Page 16 of A Reign of Roses
But Maddox’s atonal humming didn’t help. It rang through the now-empty, echoing halls like a death march as the three of us walked, my soft-soled slippers light next to Maddox’s and Wyn’s heavy boots. I waited to be led before doors that would open to a damp, darkened bathhouse like the one where I’d grown up. Waited for the smell of stagnant water and sweat and furtive joining.
Instead, I was brought before an entire wing guarded by at least twelve more kingsguards.
Maddox and Wyn guided me past the silver sea of men, and the wing yawned open for us. A sterile glass atrium—cold and spare. A few marble pillars, to hold the impossibly high ceilings upright. Iron bookcases. Twin white chairs without a single divot or stain, made of the fur of something once woolly and tufted and thick. Likely a creature I couldn’t conjure even with my imagination at its most boundless.
And five glossy black doors inside all that glass. Each with one ruby-red handle that made me think of a bloodied hand desperately attempting to pry it open. That, and a different golden symbolaffixed to each door’s center: a moon, a sun, a wave, a leaf, and a flame.
We walked toward the middle door, the one with the wave insignia, just as two kingsguards passed us by, each with a hulking glass barrel of white, shimmering lighte. I could have sworn the essence was humming through the drum, and the meager lighte in my veins pulsed, as if like could call to like.
My lighte. That wasmy lighte—
My neck craned so I could watch them heft the barrels through the entry affixed with the marking of the sun.
“Lazarus keeps all the harvested lighte in his own wing?”
Neither guard bothered to respond to me, and I was ushered inside.
Lazarus’s private baths were nothing like my childhood town’s bathhouse. Where Abbington had one single rectangular bath under stone pillars and faintly mildewed wood, before me sprawled dozens and dozens of steam-hazed, opaque blue-green pools of water, stretching on and on like rolling hills. Some as still as a frozen lake, some undulating despite their emptiness of bodies, a current gently rocking the water’s surface from deep below. Some even bubbled raucously, sputtering droplets into the moist air.
We stood on a white stone balcony, and I inhaled minerals and sulfur and marble and soap as my eyes pored over all the milky turquoise water. Like everything I’d seen in Solaris, the baths were a showy, excessive extravagance. I’d take Kane’s peaceful porcelain tub any day.
The balcony split on either side into two sets of hazy stairs that wove deeper and deeper through the baths, working their way around to its center, where the largest pool lay. Rippled and misted withsteam, the pale blue water was held without edges and cascaded into all that surrounded it.
And in the heart of all that effervescent, peaceful jade water—Lazarus.
His undeniable beauty was possibly the most vile thing about his appearance. He had Kane’s granite-carved jaw and piercing slate eyes. After a millennium alive, his thick, dark hair had grayed a bit, but he still wore it confidently overgrown like his son. But Lazarus had none of Kane’s warmth. None of his joy. That grim-set mouth, steely lowered brows, and broad rippling chest made my stomach heave. I was grateful I hadn’t eaten this morning. I would have retched.
“Arwen,” he said, and though he hadn’t spoken loudly, the echo of the rushing water carried his words right up to the shell of my ear. “Care to join me?”
I set my jaw. “I’d prefer not to wet my hair, thanks.”
He said nothing from the center of that enormous, undulating pool shrouded in steam, and Maddox and Wyn dragged me down the set of stairs closest to us despite my flailing, depositing me at the overflowing lip.
Warm water seeped into my slippers, and I curled my toes as if I could spare them from the heat.
“Join me.” His voice was deeper than when it summoned me in my nightmares. Harsher than even my own fear could replicate. His silver eyes bored into my own, and I tried not to dwell on the physical similarities between him and his son. Neither to mar Kane’s beautiful image in my mind nor to endear me to the beast I beheld.
Would Lazarus truly force himself on me here in these baths? In front of all these men? My eyes cut to the handful of silver-cladguards standing watch. To Wyn and Maddox behind me, the latter’s hand still a vise around my arm.
“Don’t be modest,” Lazarus cooed. “You’ve nothing they haven’t seen before.”
With a nod of his head to one straight-faced guard, my frilly nightdress and undergarments were sliced down along my back. The guard’s lighte scented the air as satin and errant buttons pooled around my ankles on the wet floor.
I clenched my fists until they ached.
Hewantedme to squirm. Wanted to strip me of not just my clothes but my dignity.
Yet so much had changed since the night I was mortified to take my mere tunic off in front of Lieutenant Bert. All those months ago—knees wet on a blood-soaked cottage floor…
I let that weak glimmer of lighte I’d woken up with zip through my body as I resisted the urge to cover myself. Instead, I stepped from the puddle of garments, wholly bare, and glowered at the Fae king as I entered his bath.
5
Kane
I was settling myself againsta long-ago overturned wagon half buried in snow, readying my pathetic mortal body for sleep, when a branch snapped.
All the hairs on my body rose.
