Kai escorts me through the halls, ignoring every wandering eye.
After he walked from the gardens to meet me outside my chamber door, we set a quick pace between the Imperial-lined walls. The urgency in his steps has me biting back every question pelting my weary mind. But the Enforcer is on another one of his missions, and I am simply relieved to not be on the other side of it again. So, I let him lead me past each tall window and the fading sun beyond.
We turn down a corridor I don’t recognize before stopping at the threshold of a seemingly unsuspecting door.
I glance skeptically at my guide. “This is it?”
He turns the handle, stepping almost cautiously into the space. “Odd, how it’s just a regular room after all those years of wondering what was inside.”
My feet falter. It feels as though I’ve disturbed a piece of the past, intruded on a stranger I now call “mother” in title alone. I scan Queen Iris’s chamber slowly, taking in the four-poster bed hiding beneath a layer of neglect. Dust blankets every piece of furniture—the desk, vanity, and bookshelves all warmed with white grime.
“Father never let anyone in here.” Kai’s words only emphasize the clear signs of isolation. “Always claimed that he wanted to preserve it for her.”
My gaze drifts to the shelves once again, noting the toppled books and wedged papers between them. On her nightstand, dust collects around the shape of a rectangle at its center. “This is where Kitt got her jewelry box from,” I murmur.
Kai nods. “During your first Trial, I found him in here holding it. He must have been looking through some of her old things.”
I halt my slow pacing at the end of an untouched bed. “If he looked through that jewelry box, he would have seen those notes from Calum.”
Thoroughly distracted, Kai only manages an absentminded “Hmm.”
With a sigh, I drop the subject. His mind is far from my speculations. “So, what are we doing here, exactly?”
“You don’t want to see your mother’s chamber?”
I shrug. “Maybe if she actually felt like my mother. But…” I run a hand across that dusty quilt hugging the bed. “This woman feels like a stranger.”
Kai nods slowly, sympathetically, before he spews the real reason he dragged me here. “You mentioned Calum saying something about the true records being sealed away.”
I glance around the abandoned room. “And you figured they might be in here where no one was permitted to enter.”
“Nothing gets past you, Little Psychic.” His following huff is laced with humor. “Actually, if I am right, then something did get past you.”
This offends me. Greatly. “Just spit it out, Azer.”
Kai pokes around the desk, pulling at stubborn drawers. “I am a year older than you, Pae. If my father married Myla after you were born—”
“You would have been a year old already,” I breathe.
His smirk is infuriating.
“Don’t be an ass.” I join him at the desk with a lethal look. “My mind has been a little occupied today.”
“And mine hasn’t?”
I almost laugh. “I got married!”
“And I have been mourning you since the day we left that poppy field!”
My lips part slightly. I stare at him, watching every ripple of emotion cross his unmasked face. He sighs out a steadying breath. “The slow death of us started the day my brother slid that ring onto your finger,” Kai murmurs. “And I have had nothing but you on my mind for weeks.” He reaches for me before thinking better of it. “We will always be inevitable, Pae. But in this lifetime, we are doomed. Today was evidence of that. It’s…” He swallows. “It’s best we move on.”
A long moment passes between us before he turns back toward the desk, as though he hasn’t just crushed my heart in his calloused palm. The ache in my chest is only amplified by the truth in his words. We are ruin.
Kai clears his throat. I blink away the emotion stinging my eyes.
Attempting to let the tension fall from between us, I ask, “You think the records are in this desk?”
I peek over his shoulder at the fingerprints he’s scattered across the dusty wood. Kai tugs at a rattling handle to no avail. “It’s locked,” he mutters. That hardly deters him from yanking it open with ease and stating, “Brawny.” He tosses his head toward the door. “Down the hall.”
Within a matter of moments, he is pulling three weathered scrolls from the depths of that locked drawer and laying them on the desk.
One speaks of birth, the other of death, the final of marriage. Each is a decree with secrets.
We lean in, skimming the swirling dark ink. My eyes flick between the three pages, head spinning. Frustrated, I try to fit Calum’s admittances between the scrawled words.
Eighteen years ago, a daughter was born to the king.
Eighteen years ago, Queen Iris died in childbirth.
I was the daughter—an Ordinary the king disposed of. Embarrassed and angry, he hid the truth of his wife’s death, claiming to the kingdom that she passed during the birth of his heir. Queens were isolated for safety, so it was a believable lie….
I drag a finger across the marriage license. “This says nothing of a child. Only that Edric Azer and Myla Rowe were wed.”
Kai runs a hand through his tousled hair. “There is no record of my birth.”
“We must be missing something,” I offer distantly. “Maybe there is another scroll—”
“Maybe,” Kai cuts in. I blink, and he is pushing away from the desk to stride across the room. “Or maybe we should go right to the source.”
The dowager queen stares blankly at the scrolls.
“I want answers, Mother,” Kai urges.
Myla’s long black hair is streaked with silver. Her once beautiful gray eyes are sunken and red. The cot she lies on is stiff, the room around us stuffy. She looks frail in the west wing’s sickly hue, as though the rickety tower itself seeps life from her veins.
I fidget in my seat. The queen hardly knows me and now I’ve come to sit beside her deathbed, disrupting the little peace she had.
“I know the truth about Iris’s death,” Kai says slowly, pointing to one of the scrolls. “How the king married you to help cover it up. But what I don’t understand is where I fit into it.” His gaze is piercing. “If Iris truly died two years after Kitt’s birth, then how was I born only a year younger than him?”
The queen’s gaze shifts to her son, nearly as hollow as the words she finally coughs out. “The king didn’t tell me the whole story until he decided he loved me. At the beginning, it was my duty to marry Edric—at least, that is what my father told me. As an adviser to the king, he handed me over, a solution to a problem I didn’t know.”
She lifts a hand to her son’s cheek. “Despite my father’s persuasion, I didn’t think the king would want to marry me so suddenly. Because I… I already had a son with another.” Her voice grows hushed. “But I was wrong. It was you he wanted.”
I watch the words hit Kai hard enough to nearly crack his stony facade.
“He had a Silencer sense your power,” she whispers. The queen grips Kai’s hand, a cough rattling her chest before continuing. “The king wanted a strong spare, and my baby boy was extraordinary. Edric wanted him as his own.”
Nothing. Kai says nothing.
I drop my gaze to the fidgeting fingers in my lap. After believing an Ordinary child was his, it is no wonder the king wanted only the strongest of Elites for himself. I was an embarrassment. A mistake. And Kai—the most powerful Elite—would replace me.
“Edric told the kingdom he had mourned his late wife for three months and married me in the next.” The queen chokes on her words. “He was very convincing, your father—told the people that he didn’t have the heart to announce Iris’s death until he knew his new queen and son were safe.”
“So he wanted a solution to his problem,” Kai says evenly. His voice is dangerously calm. “The king was embarrassed by an Ordinary that wasn’t even his, so he claimed the strongest Elite he could find as his own.”
“Forgive me, Kai,” his mother whimpers. “The castle was sworn to secrecy, and I was never to tell a soul the truth. So you were raised believing what everyone else in the kingdom did.”
Kai scoffs. “But I was never his. My power was not Edric’s doing.” His eyes lift to the woman who resembles him so closely. “So whose doing is it?”
Her throat bobs. “A man I loved dearly. Many years ago.”
Kai looks away, letting her words hang in the air. I can see the hurt he so desperately tries to hide beneath that mask of anger. “The king rewrote history,” he seethes, “and made me his puppet.”
Myla lets out a ragged cough that might have been the start of an apology. When she catches her breath, face splotchy and red, she rasps, “He was always too harsh on you. And I am so… so sorry for that.”
“I was his in name, and still, he hated that I wasn’t his in blood,” Kai mutters. “That is why he never loved me, isn’t it? Why he pushed me until I broke? All because my power was never truly his.”
Rage simmers deep in my gut for the boy who was forced into this fate by chance alone. Everything he has suffered, every mask forced upon his face and weapon pushed into his hand, was never intended for him. Kai Azer is not an Azer at all. He was a powerful solution.
“I’m sorry you were thrown into this mess,” the queen attempts. “At first, we were only meant to cover up how an Ordinary killed the late queen.”
Her gray eyes slide to mine.
Kai scoffs before biting out, “All this time, you knew?”
“I had my suspicions.” The queen coughs. “Edric was not himself after seeing her for the first time.”
My cheeks heat. “I was not the king’s Ordinary.” At her skeptical look, I let the truth tumble out. “I was his Mind Reader’s daughter.”
A heavy silence bears down on us, one that Kai graciously lifts from our shoulders. “The king always kept his Fatals hidden. We never saw them. The Silencer was the only one I ever met while trying to glean information about the Resistance—which I know now was a sham.” His laugh is humorless. “Though, it sounds like Damion met me long before then, when he told the king of my power.”
The queen’s eyes widen on me. “If that is true, then the king died thinking that you…”
“That I was his greatest failure?”
His Ordinary. His weakness. His death.
Even powerless, I killed him.
A slight smile tugs at my lips.
I hope he saw his daughter’s face—the Ordinary he despised—as I drove that sword into his chest.
“I’ll live with it.”
