Page 23 of A Palace of Smoke & Mirrors
A tense, lengthy pause strained between us while I waited for him to elaborate. He stared at me like he was trying to figure out what more there was to say.
“You’re my mate,” he said at last, “and the High Queen of Faerie—or you will be, one day—and that means I could have someone executed for looking at you the wrong way if the mood struck. But, if you recall, you were not enthused by my suggestion of his execution, so”—he made a wide, reverent gesture towards the sentry with both hands—“I put him here.Alive.” A heartbeat later, suddenly his voice was light and the words were coming out fast. “I cut out his tongue for the way he spoke to you, but heisalive. Can we move on now?”
My eyes were as round as a full moon and equally tormented as I steered my gaze back to the High King’s former sentry. I knew it was stupid and, quite frankly,infuriatingfor me to feel badly about a man who had put his hands on me with harmful intent, but old habits were hard to break. I felt something pulling at a loose thread of my heart as I scanned Hanson’s condition one last time.
The former member of the Guard had aged considerably since the last time I saw him, as if the magic preserving his immortal features had been drained from his very blood. Hesuddenly looked like a great-grandfather, almost blurring the lines of mortality; a relic of humanity with wrinkles and skin sagging beneath his eyes and chin.
Lucais had rendered him helpless. Stripped him bare. Robbed him of his strength and the power he possessed—derived from the position he had held in the High King’s Guard and for the simple fact that he was a man. He came armed with the implied maturity and intelligence of all the years and all the weapons forged for him by his predecessors. He had expected the world to honour it. And then Lucais took that, too.
I had to admit that part of me was thoroughly disgusted by the sight. Part of me was flattered, though. Even pleased.
A man had hit me, and Lucais had strung him up in the dungeon like a butcher’s kill of the day. He had not even given him the privilege of sitting down in his own cell, never mind the notion of a fair trial or the bail granted to reoffend at the mercy of a taxpayer’s money. He had done that. For me.
When I realised how deeply concerning it was for me to be romanticising the actions of a psychopath, my forehead creased. My therapist would have been mortified—but my therapist had tried to keep me out of Faerie with pills, so I decided that I couldn’t really be bothered about her opinion anymore.
Lucais put both hands on my shoulders, his fingers reaching so far down that the tips softly curled underneath my collarbone. He gently spun me around, bending his head to speak into my ear. “Don’t try to scream this time,” the High King whispered.
And then my eyes met the serpentine gaze of my father through a set of iron bars.
The scream coiled beneath my rib cage, ready to spring loose at the flip of a switch. It was tight, electrified, and raw. Lucais’s hands held it at bay, the soothing tendrils of his power coaxing a sense of calm and strength throughout my trembling body aspure, instinctive fear gripped my heart and nearly ripped it right out of my chest.
My father. In Faerie.
Lucais wrapped an arm around my waist, a life ring in rough seas.You’re safe. I’m here.
He was right.
I wasn’t alone. And when I wasn’t alone, I was always strong. I always had been, and I always would be, whether we were facing each other down in the human realm or in the land of the faeries.
Loosening my grip on the High King’s arm with my next steadying breath, I noticed that my nails had been digging crescent moons deeply into his flesh and felt a flood of regret colouring my face.
The ice-cold, emotionless eyes in the cell pierced me like the point of a fencing sword. They were the eyes I had once believed to be the mirrors of my own, as blue as a lagoon to reflect the seas in mine. After all, they were the only feature we shared. The long lashes, the clear colour.
But my mother had blue eyes, too, and my father wasn’t related to me at all. I was the unlucky product of a faerie fling—the result of my mother’s infidelity within the first year of her marriage to the blue-eyed man presently behind bars. The faerie father was nameless to me, and I had no desire to learn of his identity, but that did not change the truth.
The man in the prison cell was not my father.
But hewasthe man who had haunted me throughout my childhood and into my adult life.
He was the man who used his voice to silence the rest of our household. The man who used his fists when that didn’t work. He was the man who wore a bad mood like a cloak he never took off that dragged along the floor, leaving a trail of sadness and discomfort in its wake. He was the man who tread heavyfootsteps down the hall, whose weight caused the floorboards outside my bedroom to creak as he approached in the middle of the night. He was the man who never stepped across the threshold, but sometimes paused to reconsider his decision to leave me alone after he’d already turned and started to walk away.
In truth, I didn’t know what he would have done if he hadn’t left. But I would try to stay awake for as long as I could afterwards, and then I’d fall asleep picturing his hand around my throat as he squeezed the last of the air from my body because that’s what I thought I heard him thinking about.
He wasn’t capable of doing that any longer.
My father figure was alive. The mortal louse had been preserved. Although, he didn’t look like he was really aware of my presence or capable of coherent speech as he stared directly through the iron bars between us. I moved, tilting my head from one side to the other, and watched him, waiting for a reaction.
None came.
He was breathing, but not responsive.
The terror invoked by his face subsided as quickly as it had risen. I covered my mouth with my hand and waited for the indignation to take its place. I waited for some kind of anger to boil to the surface, for fury at Lucais for what he had done to come and slap me back to my senses.
It didn’t. I suddenly realised I would be waiting forever because it never would.
Lucais Starfire had done the one thing I’d dreamed about doing for longer than anything else. The desire was my earliest memory, my first big dream. Lucais had exacted the vengeance that all of my previous boyfriends had sworn to do in defence of my honour. He succeeded in the task that most of my father’s friends had set out to accomplish, and he did it without making a mess. He did it without seeking glory for besting the monster.Lucais had no trophy scars. No war stories. No expectations of me. He simply had the man incapacitated in his dungeon, and the safety of his mate and her family secured.
I blinked up at him in a stupor and cleared my throat before I tested out my shaky voice. “You have had my father here this whole time?”
