Page 214 of What Lies Within Blood & Heirs

All shackled and bound, Garrik noted.

He was tempted to bare his teeth. To rip into the king for it. But Garrik schooled his face into venomous calm and waited for a female to walk by his side.

The dismissal was clear as Garrik flicked his hand at the female whose hands trembled, sloshing the contents inside the decanter. His gaze, analytical and piercing, locked onto Ladomyr's eyes as they shifted, the king resorting once more to the drug that nullified Garrik’s powers of persuasion.

Smokeshadows gathered around Garrik’s shoulders. Whispering down his biceps and around the rolled sleeves of his tunic until they flowed like a fog across the table.

Sweat seeped from Ladomyr’s plump neck. He gripped the armrests of his chair tighter as darkness coiled around his chalice.

With an animalistic cock of his head, Garrik willed Smokeshadows to swallow the cup and displayed his empty palm beside him. Shadows whorled, producing the chalice a moment later. “Something wrong, Ladomyr?” Garrik asked.

Ladomyr moved to answer, but Garrik snapped his fingers at the female, at his empty cup on the table, and waited. She filledthe cup meant for him and stepped away when shadows dawned it in front of the king.

“Drink,” Garrik growled, trembling the room.

He didn’t move.

Garrik only needed one arch of his brow in warning before Ladomyr threw it against his lips, swallowing it whole. They waited in the unsettling silence, but when nothing happened, Ladomyr nervously broke Garrik’s stony stare.

“Will the High King be joining us for the Hunt?”

Garrik sighed, unamused. He had hoped Ladomyr would be gurgling from his mouth by now. With nothing but a quick thought, shadows whorled inside the cup meant for Ladomyr, misting away from the bourbon they provided before Garrik indulged in it and replied, “The High King cares not for his own traditions. Why would he bother with yours?”

A serpentine smile crossed Ladomyr’s face.

Something rotten like corpses in the heat of summer wavered across Garrik’s senses, drowning out the king’s pointless rambling. The familiarity of it was unsettling…

Garrik blinked, thoughts narrowing slightly to … nothing. For a moment he scanned the room, noticing the way Ladomyr waited as if he expected Garrik to respond.

Marked One, Ladomyr had said—or at least thought so as he refocused. “Marked One? Do tell me you would not be foolish enough to admit that you failed to”—Garrik shook his head, grasping words that seemed to not be there—“failed to.” He pressed his fingers to the bridge of his nose, deepening a breath as nausea crept up his throat.

That smell.Garrik recognized it, but where?

“Failed to?” Ladomyr repeated, tilting his head.

Not by his command, a shadow wisped from his hand, dancing around his face, slow and lethargic, before it died away.

“High Prince?”

Flashes of a darkened room …

The rolling of a glass bottle across a dusty shelf. An emerald hue shimmering inside as sadistic inked eyes?—

Garrik stood, pushing his chair back with such force it broke into pieces against the wall. But the room rotated; the floor shifted.

He stumbled backward. His sword—he went to grab it, but the movement refused his will.

Grabbing the table edge, Garrik attempted to steady himself when a boot collided with his chest, slamming him to the floor before another rammed his face.

Blood splattered the floorboards. Garrik braced himself with one arm, only to be kicked again. Numbness he had not experienced in decades washed over him. Surging through his nerves as his limbs fell limp.

Garrik’s vision spun. Every breath. Every sound. All sensations hit him like a damning blow until it all became too much. Overstimulating his senses like it did in that damned bedchamber and dungeon cell.

The shields.

He tried—triedto move his fingers. To twist that black ring.

But Garrik could not move—could not speak. Only his conscience remained as he willed his mind to clear.

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