Page 92 of Raisa's Cursed Ravens
His mouth twists into a smile. “The Queen’s womb barely survived making you, but I made sure you were strong enough to contain what’s coming. When the time is right, I’ll cast off this dying flesh, and you’ll carry my power forward. My name. My will.” He steps closer, so near I can smell lavender under his armor. “Sacrifice is the only thing that lasts, Raisa. You should be proud.”
I want to scream at him. I want to claw his eyes out. I want to run to my brothers and let them tear him apart. Instead, I stand my ground. “I’d rather die than be your puppet,” I snarl. “I will never let you use me.”
For the first time, he looks genuinely amused. “I don’t remember asking,” he says, his voice soft and deadly. “You come from my blood, my magic. It’s already done.”
I shake my head, but he’s not even looking at me anymore.
He lifts his hand in a lazy half-gesture. The guards snap to attention. Somewhere behind me, the doors scream open, the echo ricocheting up to the rafters and crawling down my spine.
I whip around as a dozen more guards march in, dragging the seven men I love most in the world.
My brothers, battered and shackled and barely upright, are forced to their knees on the stones.
Their faces are a map of wounds.
Onyx’s eye is nearly swollen shut, his face streaked with blood. Deep wounds crisscross him in a sickening pattern, as if he took the brunt of them. His breath rattles in his chest, coming in a wet whisper that claws at my heart.
Sable’s mouth is split and leaking red, his body trembling.
Rune’s silver hair is crusted with dried blood from an oozing gash across the side of his head. His eyes are dilated and unfocused as he sways dangerously.
Shade, who always seems so fiercely untouchable to me, is covered in raw, gaping wounds. But his eyes are still full of black fire and deadly intent.
Bran’s glasses are broken. So is his leg. He tries to rise anyway, but a pike jams into his gut, pinning him in place.
Grim’s green eyes burn with hate and helplessness, his body battered and broken. He’s lost so much blood he’s ashen, the color of death.
Talon is last, his arm twisted behind him at an impossible angle, arrows still jammed into his thigh, his shoulder, and his back. His glare finds me anyway.
My legs fill up with ice. The air tastes of iron and rot and terror. I can’t move. I can’t breathe.
My father watches me soak in the sight of them, lets the despair settle in my bones before he speaks. “You see?” he says. “This is how easy it is to take what you love.”
The guards wrench my brothers’ heads up by their hair. My brothers don’t beg. They don’t plead. They just look at me, steady and unbroken, and I can feel the shape of their hope.
Even now, they’re more worried about me than themselves. That breaks me in a way my father can’t.
Perhaps that’s the point.
To him, they’re tools to use, a means to an end. And like he said, I’m the end.
He smiles at me, a real smile this time. A predator’s smile. The kind you find in old stories, right before the wolf closes its jaws and swallows the world.
“You’ve always wanted a choice, Raisa,” he says, his voice ringing out over the shuddering, dying breaths of my brothers. “So here is your choice.”
He gestures, and a guard steps forward, his sword drawn, the tip pressed to the nape of Grim’s neck. Another levels a crossbow at Bran, centered at his heart. Each brother is marked, each man’s life balanced on a flick of the king’s finger.
“You can kneel, accept what you are, and take your place at my side. Or you can watch these abominations die, one by one, while you do nothing.”
18
The Price of Freedom
Raisa
The choice is poison,bitter and impossible to swallow. I want to scream, to tear at my hair, to throw myself at his feet and beg him to spare them, but I do none of those things.
Instead, I look at the seven men kneeling in a broken line. Their chests heave, every breath a labor.
