Page 8 of A Book of Royals and Deities

I can’t make myself reply to Ruelle, but I leave her with Hettie and go out to find Ziven, which speaks volumes. I should leave. I should run out of this mansion and get on Maeve and just fucking leave. It’s a mansion of traps, and I fell into each and every one of them so perfectly that I never noticed my heart was stolen along the way. Ziven is in a cosy room opposite, which I’ve also never seen. It has a big dollhouse nestled between bookcases jammed with books I want to read, and three large sofas around a fireplace. Thick cream rugs line the floors, and Ziven is standing in front of the flames, watching me over his shoulder as I stop in the doorway.

“I’m leaving tomorrow morning. I need you to let me go, and it’s best for both of us.” He crosses his thick arms and turns toface me. “I can’t trust Daegan not to stab me in the back at the first chance he gets, and I want to find my mother. I want to make sure she is safe, and I haven’t thought past that. I know while I’m here, I’m not safe. I never told you everything about my past, Ziven, but just know I went through hell, mentally and physically, and my best friend died to get me out. I didn’t tell you that I had given up. I had broken.” I linger on the wordbrokenbecause it doesn’t feel like a big enough word for how I felt. “I broke and shattered until there was nothing left. Kyrell, he loved me like a brother I never had. He believed in me from the beginning, and he never once gave up on me. When he died, I promised myself I would never give up. That I would live and fight for all things life had to offer me.” My voice breaks. “And if I stay here with you, I’d be giving up everything he died for. I’d be staying with a man who used and lied to me, who could have told me the truth and didn’t. I’d be letting myself be used again, and I can’t do that.”

“Storm.” He whispers that nickname for me that I used to hate, but now it makes my heart jump. It makes me feel alive and loved…wanted. I’m desperate to be wanted by him. The man I screamed was my enemy, who I slept with and hated as much as I enjoyed. “Stay here with me. I know I don’t deserve to ask that of you, but please, stay.” He walks to me, and my heart pounds as he goes to his knees. The Moon king is kneeling in front of me. “Let me tell you everything, and let me fix it. I will beg you, I will plead and grovel. Fuck, I’d do anything for you. Just don’t leave.”

“I know I can’t trust you. You lied a lot, Ziven. Daegan told me all these things that you did for me in the Decidere, and I thought you were trying to kill me. It’s almost funny how blind I was to this.” Neither of us laughs and my hands itch to run through his dark hair. “How getting your friend to throw me off the bridge was actually you helping me get to the better pillars, how yousent your dragon in to help me that one time, how you came in and you helped me that other time. I want to believe that you’re on my side, that it’s me and you, but you’ve hated me since the beginning. You called me a traitor and, in the same breath, you saved me. I’m not Atilia, but I’m paying her debts.”

He still doesn’t say anything, and I can’t stop the words from getting out. “I’ve read the book, the princess’s own diary, everything she said. She was obsessed with you, and I don’t think you felt the same from what she wrote. I’m. Not. Her. I won’t die in here because she loved you and Daegan, and she wanted to save you all. I’m not a traitor, or a liar, or any of the names you’ve called me.”

“You are a storm, sent from the deities to smack into my world with the face of my dead best friend. You are the storm I never wanted but I needed, and I won’t let you run away from me. Fuck.” He pauses and rises to his feet. “I looked at you in the beginning and saw her. I called you a traitor because it’s what she deserved to be called for what she did.”

Tears fall down my cheeks. “She saved you.”

“She doomed us. I was never given a chance to fight for my family and this place… We became shells of our former selves by being locked in here. We forgot who and what we were, where time stopped and the world carried on. This wasn’t good for us,” Ziven finishes. “She was a spoiled princess who got everything from anyone she ever wanted, without care or need for it, except from me. Fucking hell, Story, I wanted to hate you from the beginning when we met. I lost nearly everything. My kingdom, my dynasty, my parents, my people in the wars here, and being trapped in this fucking mansion cost me the life of my sister in the end. I’ve never been able to show Hettie anything outside of these mansion doors, and we are trapped here, endlesslytrapped, immortally trapped, and your soul was the very reason. When I first I saw you, fuck, I hated her and blamed you.”

I wince at the fury in his voice, but his voice softens, softer than I think he’s ever spoken to me. “Then you stole my heart on that first night when I kidnapped you, when you kicked me in the balls and stared into my face like a true warrior. I was done for. I knew right then and there you were everything I had been waiting for. I felt a connection between us then, and I kept trying to convince myself that helping you was my foolish way of keeping you alive. Daegan called a council meeting between Mazzis, him, and me to agree that killing you when the time was right was the only way, but I didn’t agree to it.” He comes to me, cupping my cheek with his hand. “There is so much history to tell you, so much I want to explain, but know that you’re safe when you’re with me. I would never let any harm come to you ever again. The magic would never have broken this place if you didn’t love me.”

He moves an inch closer, and I breathe in his burning jasmine scent. This is the man who has been inside my body, claimed every inch of me, and he’s the first man I have ever wanted for myself. “You’re the reason that I want a future, Story. I’d given up before you, too. We found each other, and I want everything with you. Don’t leave, because I love you. I will love you until we are sparks of embers floating into the skies to dance with the dragons.”

“Story…you’re alive.” I turn round to see Kyrell standing a few feet away in the doorway. If Ziven claiming to love me wasn’t enough to stop my heart with shock, seeing my dead best friend is. Gone is his brown hair, the sun-kissed tan and bright eyes… What is left is a vampyre standing in the home of the dragon-riding fae.

Chapter Five

Page Five?—

Twilight comes twice. Once before the sun

and once before the moon…

Moonlight blasts out of the air to cast silver shadows around the edges of the room that almost blind me. They head for Kyrell like arrows, and I’m running before my mind can catch up that Kyrell is alive. Kyrell, who I saw brutally murdered to save me, is somehow alive. On instinct, I feel something tap down my spine before red light pours from my body, burning the ground at my side in a way I’ve never seen. I slam straight into Kyrell’s cold body, and he wraps his arms tightly around me without an inch of fear. The moonlight stops inches away from us and disappears within a heartbeat.

“Storm, what the fuck are you doing?!” Ziven shouts in horror, and I get it. I’m hugging a vampyre, and he has no idea who this is.

“This is my best friend, Ziven,” I whisper, lifting my head back. A flow of emotions wash over me: relief, shock and some bit of pain, knowing this couldn’t have been an easy change for him to become the vampyre he is now. I’ve never hugged Kyrell and felt such cold leaking from him. Emyr was never cold like this. Tears fall down my cheeks as Kyrell smiles at me with all the love and kindness I’ve always seen and felt I never deserved.

It’s a kick in the chest, seeing that smile on a vampyre’s face. His brown hair is now silver, his skin is deathly pale, and it matches the drained colours of his eyes. There is nothing vibrant about him now, except for that smile. Even dead and turned into some form of a vampyre, Kyrell’s smile lights up the room. “By the deities, how are you here?”

He lets me go, taking a step away. He has a white shirt and dark trousers on that are torn and ash stained. Ziven’s firm hand curls around my waist as he steps to my side. Kyrell’s eyebrows raise as he looks at that hand and then to Ziven. He whistles as he looks Ziven over and then winks at me, making my cheeks burn. Ziven isn’t amused. “How the fuck did you get in here, vamp?” He looks down at me. “And who said you didn’t have powers, Storm? Turns out death was the key to them for you. Please do not burn my floors.”

Powers?I glance down at the floor and the line of burnt wood where I ran.I did that?

“Easily. If you want to keep her safe, I would suggest you make sure the door’s security is a lot better. I’ve been looking for Story for two months.” Kyrell’s tone softens. “And I’m so happy I’ve found you, little Tory.”

My new powers, the burn marks, none of it matters as I stare at Kyrell in shock. He is alive.

“Careful,” Ziven growls, and I know the only reason Kyrell isn’t dead is because Ziven knows he saved my life and got me out. “The only reason you’re not moon dust is because she clearly trusts you.”

“Ziven.” I look up at him and he drops his devastatingly beautiful eyes down to me. “This is Kyrell, the man who protected me like a brother. Asked nothing of me until the day he told me to live and run. He died for me.” That seems to be enough for Ziven as his body loses some of the tight tension and his shoulders drop an inch. I gulp and turn to Kyrell. “How? You’re a vampyre, but I didn’t know vampyres could be turned until I came here and learnt the stories of the first vampyre. They are only born now.”

“Prince Emyr has worked out how to change even the dead into this…” He waves at himself, and sickness rises in my throat even at the thought of Emyr, let alone him messing with Kyrell’s body.

I look at the space where his chest, where his heart, should be, and I know it can’t be there anymore. “I—I watched the king rip your heart out and throw you on the floor like you were nothing. How are you still alive after that?”

“I don’t have a heart anymore. Not physically. Turns out you don’t need it to be brought back to the living.”

“What is it like to die?” Ziven questions. “And are you a threat to Story? Are you in control?”

These are valid questions, but the way Ziven asks is nothing short of a command. “Dark magic brought me back, and I remember nothing of death except a feeling of…well, I can’t describe it very well. As for my control, I do not know. I feed daily from animals in the forest, and I have never touched a fae.I don’t intend to either, even if it hurts not to feed right. I might be in pain, but I will never willingly hurt anyone.”

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