Page 70 of What Sleeps Within the Cove

Now he would never have the chance. He wouldn’t be able to know what it was to hold his mate in his arms. He wouldn’t know what it was to take me to our marriage bed. He wouldn’t ever know the joy of children and watching them grow.

He’d neverlive.

I was determined to make it so that she didn’t either.

A hand landed atop my arm, stopping me from taking the first steps to the dais where Mab had taken to marring the latest messenger to return with news of Caldris’s absence.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Eryx asked, holding me firmly. The messenger scurried off, retreating to the crowd at the back of the throne room as one of Mab’s daemons stepped up to the foot of the dais. She glared down at him, descending the steps with haphazard steps. She moved as if she stumbled with each one, and it was as she lifted her dress out of her way that I realized she was barefoot upon the stone floor. Her hair was disheveled as she stepped beneath one of the torches hanging from the ceiling, pulled back into a braid that appeared as if she’d raked her hair through it. Stray strands of black stuck out from her head, deep circles etched into the lines of her too-beautiful face. I’d never seen her look so desperate, so lost.

“You let him escape!” she screamed, stretching her arm up as high as she could. She struck the daemon across the face, its figure unmoving in spite of the power I knew must have been in that slap.

“Nila, he wouldn’t want this,” Eryx said, making me turn my attention to him. His words were so similar to Dravenor’s that for a brief moment, I felt the slick viscous coating of his blood on my hands all over again.

I didn’t know how theyknew, how they’d both seen through the deception that no one else seemed to spot. We’d been so careful, keeping our distance from one another. Never in the same room unless forced to be, never making eye contact or daring to look at one another when Mab forced us to be. He continued with his escapades and affairs, tearing my heart in two with every story that reached the Court of Shadows. It hurt even worse to know that he gave his body to others, that he shared it all while he hated himself for doing it, allbecause my father’s final request had been that Rheaghan protect me in his absence.

He was not alone in the affairs, in the physical part of our deception that was agonizing. It was how I knew the pain he felt deep in his center with every person he took to his bed, because I felt the same every time I did the same. No mated pairs would bed another. No mated pairs would tolerate the scent of another on their loved one’s skin.

Rheaghan bore it all to keep me safe, and somehow Eryx saw right through that to the pain tearing me in two.

“He did not suffer your absence all these years just to have you throw your life away now,” Eryx whispered, not even looking at me as he said the words. It was too low for anyone else to hear, and his attention was so rapt on the scene playing out with Mab and the daemon that had knelt at her feet that none would suspect he spoke of anything but the scene before us.

“He did not pass, my Queen,” the daemon said, his voice unnaturally deep and twisted into something dark and menacing.

“And what kind of life do I have? She won’t just let me go now that he’s dead. I’m her prisoner,” I snapped, my throat tight with the burn of tears. Nothing in this life was worth having, not so long as Mab lived and breathed.

“As are we all,” Eryx reminded me. He may have been free to return to the Autumn Court when Mab gave the go-ahead, but they just existed in a more distant cage. All who lived were condemned to this fate.

Even the humans in Nothrek were no longer safe from Mab’s rule.

“Where is Twyla?!” Mab shouted, shoving the daemon back as she turned her attention to the group that had formed in the back. We all tried to hide from Mab’s attention, but the Queen of Winter could not hide her bright, silver hair within the darkness of Tar Mesa. It was so like her son’s, the silver more gleaming and bright than the dark-tinged silver that the God of the Dead possessed, but the similarities were undeniable in it. That was where the similarities stopped however, her skin brown where his was more golden. She stepped forward, a pale blue dress trailing behind her. She was all ice and sharp edges, poised and proper in the face of Mab’s madness.

I couldn’t shake the horror of the coming altercation. Of the centuries this moment had been in the making. Twyla’s mate had been Mab’s husband, but whereas any other Fae would release theirspouse from the marriage bond, Mab had refused to allow Sephtis to be with his mate. They’d come together for one night, and that alone had been enough to conceive Caelum. It was a miracle where the witches’ curse usually meant fertility struggles, and I’d believed that had been for a reason.

So many of us believed it was the Fates’ hands twisting the threads to make it so, particularly when Caldris came into his power and revealed himself to be the only second-generation God in existence. That could not be for nothing, even if Mab had stolen him and bound him to her will.

“I am here, my Queen,” Twyla said, curtsying to the other Queen in a show of respect she did not deserve. I remained back against the wall, letting Eryx’s words offer me solace. I may not have been powerful, and I may not have had much to offer, but I could be there when Estrella emerged from Tartarus. I could offer her my assistance.

I could make my death mean something more than another frivolous casualty lost to Mab’s rage.

“Where is your son?” Mab asked the Queen of Winter, refusing to pay her any sort of dignity in return. Her dark eyes were bottomless pits, glaring at the Queen who was all lightness and femininity.

“I do not know, Highness. I fear you greatly overestimate my closeness to my son. I am not his confidante, for I barely know him thanks to you,” Twyla said, keeping her head bowed in respect. She couldn’t give Mab the answers she wanted, and I knew that none who were here were people Caldris would have trusted. Even if he had, he would not have given them information that could be extracted from them. Not when so many were bound to Mab’s will and the ones who were not were still able to suffer through her torments.

I was probably the last person she expected to have any information about his whereabouts, and yet I was the only one who could provide any sort of answers.

“Does it pain you to know that I raised your son as my own? That he has served as my weapon and I know him far better than you ever will?” Mab asked, a cruel smile lighting her face.

“And yet you still cannot find him now,” Twyla said back, her voice deceptively calm in the face of the insult Mab paid her. They both knew that what Mab had done to Caldris could hardly be called raising him, that Twyla would have loved him with everything she had if he hadn’t been taken from her. “If you know him so well, then where has he gone?”

Mab strode forward with quick steps, wrapping her hand aroundthe front of the Winter Queen’s throat. Her black nails dug into Twyla’s skin as we watched in horror. Her eyes swirled with madness, Twyla’s words bringing all of the monster to the surface. The challenge in them could not go unanswered, especially not when they’d come from the woman Mab already believed had stolen everything from her. Twyla had been her husband’s mate. The woman who made their marriage into something Sephtis wanted desperately to escape. “He’s gone after his little bitch of a fucking mate!” Mab yelled in the Winter Queen’s face.

Twyla should have felt fear. She should have seen her death in Mab’s eyes, but she didn’t seem afraid of it. She raised her chin, arching her neck to give Mab a good angle as she smiled back at her.

“Then they are beyond your reach, and your own desperation for more power has brought your demise. If they are together in Tartarus, then you’ve already lost,” the Queen of Winter said loudly enough for all in the throne room to hear her words. They were filled with knowledge that I did not share, as if her Lunar Witches had whispered the destinies of fate to her in all her years locked away in Catancia. It made me long to speak to Imelda once again, but the witch had vanished as soon as we’d failed to kill Mab—keeping hidden and out of sight to work in the shadows.

I had known, in the depths of my soul, that Estrella coming to Tar Mesa mattered. That her presence marked change, and that she was something more. Twyla’s words confirmed it as Eryx shifted to meet my gaze, nodding as if he too read the words that Twyla did not speak.

“I will not lose to that sniveling child and your Godsforsaken son that should have never been born,” Mab argued, her jaw clenching with her rage.

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