Page 13 of A Reign of Roses
The God only tsked. “Your intentions are what matter to me.”
He had said he served the realms. Perhaps it was my integrity I needed to prove.
“You can decree the future, I’m sure. See all, know all…Tell me I am not the best chance we have to rid this world of my father. Tell me I don’t wish to save the lives of those threatened by him more than anyone alive.Nobody’sintentions are more pure.”
The God only laughed. “Hers were.”
“Arwen’s?” I hadn’t said her name aloud in over two months. The syllables slid cruelly across my tongue. Profound grief I thought I’d buried rose up my throat and coiled around my jaw.
And I couldn’t stand it—couldn’t stand another moment on this earthly plane knowing she wasn’t here, too. Here was my only chance at giving her death an ounce of meaning and I couldn’t convince him my intentions were pure? “I carry her will inside my heart. Consider her virtue, her morality, my own.”
Whether he detected the tenor of pain in my voice, I wasn’t sure. The God’s unflinching gaze only burrowed into mine.
Despite how I was breaking, I pushed on. “Look inside my soul. Tell me I don’t mean it.”
The Fae God considered me.
His judging gaze seared across my tensed brows, my burning eyes. My fingers, splintering the wooden arms of the extravagant chair. A sensation stirred in my chest, and I wondered if the man had the ability to somehow dig his hands through my ravaged heart.
The Fae God’s jaw stiffened. A breeze rustled the gauzy curtains. The wisps of smoke drifted from the incense over to the table until ash fell softly on the rich mahogany. I tried to draw in one single even breath.
When his glare found mine again, a sliver of hope sparked in my chest.
“You must swear on everything you own. Your kingdom, your coin, your people, that you will—”
“I willkill him. I swear it more ardently than anything I’ve ever sworn.”
“Swear on her. That he will perish, one way or another.”
The urge to bark out a laugh almost knocked me from my chair. “I swear on Arwen’s grave. I will do itforher. In her honor.”
The Fae God only scowled, but triumph soared inside my chest. I had him.
“I must warn you, boy, even if I were to try, I have never done such a thing. In the earliest days, when there was only Lumera, full-blooded Fae were born when Gods copulated with mortals…”
That was how Arwen had been conceived and born full-blooded—the mating of a Fae God and her mortal mother.
“But,” he went on, shaking me from my recollection of that rainy night outside Mariner’s Pub, “I have never taken a Fae and rebirthed him for the sole purpose of turning him true.”
I wasn’t clever enough to trick a Fae God. I was a mere blunt instrument. “Try.”
“There may be grave consequences.”
“I know what I am asking.”
“The risk—”
“Do,” I gritted out, “your worst.”
A single wave of that hand once more and an elegant, elongated wineglass appeared at the table before me. Not wine, but thick, bone-pale liquid inside.
His eyes were vicious. “Drink.”
That color— “What is it?”
The God only smirked. “You know what it is.”
Lilium.
