“My father did not want a child without a genius,” Maxian mutters. “On Phillip’s tenth birthday, when the Head of Healing—Eli’s father—declared him magicless, my father took out the whip.”
Goosebumps line my skin, despite the fire and heat of the body next to me. “The—”
“Yes, the Golden Whip.” Maxian’s voice is flat, distant. “At first, I refused to move, used all the power I had to protect Phillip. The queen did, too, and…and my mother as well. They stood side by side and we battled him, the three of us, with everything we had. I understood it too late: My father was a tragedy that had happened to them both. They fought like sisters. We fought like a family, but his genius was stronger. And he had the Golden Whip.”
I gaze at the king. He squeezes his eyes shut, face taut with memory, tears rolling down his temples.
“I’m so sorry,” I breathe. “How you survived is a miracle. Most faeries die after two lashes.”
My heart pounds. This is the king’s true testament, why Hector and the other nobles call him the Mountain, fear him. He survived the unsurvivable.
“I fainted after the fifth whip,” Maxian says, voice breaking. “It was my first time with the lashings, you see. I wasn’t used to them yet. And when I came to, they all were dead.”
I cover my mouth.
“It took seven lashings to kill the fae queen. And my faerie mother? Eleven,” he rasps. “Eleven.No one can endure that, but she did. My mother did. A mother defending a child that wasn’t even her own.”
“And…and your brother?”
“All my father had to do was kick him hard enough. Like killing a pup.”
He shifts, covering his face with a hand, chest shuddering.
And then the king is crying.
Great, gasping wails like a child, the king is sobbing, and suddenly I am, too. We lie there, side by side like a couple in a crypt, and we weep. We weep for what we have done and who we’ve become, for the child who never was and the one I am trying to save. Most of all, I weep for this world we were born into, this kingdom of killers, and hope, one day, it will be kinder to those who will come after us.
Then Maxian rolls onto his side, drawing me close, turning me into his chest. Even the weight of his arms feels too heavy to squirm out of, and I am so tired of fighting. So I sink farther into the heat of his embrace, my tears across his chest, his weeping in my hair.
“I will never ever do that to my children,” he rasps, a palm cupping the back of my head. “No matter who my fae wife will be, my children will have great, golden geniuses. No one will everdare hurt them, for they will be powerful like me. But they will be strong like their mother. They will be strong like you.”
My breath catches.
Large hands stroke my hair, upturn my face to him once more, cradle my skull in his grasp. A curl of bronze hair falls over his forehead, his thick brows, and my entire world becomes those strange violet eyes, that rough square jaw, the power washing us both away.
“Will you have and hold them, in secret and in silence, for the strength of the royal line and for the good of this kingdom?” he asks.
“Max…”
His thumbs brush under my jaw, pressing into my throat, and I inhale for air that doesn’t come. He rests his forehead against mine, our bodies flush against each other. I finger the gold ring on my left hand, but to lace away now would undo what I’ve accomplished tonight. Would make what I gave him in the bath a meaningless sacrifice. That, I cannot bear. There has to be a reason for violence.
The plane presses down on us like a suffocating blanket and my time is no longer up—it has passed. I have made friends and choices and enemies. I have played the great game and lost. No one is coming to save me. So when his nails dig into my skull, I yield.
“Do you, Avery, accept your new position as mother of my children?” Maxian says.
My lips part. “I do.”
Then the king of Amyria seals our vows with a crushing kiss.
Chapter Fifty-five
“Avery?” Someone shakes me. Groaning,I roll over, swatting away their hand. They shake again, hissing: “Wake up!”
I blink in the sunlight. For a moment, I think I am outside, until I register the scratchy rug beneath my skin, the heavy male arm slung across my stomach. And the horrified expression of Lila, staring down at me.
“Lila?” I mumble.
“What—what happened?”
