Page 178 of Fated or Knot

Gorgeous. Just like I thought.I raised my index finger with an unnecessary flourish of my hand, almost missing my cue as we counted up together. The leads were hostile to one another at first, thinking they were having a real duel before the play showed them in a competition, and inevitably a romance.

I coaxed the full song from her, smiling brilliantly all the while. It’d be okay if I never got her on a stage with me. I could covet her singing voice and keep moments of this to myself.Mine, mine, mine,hissed my alpha instincts.

As we finished, I leaned forward, tipping her face up to mine. Stars, Iwasa rut-crazed fool. I was going to wake up with her taste seared on my tongue, and I couldn’t bring myself to regret it. My lips were just skimming hers as I heard, “Fal, wake up.”

I opened my eyes, and instead of seeing my mate eager for a deep lip lock, I was face down on a pillow, my limbs tangled up in Lark’s nest. Marius stood over me, already washed and dressed and flapping a piece of paper over my ear. “Wake up,” he growled with a hint of his forceful bark.

“There’d better be a good fucking reason for this,” I snarled back.

He handed me a note that I took in blearily.

Dearest Sons,

There has been quite an upset in my plans. I will require your assistance after all. How do you feel about an endurance test? Don’t get too excited. You’re not going to like this.

Father didn’t sign it. He didn’t have to. My heart thudded at double its usual speed as I crumpled the note and rushed to get ready for the day and whatever else was coming next.

50

KAUZ

Laurel was deep in the second stage of rest when I found her mind and wandered its paths a bit. I noted with a hint of wry amusement the vacuous space as I delved deeper in the tunnels of her psyche to the deepest reaches where her experiences and being were woven in pulsating strands of color.

And then I looked up and sighed, “Fuck.”

Torn, forgotten memories clotted her mind, shorn off with jagged edges and tangled in a disturbing, but all too familiar scene. The damage reminded me of what I’d once seen in Lark’s mind. Instead of being forced to forget countless small moments, however, Laurel suffered from fewer, but larger, memories removed. Deep gouges had been taken from the mermaid we hadallbrushed off and ignored, pushing her aside just as callously as she and Cymora had always done to Lark.

I reached for one and pushed past the pain that gripped me from attempting to make sense of what she’d lost. Cymora’s voice invaded my mind, risen to a forceful pitch.“…Is just a farmhand! You will obey me, you impertinent twit. Forgetabout him and set your sights higher. On someone youdeserve, asmydaughter. A male, or a pack of them, to elevate us.”

“Okay.”The response was a watery whisper. Flashes of a young merman flitted by my eyes. He was always dirty and sweaty, dressed in muck-stained overalls. But he smiled with open affection at Laurel, a fact now stained with an echo of her regret. A male she was forced to forget.Jerrin.

I released a soft sound of denial and sat down along one of the paths of her memories. My pack usually wasn’t this sloppy. Just because Laurel didn’t announce her compulsion as clearly as, “yes, Stepmother” didn’t mean she didn’t also grow up under a female who had no qualms about trapping children in cruel vows. We’d completely missed that she was in the exact same situation as our mate had once suffered.

I held my forehead and thought back. When Cymora gave her a direct order, Laurel said…okay. I was pretty sure she always said “okay” and that fragment of memory seemed to support it.

Far too easy to overlook, in the tapestry of family dynamics we’d had to decipher on the train ride to Serian. And while I doubted my brothers would care much that we’d overlooked the bratty beta’s suffering, we all understood that missing even one small aspect of a complicated situation could have dire consequences.

I waited for her to settle into the third stage of rest to take a peek at her short term memory. But I suspected I would need to dive deeper to see her perspective on more than one event to truly understand her side of things.

Don’t empathize with her too soon,I tried to tell myself. If the fishling had chosen to ally with Pack Ellisar and somehow assisted their disappearance, she would have to die just like her mother. No matter what she’d suffered or that we hadn’t helped her when we could’ve.

But I was already looking back, turning over the stones of the past with how we’d interacted with Laurel. Was there something more there, hidden underneath her immaturity?

I sensed her mind relaxing and her short term memories went zinging by me. Those threads halted when I held out my hand, gathering up everything her mind was processing toward storage. Certain ones buzzed, signaling trauma or strong negative emotions. I started there, plunging into Laurel’s recollections.

I viewed the world through Laurel’s eyes, a hitchhiker in her head for the duration of her memory. “Hurry up,” hissed a male alpha next to her. Laurel’s thoughts supplied his name: Dalstin. The middle brother of Pack Ellisar, wearing a hooded cloak too heavy for the mild spring weather in Neslune. A faint halo of illusion magic over the cloth smoothed out his bark-covered appearance.

I’m going as fast as I can,Laurel replied without words. She was singing to his mind? It was surreal to witness. She couldn’t carry the wordless tune, which had a heavy physical weight in her lungs, and rush through the familiar halls of the palace at the same time.

Pain radiated from her chest as she maintained her haunting song. Her thoughts were hopelessly fragmented, nearly panicked as she tried to remember where to go in the deeper recesses of my home.

“Shut up,” another male snarled at Dalstin. This voice, I recognized from Lark’s worst memories as belonging to Ellisar himself. He also wore a cloak, though he didn’t have his hood drawn, revealing a dryad illusion layered over his face.

You don’t see us. You don’t notice us,Laurel sang. I observed guards, servants, and other palace officials turn their heads away or simply continue about their day like Laurel and the two alphas weren’t there.

I thought,Oh, stars. It couldn’t be.But there was only one kind of magic Laurel could be wielding to achieve this.

The siren’s song. In our darkest days of war, Unseelie had butchered countless mermaids to force this particular ability into extinction. Yet here it was centuries later, wielded ponderously by a beta. As a fellow beta, I could label what history would call her: some random nobody. Not an illustrious omega or a powerful alpha.The fishlingsang with the willpower-altering magic that her ancestors had bled and died for.

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