Page 22 of A Reign of Roses
“Don’t,” he chastised. “You’ll wrinkle the face of my queen.”
When I curved my mouth down farther he only smirked and waded to stand under a steaming marble spigot shaped as the mouth of a fanged fish. He angled his neck, allowing the steaming fresh waterto cascade down his marred back. “Maddox tells me you’ve been questioning Wyn about my motives.”
My eyes betrayed me, slamming into Maddox’s cold, unflinching gaze. Why I felt surprised was beyond me. He was snide and callous and would clearly lick the ground Lazarus walked upon for a chance to move up in his ranks. But to have spied on Wyn and me…listened to our private conversations…
Maybe what upset me was the realization that I’d not had a single moment of true privacy since I’d been brought here.
But Maddox’s smug lips curling upward had no effect on me now. Not compared to the fear in Wyn’s dismayed hazel eyes. His bobbing throat sent waves of lighte rippling down my spine. Some strange instinct that confusedhealwithprotect.
“I assumed you would have summoned me to your bed by now,” I admitted to Lazarus, bracing myself. “But that’s why I’m here, right?”
“Close those legs, eager girl.”
Over the rush of water I heard Maddox cease his incessant atonal hum to snicker.
“The Lumerian Solstice is in a few days time. We celebrate the bountiful harvest at the end of autumn with a ball each year, and I’d like you to attend as my betrothed.”
I scowled at him. “Could you not have just forced me? Why bring me here and ask?”
“That would not be very befitting of your future husband, would it? Have you been treated poorly while here, Arwen? No dungeon, no torture, no suffering. Frankly, I’m still waiting on your gratitude.”
I opened my mouth to tell him he’d be waiting a long damn time for that, but—
Heneededme. He needed me to behave beside him. To attendwillingly. Maybe I could use this audience, this slight power I held, for information.
“What is it you celebrate? There is no harvest. There are no crops for the people of Lumeratoharvest.”
Lazarus’s grin was withering in its cruelty.
What had Kane told me all those months ago in his wine cellar? That lighte was a resource born into every Fae from Lumera’s earth, and if it was overused—either from the reaping of Lazarus’s citizens or the influx of crowded slums—the land itself suffered.
I pointed to my bruised veins from months of harvesting. “Your land is dying because of this. It’s why the air outside my room is choked with dirt. Why it rainedfirethis morning. Because you are juicing your own people to the pulp.”
His teeth gleamed through the steam as he jerked his chin toward my veins again. “Perhaps thatisthe bountiful harvest we celebrate here in Solaris.”
Of course. Lighte. All the lighte that allowed his people to live in excess while everyone outside the capital suffered.
And all the lighte he was gathering for his war.
“You’ll change your mind on my practices soon enough,” he added. “When we take Evendell and raze it of all the useless mortal lives, you and I will have fresh land for our offspring. We’ll build Evendell into something grander than even Lumera’s former glory. And one day only the truest Fae will inhabit that realm. Don’t you want a world of creatures just like you? Isn’t your power, your lightelonely?”
Rage gripped me, bruising my heart with its iron grasp. “All those people, murdered…I will never aid you in such a quest. I willneverbear you offspring. And I will never attend some ruthless, barbarian ritual disguised as a phony celebration.”
Interest, not irritation, flickered in his depthless silver eyes as he prowled closer through the water. In a low, rough voice he said, “Octavia has been insatiable over you. Just dying to see you crawl over her coals. And with burns like those”—he ran a single pruned thumb across the top of my breast and I jumped backward, my skin writhing—“I’d imagine you have a particularly strong aversion to open flame on bare flesh. Shall we find out?”
No sooner did he say the words than the bath doors flew open with a calamitous crash. I flinched despite myself.
Octavia strode in, dreary gray dress hanging loosely off her bony figure and mopping up water as she walked across wet floors.
“Out,” he instructed me, voice harsher than it had yet been.
Despite the heat from the bubbling springs and the steam rising off my skin, my veins had filled with ice. I paused, shivering. I could stay put and be forced from the water, or climb out of my own accord and voluntarily suffer Octavia’s torture. And not just any torture—not a beating or a whipping—but the burning of my flesh.
I—I couldn’t do it.
Smoke-scented visions of Halden’s white-hot iron pressed against my abdomen in a damp Peridot jungle sent my fingers trembling.
I had a little bit of lighte—I was not completely powerless.
