what I want, and all of this will end.”
The crying behind grows louder, its cadence panicked.
