And he had done it. He had risen faster, higher than anyone could have imagined. Discipline. Focus. Charm. And, mostly, a keen understanding of exactly what made people behave in the way they did.
He had learned how to motivate people early. Encourage them to his way of thinking. A nudge here, a nudge there. And, if they refused, well, he had spent his teen years learning the exact effects of every single available poison. And a few that were distinctly unavailable.
His useless father had watched him with that ever-deepening frown, as if trying to understand, trying to see a truth that he would never understand, when yet another village dog went missing, or the rats suddenly overflowed from the grain store because the cats were gone.
Father hadn’t understood, but Mother had. If you want to know how something works, you have to be prepared to take it apart.
Gods, it had been a relief to get away. When Mother started to cough, he had begun to wonder. When the coughing turned bloody, he knew.
He took his set of highly honed skills and joined the army, where he flew through the ranks of the Blacks and then the Blues, all the way to Grendel. Gods, that man had disgusted him. Ballanor too. Both of them so wrapped up in their own primitive wants. Their lusts and thirsts. But it had made them supremely easy to manipulate.
And he had made it. From the boy expected to feed the cows, all the way to Lord High Chancellor. Almost, almost, to prince consort. Ruling over, and through, his inexperienced new wife. So close he could still taste it.
And yet, here he was, having come the full circle. Back to lying in the fucking grass.
And he knew exactly who to blame. Mathos.
Sure, he knew the others had played a part. But it was Mathos who had humiliated him in the palace when the Hawks came to free Nim. Fucking whistling in his face like a dockworker.
Mathos who had kept him away from Alanna when he so nearly had the perfect distraction to ensure that Val died. Ballanor had taken the blade instead, ending his life far sooner than planned. Creating the opening for Alanna to reject the throne and choose Val. Who could have predicted she would do something so stupid?
And then, when he managed to turn even that debacle to his advantage, it was fucking Mathos who snuck in and stole Lucilla. He should have drugged his soon-to-be fiancée to sleep again instead of relying on those idiot guards. She was so naïve. So desperate for approval. So very easily led. She was going to be perfect.
And then Mathos had taken her and ruined it all. Again.
His rage had been incandescent. That fuckwit Cerdic was, even now, mucking out stalls. A task that he was no doubt finding difficult after the whipping he’d had. Cerdic and all the other Blues who had been guarding her. The only one who had gotten off lightly was the one Mathos had already killed. Even Claudius was reconsidering his life choices, having been woken up just in time to see his men tied to the whipping posts before being demoted to kitchen duty.
They had deserved exactly what they got. Next time, they would know better than to fail. As would every other man under his command.
The bigger problem was that his fury had made Dornar lose focus just for a moment, for the first time in his life.
He had mobilized both the cavalry and infantry, pulling men from every barracks within a hundred miles and closed all the roads to the north, and then sent his men to flush Mathos and Lucilla south. He had riddled all the coastal towns within reach of the Derrow with soldiers, certain that they would try for the ports. He had even predicted that they would aim for Darant. And he had put men onto every single ship in the harbor.
But it had never occurred to him that when the captain of theStar of the Searefused to allow his men on board, the assholes would drag their heels in reporting back.
They had seen the skin whipped off the backs of their officers; surely that should have made them quicker, not slower? Surely, they would have done anything to avoid the same fate?
But no. Instead, they had delayed. And the hours that they cost him had allowed the ship to sail.
That was his first mistake.
The second was in underestimating the Star of the Sea.
He’d known in his gut that she was more than the merchant ship she pretended to be. Otherwise, she would have accepted his guards. Would not have sailed at the first opportunity.
But he had been convinced that the Nephilim would stay out of this. That they would do anything to avoid a war between the church and the state, despite the bluster they’d given Ballanor.
Every action they had taken supported the idea that they were lying low and letting the Hawks try to contact the princess in secret and sneak her back to Eshcol. None of them wanted a civil war.
Which was why he hadn’t realized that theStarwas a Nephilim ship. He had thought that she genuinely was a well-fortified merchant ship, sailing because Mathos and Lucilla had bribed the captain.
He had wanted Mathos and Lucilla back so badly that he had done the one thing he had always despised—let his emotions sway him. He had let his rage fuel his decision to chase them down instead of riding night and day and beating them back to the palace, and then descending on them with all the might of the Blacks and Blues under his command.
He had been utterly focused on killing Mathos, dumping his body in the sea, and taking back his prize. And now they had escaped once more, finally destroying any chance of him becoming consort. Or even returning as Lord High Chancellor.
Damn them both straight to the Abyss.
But they hadn’t caught him. And it wasn’t over. He still had one more play to make. A play that would solve almost all his problems, at the same time as achieving the one thing he wanted more than anything else in the world; to punish Mathos.
