Page 50 of Dark Reign

Several Ianite lives had been lost trying to protect what was rightfully ours. Many of them blamed greed and elitism for our rise, but if you ask me, it was a simple matter of evolution.

Survival of the fittest.

At the thought of what they’d cost us, my fist tightened. I was among those who’d been forced to bury a loved one due to the human’s aversion to order, and that loss had been so deep I only narrowly survived it. Their insubordination had been the cause of the one person with whom I happily shared the Fairchild name being taken far too soon—my sister.

Contrary to popular belief, being the child of a monarch didn’t guarantee an easy life, or even a pleasant one. Regina had been the only person on this planet who knew that as well as I did.

When the time came for each Quadrant to produce an heir, our father’s thirst for political gain had convinced him to make several impulsive decisions. Among them, was the choice to step outside his marriage to the empress when she could only bear him daughters. Instead of allowing the next generation of Fairchild royalty to be a woman, he chose to take matters into his own hands, devising a plan with the empress’ handmaid to conceive a son. The plan worked, but it not only garnered him a son, he also fathered another daughter.

My sister, my twin.

She, unlike our half-sisters, never had a desire to wear the crown. Her one and only ambition was to join the Royal Militia to defend our hard-won governing system. And, in the end, it was this love of peace and order that cost her her life.

At the hand of a human.

These were not things I wanted to think about tonight, but they were impossible to avoid with how the evening played out in the end. I couldn’t comprehend the balls this girl had to waltz into such a highly esteemed gala. She must have known there would be extreme security measures, sentinels trained in the art of spotting an imposter.

The risk she’d taken was too great, which left me to wonder why she deemed being present important enough to have nearly died tonight.

I was still unsure why Julian stuck his neck out for her, but he had. He’d always been so levelheaded, keenly aware of social order due to his father’s staunch position on the subject. The Westowers, unlike my own family, steered clear of scandal for fear of muddying their name. But tonight, Julian had thrown that idea right out the window. And why, you ask?

For a girl.

Ahumangirl.

It was hard not to think I should’ve gone with my initial plan—one that involved me staying in my hotel room for the night, nursing a decanter of expensive bourbon, but here I was.

Disappointing my brothers had never been easy. They’d seen me at my lowest and it wasn’t lost on me that they, perhaps, needed me to be okay more thanIneeded me to be okay. On more than one occasion they spoke of how they were hopeful I’d get back to my old self, and I wanted that, too. I wanted to laugh again without the expression fading within seconds. I wanted to feel joy again. Hell, if I could feelanythingother than the sting of loss and separation, I would have been pleased.

This past year had been the hardest of my twenty-one on this planet, but these three had been with me even when my own family wasn’t.

My father’s wife despised Regina and I because of what we represented to her—the crown that had been stolen from her oldest daughter, being made to feel as if she wasn’t enough, and the disrespect my father had shown by being unfaithful. While, no, we were not responsible for those things, we were definitely the cause of them.

My twin and I were always regarded as the illegitimate children of a wayward king—by the empress and her daughters, by the media. Being seen in this light never bothered my father. All that ever mattered to him was that he be regarded as a great ruler, one willing to go to extremes to produce a male heir who would one day take the throne in a system that focused heavily on masculine leadership.

His drive, his unrelenting ambition, made him cold when it came to parenting. With his feelings toward my birth mother never reaching deeper than her being a means to an end, he had her put to death to appease the empress shortly after Regina and I were born. She, like my sister and I, were pawns in his political game. This made for a cold, detached upbringing. One in which Regina and I were often one another’s only means of comfort.

So, when I lost her … I lost so much of myself, too.

The highly charged conversation going on around me slowly bled into my thoughts, and soon, Silas and Levi’s voices replaced the sound of my own internal one.

“This got way out of control,” Silas commented. “I didn’t … I had no clue he’d take things so far.”

“We have to be rational,” Levi chimed in. “It’ll all work out, we just have to find a way to—”

“Find a way to what?” I scoffed, feeling the scowl set on my face. “There’s nowayhe’ll get out of this. He’s dug himself into a hole no one, not even the Presiding Emperor himself, can pull him out of. He’sclearlythinking with the wrong head,” I added. “And now, because he couldn’t see past a pretty face and nice tits,we’reinvolved in his mess, too. We were seen with the two of them, proceeded to return to the gala where we alsoliedfor the two of them,” I huffed.

I kept to myself that I wasn’t totally blind to how Julian had gotten sidetracked. There was no denying the heavy sense of attraction that plagued me when I first laid eyes on her, but it was nothing I saw fit to speak about thenornow.

Then—because one of my closest friends had his sights set on her and it went against an unspoken code.

Now—because I’d come into knowledge of her being human.

Not to mention, she was trouble.

Bile rose in my throat and tension spread to my limbs as I allowed myself to think back on that first meeting. I remembered the instant Julian reached his destination and our steps halted at the feet of one of the most mesmerizing women I’d ever met. She stood out from all the others, including those we claimed as dates for the evening. It was as if she’d been dropped into our world.

Ours.

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