Nikolai rose to his feet again and leaned a touch closer as he said, “Discovering me was merely the tip of the blade honed to kill you,Your Majesty.”
With that, the fallen King’s Sword walked away, head held high. Loren watched him go, then stooped back down, wrapped his fingers around Camilla’s throat, and forced her back to her feet. “You will watch with me as he dies.”
Yet even as Loren stepped up to the battlements once more to gaze down at the newest figures making their way toward the fray, he never once saw the Caersan woman follow his gaze. She merely stood at his side, glaring at him in silent defiance.
Fine.
If Camilla thought she could so openly defy Loren as well, he would use her for a singular purpose: to ensnare his wife once more and bend that horn-fucking bitch to his will.
Chapter 34
Fighting a battle away from Azriel was a vastly different experience for Ariadne. Though she still had Whelan nearby, the clash with their enemies was far more stifling. Where Azriel had made it his purpose to get between her and those he deemed more dangerous, Whelan kept her in his sights while allowing her to move more freely. Despite the tension between her husband and brother’s mate, Ariadne knew with certainty that the latter would continue to look after her if anything did become overwhelming, just as he did for anyone else around them.
Ariadne had not trained much with Whelan aside from flying. Seeing him in the midst of battle showed her a vastly different side of the dhemon that she had not known existed. The usual banter and humor were gone. The gentleness allotted for those times he had reset her broken arm and bandaged her after training no longer existed. This was a different world, and Whelan was a different person entirely.
While Ariadne depended on her speed and mere presence to put the vampire soldiers on the back foot, Whelan became a force unlike anything she had seen. Even her endless nights of training with Kall paled in comparison to the killer unleashed within the dhemon at her side. He cut through vampires with his greatsword like they were nothing but weeds barring his way.
Whelan became the epitome of the dhemons about whom she had once had waking terrors. Long before she met Ehrun, when she still had freedom to roam the sunlit hours, the tales of such vicious monsters haunted her slumber and often woke her in the middle of the night, screaming.
Her mother’s death in the early morning hours only solidified the horrors of her mind.
Ariadne had been a very young vampire when it happened. So young, in fact, that Emillie was still in nappies and could barely form words. Even in terms of slow vampiric aging, they were nothing more than children. After so long, it was difficult to summon memories of her mother despite the portraits of her that once hung in the Harlow Estate.
The night it happened, Ariadne had convinced her parents to take her out on a ride with them through the forest. Her father, of course, argued against it. Now Ariadne understood why: he had lost one wife to the shadows that lurked out there, though not in the way most would assume. Still, Jezebel Harlow had insisted on indulging in Ariadne’s desire.
A mistake from which none of them would ever recover.
General Markus Harlow had just returned from what he calledwar, though now that Ariadne was in the thick of it, she doubted he ever fought in something as brutal as this. Against his better judgment, he had Thom the stablehand saddle the horses, and they rode off into the woods alongside his wife and child.
They did not make it far before the dhemons arrived. Dhemons who looked so much like Whelan did in that moment,faces stony and filled with a vicious determination. They hefted large weapons, just like her friend did as he hacked through yet another Caerson’s armor, the steel plates nothing against his brute strength.
“Take Ari home, Jezebel,” her father had ordered, unsheathing his own sword to face down the dhemons on his own.
At the time, Ariadne had seen him as incredibly brave and stupid. She cried for him to come back with them, full-heartedly believing he would not survive against the dhemons alone.
Now that she saw firsthand just how powerful the race of horned fae was, Ariadne knew she had been correct in that assumption as a child. There was a reason no one ever survived a raid by dhemons. There was a reason she had been forbidden from leaving the Estate grounds without a personal guard.
But when her mother turned the horse around and tried to escape with Ariadne in tow, they had not noticed the dhemons who appeared behind them. Her father had been just as blind to their sudden presence, and his cry of alarm still echoed in Ariadne’s mind anytime she thought of it. The dhemon that stepped from the shadows dragged her mother from the horse with ease, sending the mare they rode into a frenzy. The horse reared, and Ariadne fell before scrambling into the brush in a panic.
Guards from their home had begun to arrive by then, engaging with the dhemons as her father fought to reach her mother. Ariadne had watched in horror as the dhemon man—the man she now knew to be Ehrun—held Jezebel Harlow tight to his chest. What her child-mind had believed to be sweat on his face from exertion, Ariadne now recognized as something very different.
Ehrun had been crying.
“Markus Harlow,” Ehrun had said, his accent thick and common broken much like Kall’s had been, “take everything of me.”
At the time, Ariadne had not understood what he said. She spent years after analyzing his strange words and dreading that one day, he would come for her. Of course, her fear had been completely founded. Ehrunhadcome for her.
“Now you suffer.” The dhemon’s final words were punctuated by the horrific crack of her mother’s neck and agonized scream of her father.
Jezebel Harlow never deserved to die for what her husband had done, but with the bond now throttling Ariadne’s own soul, she knew that Ehrun’s words were some of the truest she had ever heard: Markus Harlowdiddeserve to suffer for what he had done. Rhana and Thavii were also innocent in everything, and their deaths were what set everything into motion.
Their deaths were the reason Ariadne now swung a sword to block the very soldiers her father had once commanded. Rhana. Thavii. Jezebel. Darien. Kall. She channeled every single one of them as she pushed through the memories of losing her mother to face the true monsters: soldiers who fought a war blindly because they were told to do so, not because they believed in what their orders said.
Those soldiers were the most dangerous of all.
The sharp edge of a blade raked across Ariadne’s cheek. Liquid heat gushed from the split there, dripping across her lips and refocusing her attention to the battle she now fought to put an end to cruel, pointless deaths.
An ironic turn of events, to be certain. Where Ariadne once would have frowned upon killing—particularly the killing of Caersans—she now wielded her ability to take a life as a necessary evil. The men she cut down in Monsumbra and those she now felled in the shadow of the Hub were blind to the truthand willing to consume every lie fed to them by an usurper. Death was the only kindness they deserved.
