Fire tears through my body, my screams fading and folding within the cage of my soul until only I can hear them, bouncing between my bones.
Are you not a monster?
Something catches my scream in the dark. The great maw of something that opens wide in a lazy, fanged yawn. Dark scales, and something else darker still. My blood turns cool. My fear turns off. This soft heart of mine is held in a dark fist
I am a monster.
Power lashes out in multiple directions, dark and spiked. Hollow shouts sound before the hard thuds of big bodies. In the dark, I sit up and remove my blindfold, wrapping my body in my power like a shawl of armour.
When dawn comes, Mace finds me standing amongst the bodies of his generals, their necks broken. He smiles at me, andthough every time before it gave me a feeling of happiness, this time, I feel nothing.
“These shadows,” he says, gesturing to the power banding around my body, keeping close. “If you put them before your eyes, you no longer have to wear your blindfold.” I try it and find that I can see as clear as day through them. “Good boy. Now shall we see what more you can do with them?”
Again, I feel nothing at his praise. “I can do a lot,” I say, looking between the cobra king’s smile and the dead serpents. His own men. “Will you teach me? Will you show me?”
“Of course.” I sense the change in the serpent king. And where his voice was once before doting and gentle, now becomes more careful, now takes on the tone of a reminder. He sees the monster now. The serpent king gestures at the mark he made over my navel and calls me by my real name. The one my family gave me. “You are mine. Remember that. Now, come with me.”
Chapter 54
Aurelia
Iwake up in a panic, fighting off my bedsheets like a caged animal. I scramble off the bed, kneeing Xander in the side and smacking Lyle’s face in the process.
“Regina?” Lyle says in alarm.
But I’m already running. I hit the floor with my good leg and get out of the room. My newer leg cramps up. I don’t let it stop me as I hobble out of the suite and up the stairs that takes me to the roof. I need air. I need cold. I need?—
How do I even fucking know what I need? Cold air slaps me across the face as I clear the top stair and reach for the wall lining the roof. Stone under my fingers and the cold air finally let mesee. My chest heaves as the images burn themselves into my mind. Four of the pieces of the soul gather behind me, and as much as I love them, the one that I want to see is not here.
Ghoul may have been right. Perhaps I hadn’t been ready. Perhaps my heart had torn apart enough. Had been battered and beaten so badly the bruises still smarted. I know my father is a monster—a cruel and malevolent creature who crawled from the depths of some hell and had fooled us into thinking he was a regular person. But this level of manipulation over an innocentchild is a new level of evil. And how I reconcile Ghoul’s child-self with the adult beast I know today seems impossible.
We are all damaged beasts. Never broken, but somehow still in pieces. And my pieces seem to be trying to fit Ghoul into us. But whichever way I turn it, try to jam him in, he resists. There is no real way to undo his blood bond. Only death will free him now. My regina’s heart shrieks out at this loss. Shrieks in pain and hate at the beast who did this to us.
A large hand plants itself against my own, a gold ring on the thumb. “Do you want to fly, regina?” Xander asks.
Something about his deep voice, so often holding a bite, now soft, soothes my pulse. His eyes beam their light from the corner of my eye as I look up into the heavens. The spaces between the stars remind me of Ghoul. That void-like darkness. The regina in me wants to be closer to him. Wants those velvet shadows to cloak me as they cloaked him. They had been drawn out of him through pain. His animus had not takenoverexactly, but had come to the front to take away the pain of torture. To bring forward the monster because he recognised that an apex predator stood before him. He had done what he needed to do in order to survive. He had become dark-hearted to save himself.
Xander turns around and leans against the stone next to me, letting his head hang back as he breathes deeply. I feel the others lingering behind me, letting me know they are near but giving me space. My dragon closes his eyes. “What did he show you, Aurelia?”
“Don’t‘Aurelia’ me,” I snarl, even though I can’t take my eyes off the way his muscled throat and Adam’s apple look at this angle.
The corner of his mouth turns up. “What did the basilisk show you, regina?”
“Something bad.”
“I wouldn’t expect anything less.”
“Still an asshole,” I mutter.
“No one will take that from me, not even you.”
For some reason, that makes me want to smile, but I’m determined to be furious with the world and the bad things that happen in it. Scythe’s presence is like hoarfrost behind me, and it’s enough to make me turn. My shark looms, his silver hair even more beautiful under the stars, his impossibly perfect beauty cutting through my vision and drawing me to him. He places his hands on either side of my cheeks, tilting my face gently upwards. “We must not let the past control us, regina.”
Half of the time Scythe speaks, I want to cry. “We can’t let the bad men win,” I whisper.
“We have to make sure we don’t become bad men in the process,” he counters. “Ghoul is a bound beast, regina. He made agreements. He must carry them out.”
“But he was a child when he was blood bound.”
