Page 180 of Fated or Knot

“She’s not worth it. She’s not. She’s not,” Floris lisped.

“Did this fucker torture you?” Dalstin interrupted, inclining his hood toward Rennyn.

“Y-yes. Yes he did. He hurt me. They hurt me.”

Even in this memory, my heart threatened to stop as everyone’s attention shifted to the motionless dark elf king. The barkfolk had armed themselves with daggers, and Ellisar shifted his hold on his weapon into an underhand grip.

A bead of sweat drifted down Laurel’s nose to blend in with the tear tracks across her face.“Oh no. I have to do something,”she thought.

She didn’t have any love for us. The feeling was completely mutual. But we Unseelie hadn’t threatened her with bodily harm or other assaults. We’d been as cordial as could be expected toward the preferred daughter of an entitled, abusive female.

In comparison, Pack Ellisar fully intended to replace Lark with Laurel in a twisted echo of fate, if they could not secure my pack’s omega as their mate. And because she’d granted them partial immunity to her song—somehow, she didn’t know how she had or how to take it back—she was vulnerable to being bitten into their pack with no way to fight back against three alphas.

Suffice it to say, Laurel hated these barkfolk just as much as we did, if not more. So, she did the one thing that could’ve gotten them all killed on the spot.

She stopped singing with a dramatic choking noise that wasn’t entirely for show. As the siren’s song faded and the last notes hung in the air, she bent double and vomited up the liquid weight that’d settled in her lungs. Pack Ellisar scrambled and cursed her for being worthless, abandoning her in that room as she threw up blood. It leaked from the seams of her gills too, drowning her in metal and tears.

The sheer unpleasantness had me cringing, but I stayed with her, needing to know if my father escaped this situation, or not.

When she straightened, it was to come face to face with the dark elf king. The misty befuddlement had faded from his gaze. He tilted his head, regarding her with a blank expression. Not his usual cheerful act, nor the smile of Unseelie mischief, and not even the air of calculation he tried so hard to mask. “That looks quite unpleasant, girl,” he said.

“Sorry,” she croaked. Her stomach lurched and she swallowed bile, trying not to puke on his fine leather boots a second time. The blood and pain always came after she pushed her magic’s limits too far and this had been a taxing song to carry.

“Why am I apologizing? He’s going to kill us all!”Laurel knew the Ellisar brothers had to be huddling just beyond this room with Cymora. Without her siren’s song, they couldn’t get out of the interrogation room without alerting a guard.

More tears blurred her vision before they fell. If she wanted to get out of this alive, she had to put him back under thrall and escape to her uncertain future with her damaged mother and the lecherous, cowardly pack relying on her.

She wasn’t going to die to spite them all, not today. It was better to be a coward too and survive to see another day. “I’m really sorry,” she sniffled.

Rennyn looked through her as she drew breath and his blank expression tightened with understanding. She felt like a butterfly pinned to a board. That red gaze was piercing straight through to the truth of who she was and what was happening. Something within her, a kernel of self-preservation, warbled a warning.

She began to sing and pain razored through her lungs anew. Before the first notes could confuse his mind, he covered one of his ears. His gaze remained shrewd on hers.You didn’t see me. You won’t remember me,she sang in his mind to the haunting melody of the siren’s song.

It wasn’t working! She’d messed up, just like she always did when put under pressure. She never did anything right, but at least this time she would take Pack Ellisar down with her.

“I will remember. How could I forget you, li’l fish?” Finally, he blinked, and let his hand fall from his face. The flash of pity in his regard faded as his eyes misted over once more.

Laurel flinched away from him, her heart thundering in her chest. He could’ve hurt her with the sharp-edged tool he still held, before they’d rescued Floris. A quick stab to the throat and there would be no more song. He’d heard her singing, but remained unaffected by it while he held one of his ears closed. Yet, he’d surrendered that power and let her put him under the song’s thrall once more.

“Why?”

She wondered why he would let her escape throughout her group’s trip back out of the palace, and presumably beyond. I only lingered in her memory long enough to confirm that she escaped without doing any further harm to him. When Iemerged and released her memories of the day, she was already well on her way to dreaming.

The quiet of my own mind enveloped me. After experiencing Laurel’s jittering nerves for myself, it was a relief to have a sense of stability back. I didn’t need to dig into any more of her memories to understand what had to happen next.

Instead of her mind blooming with color, it darkened toward dreamless unconsciousness. This made finding the manifestation of her dreaming mind a little harder, since dreams always centered their dreamer in a way I intuitively understood. I found Laurel in a corner of her mind. She waited for morning with her chin resting on the knee joint of her mermaid tail, fully unfurled in its glory of silvery teal fish scales. She’d fallen asleep unhappy and the feeling clung to her now, lingering overhead like a cloud of melancholy.

“Laurel,” I whispered, rousing her mind gently to the fact that I was here with her.

She blinked slowly, before her gaze turned toward me and focused. “Hi, Kauz,” she said, still waking up enough to talk to me. Fear marked her face with pale strain after a few more moments. “Wait, it’s really you, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said mildly.

She retreated further into a tight ball, starting to tear up and weep. “I’m sorry.”

I shook off my first impulse to look down at her with pity, just like Rennyn had. I’d only known her by her bratty behavior, but in this case it seemed the tears were warranted. She was in danger. “No,I’msorry. If I had paid more attention, I would’ve noticed you’re under Cymora’s compulsions too. Are you sleeping in a safe place?”

Sniffling, she nodded.

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