Page 46 of A Reign of Roses
He waskissing her. Not chaste, not kingly. A vile, vicious kiss. A promise of violence to come.
Arwen squirmed. Tried to withdraw from the intrusion.
And the sick, sycophantic members of his court all around me were stillcheering, as if beholding a harmonious union.
I wouldannihilatehim. I had to. And if I could, I would have killed each member of his court, too. Slowly. And with euphoric pleasure.
Lazarus released Arwen and motioned for the crowd to quiet down. In the absence of their hoots and claps I could hear only my heart pounding. My lungs, shallow with breath.
But I had to be smart, first. For her sake, I had to drown those volatile, impulsive parts of me for the time being.
Arwen wasalive.She had survived the fall. Survivedimpalement.And not only was she alive, she had likely spent the last few months here. In Solaris. With my father. Betrothed to him. He had probably beaten her. Harvested her lighte. Done…unspeakable things to her.
And I would not be able to save Arwen, to shear the skin from my father’s bones—to feed it to him as it regenerated for a thousand years—until I’d been reborn as full-blooded. If I charged the dais now, I’d be dead in the next minute, if not less.
And then he’d conduct the harvesting ceremony before his entire banquet of nobles without incident. An archaic practice performed at midnight every Lumerian Solstice. One which my father and his court believed would help him conceive the full-blooded heir he’d always hoped for.
All those men and women, watching in polite silence as he rutted—
I couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow that to happen.
I pulled my eyes from the now-seated Arwen, staring at her plate piled high with dead peacock, and moved swifter than I ever had in my life. Not for the dais, nor the monster lairs, but for my only hope of getting to Arwen before my father could.
12
Arwen
I thought I’d despised mybloodred suite, but that room was a full, beating heart compared to the skeleton I stood within now. The harvesting ceremony wouldn’t take place in my suite nor Lazarus’s private quarters. The revolting tradition, which Maddox had so generously explained to me on our walk over, was held in this sterile, ceremonial bedchamber.
Glinting white marble floors without a speck of dust. A single dazzling, dark-iron chandelier hanging overhead like a guillotine. And a bed.
A large, sprawling bed.
Clean, silken white sheets. Prim. Folded neatly. Just enough pillows.
And crowding around the bed—at least fifty nobles, dignitaries, and esteemed members of Lazarus’s court. Mostly men with round, greasy faces, drunk and stuffed from the ball still raging below us, sneering at me and revering me in turn. All of them—waiting. Waiting towatch me taken by their king. In clear, bright candlelight. Naked as a newborn mouse and just as helpless—
Alarm bells rang throughout my body. I couldn’t stand still—fury and revulsion and undiluted fear writhed inside me so violently I was shivering.
Wyn offered me a bleak expression, but I couldn’t bear to look at him. He, too, was accepting this sickening tradition. But there was no room for betrayal in my heart right now. Only urgency: I had to think of something.
One glance at the stately marble grandfather clock told me I had only a handful of minutes to do so. It was almost midnight. Lazarus would be here soon.
Though Wyn told me most near-full-blooded Fae women flocked to this chamber eagerly each year, hoping to bear their king a full-blooded heir, it was still a more revolting ritual than I’d expected, even of Lazarus.
A mistake, to underestimate his viciousness.
Between Powell and Bert, Crawford and Killoran…I’d come to expect the very dregs of human rubbish from most men I encountered. But it was the women who stood around this ceremonial bed—the wizened, crinkly Fae ladies who had surely seen their fair share ofharvesting, who had the gall to shoot judgmental glares in my direction, or, even worse, appear flat-out bored by the iniquity—their gazes were the ones that truly shattered whatever might have been left of me.
If given the opportunity, I would have scraped the gleeful expressions from their high-boned faces with my blunt nails.
I shuddered again, jumpy and sweating. A hand brushed against my back and I nearly jumped through the stark white ceiling.
But it was only Wyn. “You’re going to be fine,” he whispered.
“I’m going to kill him.” I sounded as ill as I felt.
“If I could,” he said, hazel eyes simmering, “I’d do it for you.”
