Page 146 of Of Blood and Banes
He holds my stare, not backing down. “You know it’s true.”
“You’ve only known this woman for months?—”
His nostrils flare as he inhales deeply. “That’s where you’re wrong. You have always been so focused on yourself, this throne, and your dragon that you have never stopped to pay attention tome.”
“Are you so simple-minded you need myattention? Brother, look around.” I motion to the room with both hands, though it does little to convey all that weighs on my shoulders. “I am the queen. I have a plethora of responsibilities all warring for my attention!”
“You are an aunt, Elara!” he roars.
I flinch, my breath caught in my throat, before I narrow my eyes. “You are not serious.”
He continues, “She was born last year. The reason I was so desperate to go on the trip to Brookvale year after year was because the ‘friend’ I wanted to visit there wasAvice. Mywife. I have loved her since the second I laid eyes on her. Five fucking years ago.”
My hand covers my mouth, and I stumble backward until I bump into the desk. Five years…five years he’s been courting this woman? All this time I only thought he went to get drunk with a close friend of his. Maybe visit some brothels. “And why couldn’t you have told me this years ago, then?”
“Because I knew you wouldn’t bless our marriage.”
“You have such little mind for me, brother,” I growl. “Even if it puts me in the most precarious political situation, I still blessed your marriage.”
“And now you’re trying to break it.”
The silence between us is filled with our heavy breathing as we stare each other down. I long for the simpler times, before politics tore us apart.
My heartbeat slows, and I whisper, “The…the girl. Where is she now?”
“Since you originally blessed our marriage, her and Avice moved here, just outside of the palace.” His anger flickers, his jaw relaxing slightly. “You…you can meet her. If you’d like. She’s been asking to meet you, but I was waiting for the right moment.”
I shake my head, folding my face down into a hand and rubbing my temples, focusing on the black behind my eyelids.
This changeseverything.
Seconds or eons pass with my eyes closed, and when I open them once more I’m in a massive library, columns of glinted marble supporting shelves and shelves of colorful books lining the walls. The same library Cole, Marge, and I were in earlier.
I flip the page of the book resting in my lap, studying the next set of passages, when a roaring sense of rage fills me. Twitching my head to the side with my eyes squeezed shut, I fight against the roll of blazing fury.
“Vue?”I call out.
He snarls, white-hot anger ricocheting in my skull, forcing me to my knees as I wrap my hands around my ears as if it’ll stop the sound.“Vue, what is going on?”
He doesn’t answer me.
“Queen Elara?” Emerose calls in panic.
“Where…where is Vue?” I croak.
“Last I saw, he was in the hatching grounds, my Queen.”
“Take me to him. Now.”
We race to the hatching grounds, my head dizzy with the sound of Vue’s fury. He isn’t ever so ill-tempered, but something has changed recently. He’s become territorial and moody…I can only hope I’m not rubbing off on him.
But as Emerose and I spill out into the Stone Gods’ Garden with the hatching grounds in the next room, we find my brother. The second our eyes connect is enough to shatter my heart asI see the rawest agony drowning his features into something unrecognizable.
In his arms, limp and charred, is a small girl.
“If you have ever loved me,” Aaric half-snarls and half-cries. “You will find her justice. You will honor her life, cut short by your savage beast!”
My niece had died a tragic death—caught in the dragonfire between Vue and the commander’s dragon in the hatching grounds.
