Page 179 of Fated or Knot

Her role in Pack Ellisar’s disappearance slotted into place perfectly with this information. Laurel was incredibly dangerous. I should’ve withdrawn from her memory and destroyed the delicate inner workings of her psyche to disable the threat she represented, but something about the details around her gave me pause.

She was seized by deep agony, and it was only growing worse the more Unseelie she passed and ensnared in her song. Pain pulsed down her throat and pooled in her lungs until she could hardly draw breath. Tears streaked her face as she led the two Ellisar brothers to the prison and descended one jarring step at a time.

A firm hand swatted Laurel’s ass. She stiffened from the unwanted contact. “Guess you’re worth something after all,” Ellisar sneered.

She quivered in fear, immediately afraid he’d do something else while the guard on duty at the front of the prison had his gaze averted. He didn’t see or notice them, just as her song instructed.

This clearly wasn’t a willing partnership. Laurel thought in her usual whiny tone,“Don’t touch me! As soon as we do this, I never want to see you again.”

She pictured her old room in Osme Fen with longing. Back when she’d had some control of her surroundings and a clear path ahead of her. The Omega Masquerade and everything that’d happened afterward had ruined her life. And that, as she thought with the equivalent of a mental stomp of her foot, was“so unfair.”

“Where do you think they’re hiding him?” Dalstin whispered.

Her. My mother first, like we agreed,Laurel insisted in her song. She wove a request into the guard’s mind, asking where Cymora and Floris were being held. He smiled vacantly and pointed at the first two interrogation rooms across the hall.

They went to the first room and Laurel cautiously sang at the threshold while the two alphas ranged ahead of her.

“Just your mother in here. Close the door,” Ellisar said.

She passed through the small viewing area, still singing, her chest feeling heavier with dread.

“She doesn’t know. What is she going to do when she learns about the song?”

It was one of the only secrets she had, something she was proud of. As soon as she’d figured out what kind of magic she’d manifested a few years ago, she’d used it in subtle ways to avoid the worst of Cymora’s rages.

Also, she didn’t want to be Lark, wrung dry of her essence because she had a useful magical talent. She wasn’t thinking about how fearsome Cymora would be with the siren’s song under her thumb. She was just protecting herself the only wayshe could, which meant her demanding mother didn’t harp on her about another thing she couldn’t do perfectly.

Because, as powerful as the siren’s song was, Laurel didn’t understand how it worked, only that it did. Usually. And if she sang for too long, there were unpleasant consequences.

She resigned herself and walked into the interrogation room to see what’d become of her once proud mother. The Ellisar brothers were cutting her bindings as she hacked with a nasty cough. Cymora had dropped a dangerous amount of weight. The knobbiness of her joints and the prominence of her collar and cheek bones were stark. She was dirty and unkempt.

The older mermaid still lifted her chin and beheld her daughter and her magic for the first time. Laurel didn’t flinch from the hollows that darkened her face or the state of her body, but shedidrecoil from the glassy-eyed madness that looked back at her. That was new. Very new.

She thought about Cymora’s original order to save her, made shortly after they’d arrived at the palace. I recognized that they’d had their last visit before Cymora’s torture had truly begun. Compelled by her mother’s instructions to do whatever it took to get her out of that prison, Laurel had returned with the only allies she could scrounge up.

“She’s dying. This is hardly saving her,”Laurel thought.“Why couldn’t they have just killed her?”

“He was worth something after all. I thought he was full of air about the power hidden in his seed,” Cymora said in a husky slur as she took in her singing daughter. “But look at you.Magnificent.”

Cymora tried to stand. Her too-thin legs trembled as she put her weight on them, becoming a violent shaking as she attempted to straighten her swollen knees. After collapsing back into the chair, her eyes rolled back and she laughed discordantly.

Laurel rubbed a chill from her arms and watched as Dalstin lifted her mother’s body while shooting over a look of warning. They had an agreement, after all. Laurel had saved them from death at the train station in exchange for their assistance with rescuing Cymora. But they had pushed it off until last night, when they’d sensed Floris’s capture and overnight torture. Now the agreement was a simple exchange: they would save Cymora and Floris both.

Thankfully, the last Ellisar brother was in the next room over. Laurel went first, re-ensnaring the mind of the guard on duty, plus two more that happened to be walking by. The weight in Laurel’s chest inched down further from disabling the guards. Yet somehow she’d excluded Cymora and the Ellisar brothers from the effect of her song.

Dalstin shouted a warning before they entered this interrogation room. There was someone else already there, twirling a tool between his fingers.Click click snap. Click click snap.

Laurel recognized Rennyn as Fal’s father, and a cold, distant figure who’d scoffed at her when she’d whined over being confined to a palace bedroom. She swallowed nervously and wished she didn’t have to do this. But she had to enter the room first, so she did, and her heart nearly stopped when the dark elf king swung to face her, before his eyes glazed over from her song.

She nearly gagged. Putting him under thrall had been far more difficult than most of the other fae they’d met.

Interesting,I thought. My nerves rose independently of Laurel’s memory to have this many enemies near one of my fathers while he was rendered helpless.

The undisguised barkfolk in the interrogation chair looked up listlessly and mumbled when Ellisar took hold of his cheeksand exclaimed, “Fuck! Floris, look what they’ve done to you. We’re going to get you out of here.”

Laurel tilted her finned ear. Floris was wheezing, “We have to leave. We have to leavenow. She’s not worth it.”

She looked at him with a curled lip, disgusted by the state he was in. She’d never seen anything like it, it was as if he’d been torn in to by a wild animal. His bark was stripped away in several places, revealing spots of rent skin surrounded by dried blood and sap.“Ew, gross!”

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