Page 114 of To Bleed A Kingdom

“I’ve tried.” Several times, in fact, but my mother put a stop to all my efforts before any of them came to fruition.

“Not hard enough,” she bites back, jabbing her finger towards me. “That could've been you offering up your last goat. You watching your wife and son wither away to nothing.” She pushes off the wall and stalks towards me with a palm above her breast. “If you could feel what they feel, could feel their suffering and pain, you would have done more.”

“You mean if I were an empath like you?” Fuck it! If she can push, I can, too. I haven't prodded her about her Gift. I’ve tried to be respectful of the pain she's experienced from revealing such secrets, but with the way she’s practically admitting to it and her assumptions that I voluntarily stand by and do nothing while something like this happens within my own kingdom, I no longer give a shit.

“You don’t need my Gifts to see their misery,” Lena says without pause, not even attempting to deny her power. “Nor to see how scorned humans are. Gods,” she breathes, squeezing her eyes shut. “The looks your people give me. So much hate and disgust. I can hardly walk down the street without choking on it.” She clutches her neck, swallowing thickly. “There's a poison within your lands, Darius, infecting every crevice of this stone cage.”

“And what do you expect me to do about it?”

Features hardening, she says in a voice so cold, I can feel its icy tendrils pierce my very bones, “How do you rid someone of toxins? You make them bleed.”

The hairs on the back of my nape rise with her statement, uneasy with the similarities between her words and that of the traitor guard. But I immediately dismiss the eerie feeling with a shake of my head. Lena can occasionally seem cold and ruthless, but she could never be like that traitor. “Not everyone hates humans.”

“Only the ones who have the power to change all this. Like your mother,” she sneers. “She could change all this with a snap of her dainty little fingers.”

“She has good reason to hate humans,” I argue, feeling an odd protectiveness for my mother. She never asked to endure what she did, to be raped by her husband’s murderer and become pregnant with his child. I doubt others would feel much differently than her if they experienced what she had. She may not be a perfect queen to humans, but one of their own broke her. Her behavior isn’t surprising, nor unexpected.

“Because of the Battle of Brecca,” Lena says, a statement, not a question, but I answer all the same.

“Yes.”

“Are these Breccan sympathizers?”

“Possibly some.” Frustrated, I suck on my teeth. “But not all.”

“Yet they are punished for something in which they took no part.” She arches a chastising brow. “Do you not see how ignorant it is to vilify an entire race by the actions of a few?”

“I do, but…” I suck in a long breath, my chest expanding as I try to control my anger. “It hasn't always been this way.”

She laughs, a harsh, mirthless sound, and gestures towards the human district with a jerk of her hand. “Look around you. Do you honestly believe this neglect and abuse only began thirty years ago?” She shakes her head and purses her lips. “This has been going on for generations. The Battle of Brecca was simply the spark immortals needed to justify the humans' complete subjugation.”

A niggling of guilt rears its head but I instantly smother it, refusing to allow her twisted perception to take hold. “That's the natural order of life. The more powerful will always suppress the weak.”

“And humans are weak because they don’t have your Gifts?” Lena retorts with a curl of her lip, leaving no quarter to her verbal lashing.

“Do you think humans are the only ones suffering?” I snap, furious she can look at me with such scorn for something I have no control over. “Because they’re not. It’s just more apparent with them because they haven't figured out what the rest of us already know.”

“Which is?”

Stepping forward, I brush my chest against hers, ignoring the feeling of her breasts pressed up against my stomach as I glare down at her. “That the ways of fae and immortals are harsh and brutal. Cruel, even. And to survive this archaic way of life, you must fight cruelty with cruelty.”

Tilting her head back, she peers upward, unflinching from my gaze. “Just as you do.”

“Just as I do,” I agree. “If you wish to survive in this world, there is no room for weakness.”

“What if you wish for more than survival?” she asks quietly, her expression slipping into a more somber one. “What if you simply wish to live?”

Confused, my brows furrow together. “Isn't that what surviving is? To live?”

“No,” she replies with a slow shake of her head “Surviving is to endure. To tread through life in a perpetual state of struggle. With fear, pain, loss. To live is to find hope, happiness, and love. To live is to be free.”

A short laugh bursts from my chest. “That's not the world we live in, sweetheart.”

“What if you could?” she asks, her voice barely audible as she searches my gaze. “Would you wish for it?”

“I'll not hope for something that will never come to be.”

Her expression falls and her shoulders slump as she breathes out a weary sigh. “Then I pity you.”

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