Cinder: An MM Romance Fairytale Retelling, page 15
Cin’s mount shifted beneath them, Perdition ruffled her feathers in anticipation on his shoulder, and in the moment of silence that followed, he found he couldn’t ignore the ache in his bones nor the pull in his chest. If he was the only one who could help, then he had to do so, consequences be damned.
“Did you hear that?” Cin asked. “Down the road. I swear someone screamed.”
Prince Lorenz’s brow shot up. He didn’t question Cin, didn’t even pause to try to hear the sound for himself. Simply trusted. “What are we waiting for?”
His unquestioning determination to help made him all the more handsome.
As though they had one mind, Cin’s steed took off, charging in the direction of the sound. They had to turn down a side street, then a wide, paved alley between the rows of fancy houses. The clop of hooves should have overwhelmed the now fainter, muffled sobs, but whatever magic the transformed birds possessed let them practically fly, soundless through the night, Cin’s trio of tiny feathered angels guiding their way from above.
They emerged around a corner into the small gardened yard of a wealthy town home, and Cin found the person in an instant—spotted the man hulking over-top them, anyway. He’d pinned his much smaller victim onto the stoop of the dark back porch. By the muffled anguish to their whimpering, he was clearly holding one hand over their mouth, and the nature of their weak struggling made it easy to imagine the scene hidden by the shadows. Easy, because Cin had witnessed it so many times before.
His chest tightened, the blood that pounded through his veins turning to a war drum in his ears. He slid off his mount without a thought, throwing himself at the large man, grabbing into his clothes, twisting, then yanking. His great size barely budged under Cin’s exertion, but then a second pair of hands joined Cin’s and together they pulled.
As they ripped the man back, his victim scrambled, falling over themself to get away. They seemed too breathless to thank anyone, too panicked still as they tried, desperately, to tuck the pieces of their simple servant’s clothing back around themself, their hat sliding off their head in the rush.
Despite the hands gripping his lavish shirt and shoulders, the man dove at his victim again, bellowing under his breath, “Come back here, you fucking—”
The man’s victim wavered, and Cin had the sickening realization that they must be their attacker’s hired help, caught between the job that provided them food and board and the horror of what their privileged employer was trying to take from them. But there was no real choice here, not after all the times Cin had seen something like this play out.
They took a few more steps, crossing through a pocket of moonlight, and Cin caught a better glimpse of them—bruised skin, long hair, and, free now of their hat, the tips of two pointed ears. An elf, here, in the city. Cin could see only one of their wrists, a flash of skin as they struggled to slide the rest of the way into their shirt, but he recognized the manacle clamped there.
All the nausea he’d felt when he’d first seen the elf-holding cages back on that wagon in the woods rose bitter and rancid in Cin’s stomach, but this time his anger overwhelmed it. “Go!” he shouted at the elf. “Now!”
Finally, the elf ran.
“You fucking—” The man spun sluggishly, landing heavy on one foot. His breath stank of drink and his expensive jacket hung rumpled, half off him. “I paid good money for that elf.” His gaze seemed to slide right over Cin and lock on Prince Lorenz, gorgeous even now, in the low light and the panicked anger. His fists balled. “You’ll wanna take their place, huh?”
He lunged at the prince.
Fear shot through Cin, then rage. He could see the future that would play out—the pain, the loss. There was no God to smile on Prince Lorenz here, just as there’d been none to help every other elf who’d been enslaved by a rich Hallinisch bastard. Only Cin. Only ever Cin.
Before the thought had finished, he was already moving, his feathered cape sweeping out behind him.
This man, this bastard, this villain, had bought an enslaved elf, not even simply for the status or their magic, but to violently extract every piece of them—soul and body—he could. And he thought he could take the same from Cin’s prince. Would take the same, next time he could, from whoever he could.
Cin’s body knew itself even in his ludicrous glamor, this false pretense of regality and goodness, and his hands found the small blade that he’d tucked against his back that morning. He had it free in an instant. As though he possessed the very wings his feathered coat implied, he all but flew onto the man’s back, blade poised. A little voice, soft and mothering, told him no.
Be good, be pious.
But the man beneath his grip had not been, over and over and over, and no one else had stopped him. He was doing it again, despite Cin clamped to his back, one fist slamming into the prince’s stomach as he grabbed him with the other. No one else would stop him. No one else, but Cin.
So he rammed his little knife into the side of the man’s neck. Flesh gave way beneath his blade as he tore, like cutting the wrong way through a freshly plucked chicken.
As though his puppet’s cord had snapped, the man lurched to a stop. He reeled once, his hands trying to reach for Cin. He grasped unsuccessfully at his neck, at his own blood, but as Cin wrenched free his blade, its sharp edges were what he found first, hand clamping down only to recoil with a howl. Then the blood started pouring. It spurted, hot and sticky over Cin’s fingers, and the man sank to his knees.
This time it was easy, the knife going back into that serrated muscle so smooth and sure. Cin drove it until the tip hit bone, and twisted up. The man’s growling and scrambling dissolved into a choke, then nothing.
Cin dismounted as he crumpled across the pavement.
Hands shaking, Cin stood there. Perdition dropped onto his shoulder. She nuzzled into the side of his neck, and somewhere above, behind, around, were Ragimund and Lacey’s gentle coos, too soft and melancholic for anything but a funeral. The fire that had fueled Cin—the surety so deep in his bones that reason couldn’t touch—drained away. His chest felt empty. Nausea turned in his stomach.
Yet again—yet again. How many times was this now? How many bodies...
Yet again, not pious, not good.
But this time, it wasn’t the corpse at his feet that disturbed him most. Not the stench of the dead man’s blood still dripping sticky and hot from Cin’s arms, nor the weight of the knife in his hands. It was the prince’s gaze, so aghast that Cin could feel the shock, each tiny, sharp breath he took before he spoke a miniature dagger to Cin’s chest.
“Did you—you just—you—” Prince Lorenz barely managed the words as he straightened, one arm wrapped around his bruised side.
And so awkwardly he seemed not to even know what he was doing, the prince took a step away from Cin.
Sixteen
With that single step back the prince took, Cin felt like his whole world was falling away from him. How had their blissful night turned into this? He’d murdered someone—murdered with the rage of the Plumed Menace. Murdered someone in front of the third most powerful person in the kingdom, the man whose parents already had a price on his head.
Murdered someone in front of the only person who’d sought Cin out, tried to see him for who he was.
And now Prince Lorenz was clearly seeing something else entirely.
Cin reached for him instinctively, bloody knife still in hand. “Your Royal Highness—”
“Don’t,” Prince Lorenz warned.
Cin froze. What could he say now? What could he do? He could run—back to the house he’d just brought Prince Lorenz to. The royal guards would be there by the morning. But he couldn’t just leave his home, either. He couldn’t—
The prince took a deep breath, in then out, in then out again. He looked through the darkness, from Cin to the corpse and back, his hand clenched again his heart, fingers digging into the fabric. What he said was not what Cin expected; it was somehow worse. “You don’t even care...”
Cin felt his insides turn in on themselves. His skin burned, like God was here after all, that infrequent smile turned to a fatal glare.
“You don’t even care that you...” The prince repeated, a vague wave toward the dead man the best he seemed able to conjure.
He was attacking you, Cin should have said, or he’d been assaulting that elf, or better yet, he said he owned them, but what came out was the excruciating endpoint of all those, small and soft but not the least bit timid: “Not this time.”
It was the wrong thing to say.
Wrong in every way.
“Not this time?” The prince gave a tiny half-laugh, desperate and delirious. He ran both hands through his hair turning away, then back. “You’ve done this before?”
Cin carefully tucked the little knife against his chest. He could barely see through the panic rearing up inside him. Could barely think. “Not like this?”
Prince Lorenz began to pace, his arms trembling as he cupped the back of his head. “My God,” he whispered. “My God. He’s dead.”
“He was hurting you.” It came out so much softer than it felt in Cin’s head, almost like a whimper. A plea.
The prince’s gaze flashed back toward Cin, and while his expression was shadowed in the darkness, Cin could see the drop and fall of his Adam’s apple as he swallowed. “With his fists! I can take a few punches. There were two of us, and one of him, and we have the horse.”
It sounded so logical the way he said it, so unambiguous, but Cin could still feel every emotion of that moment as though it were happening over and over again inside him: fear, anger, hatred, and the pain—the pain that would keep coming, whenever the man chose it, like it surely had so many times before, until someone else stopped him.
The pain of watching Prince Lorenz be the one who hurt for it.
Something hot and tight tore through Cin’s chest, so much like anger and yet when it burst forth, it brought with it a blubber and a choked, “I’m sorry.”
His knees felt useless suddenly, the binding around his chest so tight that he couldn’t breathe. Hadn’t been breathing. More than just his sides hurt, as though his ribs were curling inward, cutting him up from the inside. Then, he was sinking.
Prince Lorenz didn’t catch him. That hurt more than the ground, more than the endless ache beneath his bindings or the bite of his small knife into his own skin as he held it too tight.
“I’m sorry,” Cin cried, softly, so very softly for how large the scream inside him felt, for how desperately his soul seemed to want to tear off the mortal folds of his own skin and explode into a thousand unseen pieces, everywhere and nowhere all at once. “He’d been hurting someone. He was hurting you.” Just like the others. So much violence. So much pain. “I couldn’t let him.” Cin stared at his darkly coated hands, at his knife, as capable of as much death as any larger, stronger weapon, and said what he knew, “I just couldn’t let him.”
He wasn’t even sure the prince was still there—couldn’t bring himself to check—until, so softly, an unbloodied hand wrapped around his, then another. Prince Lorenz uncurled Cin’s fingers from the blade, taking it away. He tucked it into his belt. “You do care, after all,” he whispered. “That’s good.”
As the prince crouched there in front of Cin, he seemed to take more of Cin in, a dawning creeping over him. “If you’ve killed others like this... like him...” Prince Lorenz swallowed, and it felt as though he was eating Cin’s heart with each word, tearing into it with his teeth to find the feathers beneath. “You’ve killed...” He swallowed again. “How many? How many, Cinder-Ella.”
It echoed in Cin’s ears like a very different word.
Menace.
“Only the times there’s been a body.” Cin had heard Prince Lorenz claim with his own lips that he didn’t believe the Plumed Menace was guilty for his brother’s disappearance, but he still prayed to the God he’d so defiled that the prince saw the truth in him. “I swear on my life, on everything, that I had nothing to do with your brother’s disappearance or the feathers on his crown, none of it. If I knew what happened to him—” Cin choked back a sob, and it seemed the only sound he could make for a moment. When he continued, his voice was brittle and terrible. “I wish I knew that. If I did, I’d give you that peace—I’d give you anything.”
Prince Lorenz’s fingers fastened around Cin’s shirt, grabbing his cloak and collar with one hand, his other digging into his own chest the way he always did when he spoke of Adalwin. It was nothing like the times he’d grabbed Cin in the past: no protection, only purpose. “You swear it? You swear it wasn’t the Plumed Menace who killed him?”
“I swear,” Cin sobbed, the emotion unleashing inside him, so furious it seemed his soul was trying to force its way free of his body. If only he could rip off his skin and escape the awful purpose he’d chosen, or been chosen for—Cin didn’t know the difference anymore. “I would never have touched him. Every time, I’ve known my victims were terrible beforehand, known they bring only pain to the people closest them, and still I regret what I do. If there was another way...” Between his tears, he managed to lift his face towards the prince’s, and Cin couldn’t see him through the blur of his world, but he hoped—prayed—that Prince Lorenz could, at least, see him. “I don’t ever want to kill them. I don’t want to be this, this menace.”
The last word barreled out of him in a hiss, and the sharp edges of it seemed to tear through him. He cried all the harder.
Prince Lorenz crouched there, not a movement, not a sound. But Cin could feel that tension still in him, the war between his desire to help the Cin he’d kissed in the garden tonight and to renounce the Plumed Menace his parents had put a price on. The latter seemed to be winning.
“Then why be the Plumed Menace?” Prince Lorenz asked, finally.
“I’m not strong; I’ve no power,” he choked out. “How else do I stop them? How else do I save anyone...”
“I don’t know,” the prince whispered. “But it shouldn’t be this, right?”
Cin sniffled. “It’s all I have.”
“It’s... wrong.”
Cin wiped at his cheeks, then his nose. He could feel the stain of the blood left on his face after. Marking him. “I never claimed to be good. Or gentle.” He barked, a sharp, short sound. “I told you, I didn’t come to marry a prince.”
He could feel Prince Lorenz’s gaze on him, cold and deep as the heart of a lake in winter. “But you did come,” he said, finally, and Cin could not for the life of him decide what that meant. The prince stood. He did not pull Cin up with him. “If we just leave him here...”
Cin shook his head. “I killed him. I deserve to take responsibility.”
“This will not look good, you know.” Prince Lorenz stated it so bluntly, like he didn’t know how to feel about it. Or, perhaps, like he felt nothing. “A man of wealth, so near to the castle—it’ll bring back the rumors of my brother’s disappearance, founded or not.”
“I am aware,” Cin said, but he didn’t mean it. As much as he tried desperately to hold onto the weight of the situation as he stepped back, pulling three feathers off his cloak—he’d have no reason to wear it again—he could think of nothing but the nauseous shock of losing Prince Lorenz like this.
It was only two weeks before their time would already have been up, he told himself.
But moving on like this: leaving himself as a bitter taste in the mouth of the man he’d so enjoyed, even cared for...
It made Cin sick in the worst way. He forced himself to move, his body reacting sluggishly, and he could barely feel his fingertips as he pressed the feathers he’d pulled into the side of the dead man’s neck. There: it was done.
He turned his full attention back on Prince Lorenz, and wished suddenly there was more light—that he could see every wrinkle and depth to the prince’s face. Every pain, even if that pain was caused by Cin. “Will you tell anyone?”
Prince Lorenz didn’t answer—didn’t answer fast enough anyway.
And Cin added, “I’d have no way to stop you.”
A future as a criminal on the run flashed through his mind as he said it: his current life abandoned; his home and family suffering for it. And he’d gain nothing. Yet a part of him, tight and hot, felt more compelled by that than the idea of a marriage and the happy ever after with it.
What was wrong with him?
“I don’t think I will,” the prince said, finally, then corrected it to: “I have no desire to. I know the consequences that will befall you for that and I wouldn’t wish them on you, regardless of your actions.”
Cin could do nothing but nod. He had to leave—not just because of the body cooling at his feet, but the carriage likely heading back for his home at that moment. If the prince chose to keep this a secret, then Cin still had other woes to worry over.
There was one last thing to be said, though. “They were an enslaved elf. Here, in Hallin. So close to the castle…”
“I know.” The prince sounded bitter as poison as he said it. “Elves do not belong bound to anyone, least of all to the likes of these. Hallin’s stance on that will not change.”
“A stance did not stop this,” Cin muttered.
He didn’t know what he wanted from the recently crowned heir—to do better? He was not king yet. Besides, he’d seen his own mother establish a watch for the crown only for this to continue while they walked but streets away, their attention elsewhere. Never where it was needed; even, ironically, the time the prince their system protected was here. Perhaps this was larger than them both.
But looking down at the rich bastard’s cooling body, he knew that wasn’t entirely true. Cin had access to one thing, certainly: a sharp blade and the wrath to use it. Again, and again, as many times as it took.
Cin tipped his head. “I have to go.”
“I know,” the prince said again.
He offered no hand to help Cin mount, no kiss goodbye, no reassurance. Even a look of pity, if he had one to give, was stolen away in the darkness.
