Chapter 85: Eighty Five
Impossible, I think, but I’d pick it out anywhere, remember it like I remember what it felt like to kiss her the first time.
My gaze lands on the coronet on her head. It gleams in the room, a gold brighter than even mine, matching the one atop the monster’s head. I let my gaze drift lower. To a halo of unusually bright gold hair with a hue of summer red in them. And lower, to the small nose that might have been cute before, but was stronger now, noble, arrogant.
To those sensual lips curved into a small smirk.
"Is that..." Astrea utters breathlessly. "Valerian?" Her head snaps to me. "He is alive? He... is a woman."
But I can’t move. Can’t breathe. The hall collapses around me. The air turns thin. I can feel my pulse hammering behind my eyes, my own heartbeat screaming *no, no, no.*
Shit.
I would think I was hallucinating if she doesn’t breeze past me, her shoulder brushing my chest slightly. Real. She is real.
I killed her. I know I did. But here she stands, real as the air being sucked from my lungs.
She halts in front of me, her steps in tandem with the male whose hand rests on the small of her back, idly toying with the ends of her hair. But she doesn’t look at me.
No.
She doesn’t even notice my existence coming apart, my mind trying to reconcile this cultured, poise image of her dressed in a red dress that reveals her tanned skin that has grown paler since I last saw her. A low cut v neckline that dips so dangerously low, it stops just above her navel. A small necklace of blood red fits around her elegant neck, doing nothing to conceal the mark of crescent on her skin.
A madness stirs in my mind, a darkness rattled by the fact that I both find out that my mate is both alive and claimed by another in the same breath.
A part of me tries to process it. Tries to understand what I should feel at her being alive, while I was haunted by ghosts of her the entire time. But the only thing burning in me is rage.
Covered in the scent of another. Held by another. Possessed by another. And by the scent of it, touched by another.
"You have my many congratulations," the too-eager prince says as he halts in the center of the room, arms sweeping out to greet them like they’re old friends reunited once more.
And she doesn’t, still notice that I’m there as she stands on her toes and presses red lips to either sides of Prince Cyrus’s cheeks.
No, she doesn’t. She should feel me like I would her in a room full of thousands. Her eyes should look for me. She must know that I am here.
But it isn’t Valka Ironfang who notices my heated stare first. It is the king who looks half-bored as the prince prattles on, who tilts his head straight at me like he knew I was standing there all along.
He grins, lazy and taunting, but it is nothing at all like a grin. It is a flash of fangs and something so dark, even the beast inside me whimpers and quietens. And he pulls her tighter to his side, large hand resting on her bare waist in a show of territoriality.
He knew who I was, then. What I was once to her. He is the reason I am now nothing to her. Because he’s stolen her from me. Mine now, his eyes seem to say, and I’ve never wanted to tear a man’s hands off a woman fast enough.
Prince Cyrus notices our stare off then, and then turns to Valka and the King. "Ah, yes. I don’t believe you have met. I’m sure there will be proper introductions later, but..." He gestures towards me with a slight nod of his head. "King Rafael Draemir of Silvermoor, his wife, Queen Astrea Draemir and his grandmother, Cecilia Draemir."
Valka turns then, just as the Prince says, "King Lucien Draemont of Ebonheart, Queen Lyra Draemont."
Lyra? Who the fuck is Lyra?
Amber eyes flick to mine. They hold. And for the longest minute, she just stares at me, into me. Eyes assessing deeply, searching. And for all her beauty, there is an eerie coldness that grabs me by the throat as she regards me.
There is something crucial missing in her eyes. And it takes another one of those smiles to realize it.
There is nothing left of the fire or feelings she once regarded me with. There is only an emptiness left as she raises her chin in a slow nod, holding out her hand to me. "Well met, King Rafe."
I stare at the small hand. The ring sitting pretty on her finger. The callouses that have begun to clear up and I remember what those hands had felt like while they pulled my hair back harshly, how she had kissed me with violence and hunger.
Transfixed, I take her hand, even if it is beyond etiquette to. And I lower my head and press a reverent kiss to her knuckle, brushing my lips over her wedding ring.
If she feels the disastrous stroke of want that a touch so small that runs from the tip of her warm fingers and burrows underneath her skin, she doesn’t show. Her blonde brow only arches slightly in mild surprise, and I marvel at how well she has learned to school her expressions, her perfect poise of elegance and grace, her focus of observation that isn’t anything but clinical. I might as well have been furniture.
"Rude," grandmother says, cutting through the moment, and I feel the undercutting displeasure in her voice at my lack of composure. "That the King doesn’t deem to address us himself. Think yourself better than us, I see."
Valka retracts her hand from mine then, dismissing all of us altogether as she steps back.
The King hasn’t stopped toying with her hair. And he doesn’t look up from where he stares at her backside as he mutters absentmindedly, "No use exchanging words with dead men, is there?"
Silence ripples through the hall at that. Then, Valka nudges him with an elbow, whispering, "Stop staring at my ass."
He blinks, as if only realising we’re all still there. "Ah, yes. Well, my Queen prefers to speak on my behalf. And I quite like it that way." His glittering violet gaze settle on me. "Ravishing, isn’t she?"
I swallow thickly at the bitterness in my throat, at a complete loss of words. My jaw clenches in response as I regard them, and as if bored of me, he dismisses me completely, and sets his glance on Grandmother.
And my grandmother does the one thing she hasn’t in public since before I was born. She lifts her veil, revealing her marred flesh. "I never did think we would meet again like this. Bless the gods for this truce, for the last time we saw, you were in chains and not nearly sane."
The King seems to still. Valka does too, stepping back and my insides curdle like rotting milk as she grabs his fingers, step in front of him instinctively, as if to shield him from something. And there is such rage in her eyes, directed at my grandmother that the guards step forward, flanking us.
Frost kisses my skin as his eyes pierce grandmother’s, roving over her face, her hand and every inch of ruined skin exposed. "Ah," he says, voice colder than shards of deadly ice. "The one who got away."
It dawns on me then as I look between them. It was the King of Ebonheart who had done this to my grandmother. The one she loathed and spoke of with an unrelenting need for vengeance and yet, sick admiration. The one she still secretly wanted.
Lucien Draemont was the monster she never should have touched. And his eyes meet mine in that moment of silent revelation.
This dark creature, the thing that haunted nightmares and breathed carnage on battlefields, he is my grandfather.