“Your fa—” She gasps and stumbles back as if she’s been slapped. Then she lifts her hand to protect herself from the visual assault the same way I did. “Lucien! Forcryingout loud!”
Lucien chuckles from his bed as the man kisses down his neck, clearly unbothered by this woman’s sudden presence.
She keeps her eyes skyward and sighs deeply. I have the sudden suspicion this is a common occurrence.
“The king has called an emergency council meeting. You need to come right away.”
“Everyone hear her?” Lucien replies with a smile, letting his head drop back briefly before lifting it again. “It’s time to come.”
“Right away,” one of the women giggles out. The other woman lowers her mouth between Lucien’s legs again, enthusiastically following orders.
The older woman gives up and pins Lucien with her glare. Her hands curl into fists, and her delicately arranged hair quivers against her cheeks.
“Lucien. I don’t have time for your frivolities. Your father needs you,now. It’s about Alistair.”
Lucien immediately sits up. His smile is gone. His bedmates complain, moving away from him. His chest rises and falls a few times as he stares at the woman in the doorway, then he’s shifting to stand.
I curse under my breath and turn my eyes away as he quickly dresses his admittedly chiseled body. His partners have started back up, apparently unbothered by his absence.
I’m grateful to leave them behind as Lucien follows the woman’s hurried gait down the halls. They don’t exchange a single word all the way to what looks like a formal audience room with a throne on one end of the space.
I can’t make out much detail beyond the blur of long banners waving in the breeze from a wide-open balcony that stretches the length of the room.
A man sits on the throne, flanked by guards and attendants. He’s much clearer than his surroundings, with white-blond hair like Lucien’s and the samesun-bolt crown that brought me to this vision. He appears older than Lucien, maybe in his fifties if he weren’t a Siphon, and shares none of Lucien’s playful, feline charm.
This regent is serious. Angry, maybe, though it’s hard to tell whether the deep lines between his brows are just always there regardless of his mood.
The king—Lucien’s father—doesn’t greet his son as he arrives. He watches Lucien as he strides up toward the throne to take a lower seat beside him.
I follow Lucien, studying the tense expression on his face. It’s the same look he got in his eyes when he told me about Alistair’s vendetta.
Serious, clear, penetrating. He looks more like his stern father when he stares forward like this.
The doors burst open once more. Guards appear dressed in sparse but elegant half-plate armor, dragging with them a disoriented-looking man.
Their prisoner looks so much like Killian I almost recoil. He has the exact same sweetly deceitful eyes, the same shade of dark blond hair, the same pointed features. My stomach knots.
The guards throw him down onto the pale pink stone floor. He cries out on impact and remains kneeling as he lifts his head.
Stay on all fours, dog, I growl internally.
“There’s been a very serious accusation against you, Alistair,” the king says, staring down at his son icily. I’d freeze over entirely if that look were directed at me. “It is said that you have been creating thrall bracelets.”
That word again.Thrall.
Alistair looks up at his father with blatant shock on his face. “I… Father, I would never do such an abominable thing!”
His voice cracks. His eyes well. He looks so vulnerable and afraid. Earnest. He looks like he isn’t lying.
The king nods to the guards. Through my vision, they move in a blur, reappearing moments later with additional people. Several men and women stand around Alistair, their expressions all grave.
The guards step forward and pull up the sleeves of the men and women, exposing bracelets on all of them—gold, with bloodred jewels at their centers.
My stomach bottoms out. My horror spills through the vision in a wave, staining everything in its color-drained dread.
Thrall bracelets.
Identical to the engagement bracelet shackled to my wrist.
