Page 87 of A Reign of Storm and Madness

Confusion wars with interest. The King of the Gods has a daughter? How had I or any of the others never heard of her? Surely, I would have been forced to listen to this information from Niall back when he’d lectured me on the great God King’s benevolence before.

My eyes land on the sender of this letter. Danai. That’s the same name of the Queen of the Gods, isn’t it? Danai is Dolos’ sister? That, too, was not something I knew. Certainly, it couldn’t be common knowledge if I’d never heard anyone mention it. Why, too, is she telling Dolos to have a list of powerful God children ready? Where are they to be taken?

So focused on the paper in my hand, I hardly notice the turn of the knob until Maeryn’s sharp gasp reaches me. Snapping my head up, I gape in shock as an elder Mortal God appears in what most certainly should have been a locked door. The key in his hand, however, is merely an afterthought of realization as his eyes widen when he spies the three of us in the room—two Terra and a Mortal God, all of whom are trespassing.

I drop the letter and hurtle over the desk in an instant as he parts his lips. The key falls from his hand as he reaches for the hilt of the sword on his heavy belt. My dagger is out of its holster and embedded in his throat before a single sound can escape.

Blood bubbles up, oozing out of the wound on his neck as I find myself crouched over him, my body practically sitting on his chest as the light in his eyes dims and then goes completely cold.

Numbness sinks into my fingertips and crawls up my hands and then my arms. I look back as Maeryn gets to shaking feet, pulling Niall up to stand next to her. Both of their gazes land on the Mortal God lying beneath me.

“You killed him.” Niall is pale and trembling as he staggers a step and Maeryn catches him before he goes down. “You—” Niall’s eyes lift to meet mine, soft brown like that of a trusting animal. He blanches at whatever expression he sees on my face. I don’t know what I must look like, I can’t hardly feel my own skin much less know the twist of my own appearance.

“That’s not possible.” Maeryn shakes her head. “You can’t kill him. You’re human.”

A hissing noise grabs my attention and as I lift my head, twin black eyes meet mine from the shadow across from the open door. A snake. I close my eyes with a curse. One of Kalix’s no doubt. He must have sent it to follow me after I’d slipped away from them at the arena.

As if to prove my assumption correct, seconds later the sound of pounding footsteps reach my ears and three large bodies fill the doorway. Ruen, Kalix, and Theos each take a look at the scene before them.

Me with a dead Mortal God guard under me, my dagger in his throat, to Maeryn and Niall, standing a few feet away, gaping at me in shock and horror.

I’m breaking all my rules today, it seems.

Chapter 44

Kiera

When I was fifteen, there’d been a particularly rough mission that required both Regis and me to work in tandem. It was a rare mission in which multiple targets were under the same contract. Regis and I had spent weeks scoping out the stronghold of a seedy brothel in Carth, a rather ordinary small city with a God Lord that didn’t seem all that interested in ruling so much as holing up in his castle and drinking night and day.

The disinterest of the God Lord had led to several human men rounding up young women with no protectors and forcing them to sell themselves to anyone with enough denza. Fortunately, one of the women that had been taken and forced into sexual servitude had actually been someone with a protector—a protector that had been away hunting due to their dire straits when she’d been taken.

The man had sold all his earnings from the hunt and offered his own body up to the Guild in exchange for a contract to kill the perpetrators who stole his sister from their dilapidated home. The earnings hadn’t been enough, nor had the offer of his future services and life to the Guild. The man had left one of the many taverns where Guild members reserve private rooms for client meetings with a hollow sort of look I’d seen so often in slums and in the faces of those who served time in Ophelia’s dungeons.

By some miracle, the man had returned two days later with a bag of denza coin heavier than a human skull. As he’d dropped it on the table before Ophelia, not even caring that he was one of few clients to ever meet her in person—much less me, who’d been standing at her back as an extra guard that day—he’d leaned over and said a phrase that, to this day, I’ve never been able to forget.

Evil is not the tyranny of the Gods. It is not even the cruelty of life. Evil is the act of apathy, and madness is begging for difference only when you need it. If you don’t save those women now … there will come a time when you are the one who needs saving, and it will not be evil to see you shatter under someone else’s reign of greed and madness. It will simply be indifference.

Those words had struck my heart in that moment. The truth of evil that I’d so long, by that point, assumed was clear. The Gods were evil. They were bad. They were conquerors who squashed all who did not bow before them.

Yet that man’s pleading eyes, the anger in the trembling of his limbs, everything in me had told me that, in order to get that money, he’d done unspeakable things. Perhaps even things that I would never do myself—and by fifteen, I had done enough of them.

Ophelia hadn’t even batted an eyelash as she’d lifted the bag of coin towards her. As ostentatious and grand as the man’s gesture had been, a simple glance was all it took for me to realize that even that amount wasn’t enough for a meeting with the leader of the Underworld, much less one of her top assassins in training.

Still, she had taken the man’s money and she had sent not one but two assassins. When Regis and I had found the women in the brothel, seen the decayed insides of the rancid building and the rags they wore—stained with all manner of fluids that made my insides churn—we had been only too happy to cut down any of the men who’d kept them there against their wills as they’d attempted to flee for their lives.

Not a single man had made it out. We’d killed them all, and we had relished in their slaughter.

Now, as I sit in the Darkhaven chambers high within the north tower of the Mortal Gods Academy of Riviere, I think about that man’s words. The last plea he’d had for his sister’s salvation and I hope that my actions against those disgusting pigs will at least grant me some sort of pardon of my own.

In spite of my actions over the last ten years, the people I’ve killed—those who certainly deserved it and those who may have been redeemed—still weigh on my chest, a burden that will never be lifted.

“So, you’re a…” Maeryn stares at me, her eyes wide as she paces across the room, her body moving with lithe grace as I sit on the center lounge before the fireplace.

“Mortal God,” I say, nodding. “Yes.” I grimace to think of what Ophelia will say when she finds out I’ve betrayed her so. Unlike the Darkhavens, Maeryn is not under any blood contract to keep my secrets. I eye her as she stops and blows out a breath.

I’ve performed enough evil deeds in my life that if possible, I would truly like to keep from killing her. I’ve not had a female friend before and I can imagine that if things for us had been different, Maeryn would have been a very good one.

Down below, in my private room, Niall is resting, a note left on the bedside to join us if he wakes before we can retrieve him and Aranea watching to make sure he doesn’t leave without alerting us. After being attacked by Rodney and Laria, it comes as no surprise that he fainted at the sight of the three Darkhavens gathered in Dolos’ office doorway.

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