ARWEN
ITHOUGHT I’D DESPISED MY bloodred suite, but that room was a full, beating heart compared to the skeleton I stood within now. The harvesting
ceremony wouldn’t take place in my suite nor Lazarus’s private quarters. The revolting tradition, which Maddox had so generously explained to me on our walk over, was held in this sterile, ceremonial bedchamber.
Glinting white marble floors without a speck of dust. A single dazzling, dark-iron chandelier hanging overhead like a guillotine. And a bed.
A large, sprawling bed.
Clean, silken white sheets. Prim. Folded neatly. Just enough pillows.
And crowding around the bed—at least fifty nobles, dignitaries, and esteemed members of Lazarus’s court. Mostly men with round, greasy faces, drunk and stuffed from the ball still raging below us, sneering at me and revering me in turn. All of them—waiting. Waiting to watch me taken by their king. In clear, bright candlelight. Naked as a newborn mouse and just as helpless—
Alarm bells rang throughout my body. I couldn’t stand still—fury and revulsion and undiluted fear writhed inside me so violently I was shivering.
Wyn offered me a bleak expression, but I couldn’t bear to look at him. He, too, was accepting this sickening tradition. But there was no room for betrayal in my heart right now. Only urgency: I had to think of something.
One glance at the stately marble grandfather clock told me I had only a handful of minutes to do so. It was almost midnight. Lazarus would be here soon.
Though Wyn told me most near-full-blooded Fae women flocked to this chamber eagerly each year, hoping to bear their king a full-blooded heir, it was still a more revolting ritual than I’d expected, even of Lazarus.
A mistake, to underestimate his viciousness.
Between Powell and Bert, Crawford and Killoran…I’d come to expect the very dregs of human rubbish from most men I encountered. But it was the women who stood around this ceremonial bed—the wizened, crinkly Fae ladies who had surely seen their fair share of harvesting, who had the gall to shoot judgmental glares in my direction, or, even worse, appear flat- out bored by the iniquity—their gazes were the ones that truly shattered whatever might have been left of me.
If given the opportunity, I would have scraped the gleeful expressions from their high-boned faces with my blunt nails.
I shuddered again, jumpy and sweating. A hand brushed against my back and I nearly jumped through the stark white ceiling.
But it was only Wyn. “You’re going to be fine,” he whispered. “I’m going to kill him.” I sounded as ill as I felt.
“If I could,” he said, hazel eyes simmering, “I’d do it for you.” Maddox prowled closer and hissed at us both. “He’s coming.” Oh, Stones, oh, Stones—
The clock, ticking. So loud my ears rang. Two minutes—
I’d tried to slink down into someplace buried deep inside—to submerge myself somewhere untouchable, somewhere only my mind could find me, somewhere I could weather this as nothing but a mere husk of myself.
But my heart was thrumming like a caged bird and my limbs were screaming at me to fight, and the images skittering through my mind—I couldn’t face them.
And if I didn’t have enough lighte to protect myself from Lazarus, then I needed to flee.
“Can I use the washroom?” I asked my guards, blinking under the bright white reflection of all that lamplight. My face, hot and clammy.
It had worked for me once tonight.
Maddox opened his mouth, surely to tell me no, when an elderly Fae bathing in pearls craned her neck out from the crowd. “Holding it in will make you more fertile,” she offered.
I recoiled in disgust.
“And,” she added with a wry smile, “it’ll feel better, too.”
“Go,” Wyn said before I could snarl at the frail woman. “You only have a minute.”
I didn’t know if that was a warning or merely the truth. Regardless, I hurried from his grasp and into the washroom before he or Maddox or any other voyeur in the crowd could say a word against it.
The door closed behind me and my chest nearly caved in from the silence. From the privacy.
Don’t break don’t break don’t break—
I had no time for that. Nor enough time to tear my sweaty gloves off or rip the heavy mask from my face, nor to rinse my mouth with soap, scrubbing my lips until they were raw and plump and bleeding.
Still, that’s what I did. The thought of Lazarus’s saliva, his imprint being anywhere on me, made my skin crawl. It was enough that I’d have to live with the memory of his lips on mine. I would not allow him to touch me again.
My hands found the damp creases in my forehead and bridge of my nose where the mask had dug into my skin, and rubbed until my mind settled.
Think, Arwen.
My desperation was crystalizing into resolve. The spark had returned to my veins, that buzz of powerful lighte, as I knew it would. Sun and air and warmth sparkling deep within me. The rush of adrenaline that so often fueled my panic also fed my lighte. It had always brought me back when I was on the brink. Halden’s poker, Reaper’s avalanche of rocks—how many times had the fear I’d thought made me weak actually, physically, made me strong?
And Lazarus was using that strength against me. Allowing my lighte to regenerate so he could birth something sinister between us. Force himself on me, inside me—
The Fae king had been right: If I stayed here, I was a sow for breeding.
A womb, as he had said. A womb with an audience.
So I wouldn’t stay here. I’d put that fight-or-flight to work somehow— Flight. Flight.
What had Amelia said? “I bet he’s using your lighte to create more of the shifting Fae.”
The porcelain of the washroom sink was cool and steadying against my palms as I braced myself to stay upright.
But when I’d fallen from that cliff in Peridot, hadn’t a bizarre itching pricked at my shoulder blades? Needles buried under my skin. That’s what I’d felt.
And when I plummeted from Lazarus’s back toward his outstretched claw, it had been like points trying to break through my flesh. As if they could hold me, suspended in air.
Had I been like Kane, and Griffin, and the mercenaries all along?
Heart buried in my throat, I hurried for the one rectangular window that reached the paneled ceiling and ripped the thin lace curtain aside to expose the glass panes behind. This wing was lower than my tower, and beneath the foggy clouds I could make out a glittering city of stars and lights and homes. Rolling hills bathed in moonlight, peppered in pines and oaks. A twinkling river curving in the distance.
I was suddenly ravenous for that cold, dry night air whipping at my hair and sending gooseflesh across my arms. My pulse raced for it. Even if it was thick with smog and ash. Even if it might be the last thing I felt before I flattened against the cobblestone below.
Shuffling sounded from somewhere. Either the roof above me or outside the washroom door, I couldn’t tell, but I had to move. Had to now.
Now, now, now—
I crossed the washroom and snatched the gilded urn, embossed with the image of a wild horse rearing up on his hind hooves and filled with delicate
hand towels. Then I turned on the water and let the rushing sound mask what I could only hope I’d be able to do next.
Feeling the urn’s heft in my hands, I dumped the linens to the floor and lifted it once before smashing it against the glass of the window.
Nothing but a resonant smack. As if the glass was not glass at all but steel.
Spelled glass.
Sweat prickling under my arms, I cut my eyes back to the door of the washroom.
Waited without breathing.
Prayed to every single Stone that nobody could hear over the sound of water spraying against the porcelain basin—
And when nobody barged in, I slammed the gold bowl into the glass over and over, each slam of the urn more violent, less careful. My rage poured out through the gilded piece, through its brutal smashing. All that I had left—every last drop of hope—I slammed into that window.
Not caring as a chunk of the horse’s gold mane broke from the carved piece. Not caring as my palms ached and my arms, weak and fatigued, began to shake.
I had to be free. I had to.
Sweating and gnashing my teeth, I slammed again and again, until with both hands and one final blow carried by an arc of white, resplendent lighte from my palms—
Glass rained down.
As did the lovely nightscape before me.
What had been a lush, tree-dotted countryside beyond Solaris painted in silver by a full, white moon high in the sky was now…barren. No countryside. No riverbed. No uneven, green hills rising and falling. Beyond the walled city was…nothing. Miles and miles and miles as far as my eyes could see of emptiness. A few lone structures—possibly lighte outposts or slums—but nothing more.
Lazarus must’ve had Octavia spell all the windows in the palace. All of it—false.
Well—it didn’t matter to me.
I’d figure out where to go next once I was free of this palace.
I would have rather wandered a desolate desert and died of starvation than stayed here, waiting for Lazarus to make me his before a room of shameless spectators.
I’d rather fail, falling to my death, than bear his children. I was sure of
it.
Still, that assuredness didn’t do much for my racing heart or my
plummeting stomach as I climbed onto the windowsill. The ceremonial room was on the highest floor of the palace, which meant the soldiers and city folk below—the storefronts and cobblestone and lamplight—were so small they all blurred together.
My stomach dipped as muggy air swept along my face. Glass crunched under the soles of my shoes. My hands trembled on the jagged window frame I clung to.
The muted din of revelers echoed from the city streets as they left the ball. I could almost make out their figures as they bled out into the streets below me. Pointed roofs of noble homes and swirling streets and alleys below. The height was worse than dizzying. My vision yawned out and blurred. Burrowed into a single pinprick and tunneled. I held on with hands like claws.
A gory, final image of myself charged into my mind’s eye: a splatter of bone and flesh upon the manicured Solaris hedges directly below the window. My heart spun in my chest.
More shuffling and thumping sounded from somewhere above or in the next room. No, it was definitely resonating from above—there was someone on the roof. Crunching, nearing. Drawing closer to the window I was practically hanging out of.
I couldn’t be sure. I couldn’t think, let alone listen closely—
So I didn’t dare look up. Not even when I swore I could smell Kane’s cedar scent invading my senses. I was losing it—the unsound mind of a
woman seconds from free fall. I had to jump. Now. Now.
My last thoughts were, Please let me be something that can fly. Please let me shift at all.
And then I leapt—
Only to feel the frantic grasp of a warm, sturdy hand around my arm… but too late. Whoever had reached down from the roof and grabbed my wrist I’d pulled down with me.
We fell rapidly, his words lost as the wind shattered in my ears. But that touch.
That touch that never wavered—that pulled me close to him, cradling me in his arms even as we plunged, prepared to insulate my fall with his own limbs…That cedar and leather scent in my nose, those silver-ringed hands on my bare back, the dark, sable hair clouding my vision—
Kane.
