Kingdom of Villains, page 10
“Outside.”
“Please, spare no detail,” I muttered dryly, trailing my fingers over the spines of books while eyeing the contents of the vials and jars. They contained everything from grasshoppers to butterfly wings to pollen and, to my surprise, even locks of dark hair.
Circling the room, I noted there were fairy tale and mythical stories, books on apothecaries and potions, and even some tomes on our history. Some of the spines and covers were too weathered and worn to know what they were.
But the smell of the room—the scent of books and parchment and a myriad of herbs and spices wafting from the stoppered jars—I couldn’t help but gulp heaping lungfuls of it. I stopped when I noted the ingredient that made it all the more addictive.
The additive of him.
Shelves holding small cauldrons, bowls, more jars, daggers, tongs, and other instruments I’d not encountered before lined one length of the walls from where I stood at the stairs to the double doors I’d entered through.
The prince sat on a stool, his knee-length boots hooked into the wooden rungs and his hair slipping out from behind his ear as he wrote something else down. “Sleep well?”
“Fine,” I said. “But the beasts ate my dinner.”
He stopped writing. “So you found yourself an apple.”
He must’ve seen and scented as much before I’d helped myself to his chambers. “Where’s the bed?”
“I don’t have one. Not here.” He cleared his throat. “Why do you ask?”
“So I can ravish you on it, being that we are to marry, of course,” I said with enough sarcasm that he shouldn’t have looked at me like that.
Like I was sent merely to torment him, his jaw flexing and his eyes darkening. A hint of crimson crept in at the edges, and my heart thudded hard as I wondered how often someone like him, how often any creature like him, drank blood.
The shiver of my blood told me it was best not to ask. Not yet.
I padded back over the worn carpet, marking each faded gray whorl in the black woven wool to keep from looking at him. To keep him from seeing the curiosity in my eyes as the cool room began to heat, the energy flowing from him disturbing the flame in the ornate sconces.
“Would you like me to get you something else to eat?” The gentle question rattled me, though it shouldn’t have.
“I would like to go home,” I said, not intending for it to sound like a plea rather than a scathing retort.
“If I could grant you that, I would.” And the solemn gravity in his voice made me want to believe him, made me look at him as I passed by his desk. I stopped, noting his eyes had returned to their golden hue. He rubbed at the growth dusting his jawline. “I did not wish for all of this to happen to you, Fia.”
My eyes burned, as did my words as they rolled over my tongue. “Yet you are the reason I am stuck here. You are the reason for all of this mess.”
He stared at me, unblinking, and after a few moments, it began to unnerve me. Being so close to him, just looking at him, unnerved me in a way that made it unclear if I wanted to kiss or kill him.
That he didn’t refute what I’d said, didn’t patch up the truth with lies, only worsened the mixture of conflicting feelings until they became a swarm of stinging nettle inside my chest. “Say something, Prince.”
The quill rocked side to side between his large fingers, his attention given back to whatever work he was doing. “And what would you have me say?”
I sneered, advancing and snatching his stupid quill from his stupid hand.
I snapped it, ignoring the slight curl to his lips as I tossed the pieces to the floor. “You upended my life, stole it from me like you had the right, and then you hide down here within this, this…” I waved my hands around, blinking back tears. “This dusty cave of books, and you just leave me to roam about as if I have any idea where I am or what I’m even to do with…” I sputtered, turning side to side. “What is all of this shit even for?”
“Fire-breather,” he started, his brow furrowed.
“You are the fire-breather, though, aren’t you?” I raked a hand through my hair, hissing when my fingers caught in a tangle of knots, and then I stabbed one at him. “You. Not me. And because of that, my life is ruined. Gone as though it never even existed.”
His mouth closed, and he swept his eyes to the desk, moving books and parchment around, likely in search of another quill. “Will that be all?”
Anger rose within me like a beast I could never dare hope to tame. “Will that be all?” A crazed laugh left me. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
His silence only made it worse as he found another quill and dipped it into an ink pot, his hand trembling slightly.
I had to leave.
I had to leave before I said something that might just make him kill instead of marry me. Perhaps, deep down, that was what I longed for. Not to die, but to make him show me exactly who he was so I could feel some solid ground beneath my extremely comfortable feet.
I stalked to the doors. “Fine, hide behind your mildewed doors and your books and your cravats and your stained shirts and your careless actions. But mark my words, dragon, I don’t need to breathe fire or grow scales to make you regret deceiving me.”
“Would you have still released me?” he asked as my feet met the stair to the doors, his voice right behind me. I closed my eyes and laid my hand against the wood, and he whispered, stirring my hair, “If you’d known, would you have still kissed me?”
“You kissed me,” I ground between my teeth.
“Answer the question, Fia.” When I failed to, his laughter rendered my heart still. Dark and gritted, the sound flowed over me like hot water on a winter’s night, his hands molding to my hips. “You can’t, can you?” He squeezed my waist, and I trapped a gasping breath behind my teeth. “Why?”
I shook my head, my tongue frozen solid.
The heat of his chest met my back. “Perhaps it’s because you’re more afraid of the answer than you are of me.”
I whirled, glaring at him, but he didn’t move.
His knuckles feathered down my cheek to my jaw. His fingertips and eyes followed, stopping at my fluttering pulse. “Fear,” he murmured, his gaze lifting to mine with bloodred hunger. “Or excitement? The two can so often get entangled.”
I smacked his hand away and tore open the door.
Spodge and Herb startled awake from where they’d been napping on the floor, snorting. I stepped over them, but not even their grunting and lumbering behind me could mask the sound of the prince’s velvet dark laughter.
Guilt was a sickness.
I could still recall with red-hazed clarity the moment I decided to let it cease being a paralyzing plague—the moment I’d felt it transform into a broiling need to finally take what I desired. To claim that which was so fragile yet still so unshakably mine.
The sound of the doors crashing open to my study. The butter-soft pages of the worn tome beneath my fingertips. The day-old tea giving fragrance to the crisp air. All of it.
The memory hadn’t left me alone for a moment as the image of Fia, bedraggled and bloodied, sat tight at the forefront of my mind.
I’d done that.
I might not have been the one to place her in that dungeon, nor had I pushed her hard enough to wound. But I had wounded her.
I’d caused it all.
Jarron delivered the message that had caused the flame to ignite, his words careful and clipped as though he’d known the fire he would start by simply speaking. “Our spies have heard word that the princess mates with a young soldier.”
The book had gone up in flames, ash piling beneath my quivering fingers.
Jarron had watched it burn, watched me try to grasp control of myself, but I hadn’t been able to.
The spies could have indeed heard wrong—and whoever they’d heard it from could have exaggerated the truth. Many things were always made to sound worse than what they truly were. Nevertheless, the truth was always there somewhere.
That, and I’d heard it, had witnessed it, the relationship with this soldier and Fia. A male did not track a female’s scent unless he harbored a severe hunger for it—hungered for her enough to do so.
“Olette says the time is now. This procrastination must cease.”
I had almost forgotten Jarron still stood there, too busy trying to keep a part of myself from perishing while the rest of me begged to be set free. To fly southeast and pluck this soldier from Callula, from existence, with my fucking teeth.
Indeed, my mother had harped since my return from Callula, warning that we could only forestall fate for so long.
So I’d nodded. Just once.
It was all the permission they had needed. Jarron had instantly taken his leave, and soon after, so did the queen and a unit of our warriors.
They’d returned an hour later, and my mother had taken one observing look at me and then smiled. “It is done. The contract is being prepared as we breathe.”
Since my return, she’d been trying to devise a plan, to create an excuse for the two kingdoms of Gwythorn to come together in a way they had never united before.
Marriage.
All the while, I’d lost weeks to the sickness of guilt. I’d drowned within the plaguing peril that’d arrived with the discovery of what I’d so desperately sought and what it would cost to claim. A cost I’d not considered nearly enough during all of our searching.
In order to give myself everything I’d longed for—I would rob her of everything.
“It’s the only way,” Mother had said countless times while I’d remained hidden in this study more than ever before.
I’d been determined to find another way. I needed her, but I refused to force her. I couldn’t endanger her.
In the end, it had all been for naught.
Fia was here, and she had every right to hate me. In fact, this might just be more bearable if that were all she felt.
But it wasn’t.
Her scent suffocated, the shape of her hips memorized by my hands. They trembled, raking through my hair. The sickness had returned, but it was now at war with the primal urge to fight for her surrender.
I growled, the tower of books toppling over by the doors as I finally ceased staring at them and headed for the back stairs.
I followed the narlows to the floor below my rooms.
I’d given up on asking them to wait and come with me. Whatever it was they wanted, they weren’t stopping until they found it.
I felt like a fool when they reached a set of double doors, and both turned to me, Herb expelling a grunted huff.
Of course, they needed to go outside.
As soon as I opened the doors, they nearly knocked me off my feet, barreling past and down the cluster of rounded stone steps to the grass below.
I cursed when they continued bounding toward the woods and hiked up my skirts to follow. Upon a log at the tree line, I watched them rummage and race through the foliage, still feeling the prince’s parting words to me upon my skin like a burn.
One I knew would not leave with time.
The ting of metal meeting metal, followed by a rich bark of laughter that tugged at my innards, swept through the woods some minutes later.
I looked up at the castle, unable to see much of it beneath the canopy of trees above me and surrounding it. The ivy and moss carpeting the stone made it blend with these northern woods as though it was a part of the land rather than a fortress constructed many millennia ago.
My gaze swung to the left, to what appeared to be a small clearing not far from the exit I’d just taken.
A training yard, I soon discovered, as I left the narlows to play and took a few hesitant steps closer to the clang of swords wielded by grunting and cursing males.
Colvin, dressed as he had been when I’d left his cave of books not even a half hour ago, narrowly dodged a blow to his side from another male. The stranger’s back was to me, but I didn’t care to get a better look at him.
Not when the prince swung his sword down and up as he feigned a lunge to his right but then crouched.
Such a strike would’ve taken his opponent out at the knees, but the prince stopped a second away from contact, his sparring partner cursing viciously. “You always fight better when you’re worked up.”
At that, I frowned, but Colvin just swiped his fingers through his hair. He’d tied it back since I’d visited him, his rough fingers freeing some of the inky strands, and then he lunged at the male again.
The way he moved betrayed the senses—held me pinned behind the oak tree with my fingers clenching at the bark. He was lean, but he was all fluid muscle, the dark unable to conceal the strength and power beneath his loose tunic and tight black pants.
The two can so often get entangled.
My breathing quickened with the fluttering beat of my heart, his taunting words more than mere memory. They were a haunting burrowing beneath my skin.
I’d never felt anything like it. Never had I felt anything so acutely. This merciless combination of lust and loathing. It wasn’t fear of not knowing which affliction would claim victory over me in the end but of knowing all too well.
And it made me question just who it was I truly loathed—the prince or myself.
After an eye-widening series of maneuvers, his blade glinting beneath the shine of the stars overhead, the prince lifted his tunic to his face to wipe it. In doing so, he revealed a glimpse of his defined abdominals and the small shadow of hair that trailed from his navel down to his…
The narlows growled at something in the trees behind me, or perhaps just at each other, and I ceased breathing as Colvin stilled, then twisted slightly.
Without lifting my eyes to his, I knew that he was now aware of my presence behind the tree. I’d been caught.
But I still lifted them, coerced to by this growing entity that constantly called for my surrender.
As golden bright as if he was standing before me and not some fifty feet away on the stone terrace, his eyes snatched mine and refused to let me run.
My fingers slackened, loosening their cutting grip upon the tree. My pulse slowed to a thud in my ears as I tilted my head and watched his eyes glow a darker gold. If it weren’t for the breeze that kicked at his shirt and hair, those still features would’ve rendered him a striking statue carved by the moon goddess.
Each breath I drew began to warm and soon burned as the dragon prince’s gaze failed to relinquish its hold on mine.
“What is it?” his muddied-haired companion asked, twirling his sword and turning to glance my way.
I ducked behind the tree but peeked out from behind it again when the prince murmured with a crooked smile tossed to the woods, “Just a pretty little night bird.” He then raised his sword, turning back to meet the downswing of his companion’s before it could make contact with his shoulder.
Slinking back against the tree, I smiled at my toes. My heart sang through every limb as I forced myself to wander back through the woods to collect my beasts.
Curled into giant furry boulders, Spodge and Herb dozed before the fire.
Their snoring made it hard to hear much of anything, especially my own thoughts as I lay upon the bed and stared at the green canopy of netting. A blessing, I supposed. But I didn’t need to hear the approaching footsteps or the knock on the door.
As soon as both happened, the narlows rose with a snorting snarl, scenting the air. A moment later, they deemed whoever it was no threat, for they soon settled, licking their misshapen maws as they placed their heads back upon the carpet.
“Enter,” I said, for I didn’t wish to move. I needed more sleep, more time to adjust to all that’d transpired and to unravel the twisted coil of thorns within my chest.
But it would seem that might not happen.
“Your presence is desired at dinner.”
I kept my eyes fixed on the ceiling, determined to ignore the melting return of his earlier words. Pretty little night bird. “Didn’t we already eat dinner?”
The dragon prince huffed. “You ate nothing but an apple.”
True. I was still hungry. “But it was served earlier.”
“There’s no breakfast or lunch here, just meals and then dinner,” he said. “Come, they’re all waiting.”
That had me rising on the bed to find Colvin leaning against the open door, his eyes on the sleeping beasts. “Who?”
“You’ll see.” He nodded to the narlows. “You shouldn’t let them sleep in here. They’ll expect it and refuse to do so in their own room.”
“It’s just a nap.” I scooted to the side of the bed, asking, “Where is their room?”
“At the other end of the hall.”
Oh.
I looked over at them, pondering how I’d get them there and if I even wanted to. They were far from cute, and knowing that they could kill me before I saw it coming was a little unsettling. But they were also company I’d found myself grateful for since leaving the outskirts of the woods more confused than I had been yesterday.
It was hard to bring myself to look at him, this prince I was supposed to marry, so I didn’t. I stared at his leather boots, then at the tea stain on his otherwise fresh cream tunic. And as my eyes began to drift over the black cravat at his neck, I stood and walked to the bathing room.
“Time to go,” the prince said, and I realized he wasn’t speaking to me. The narlows whined, rousing and lifting their heads. Colvin arched a brow. “Bed. Now.”
Groaning, the beasts took their time rising to their full height, Herb scratching at his chest before deciding to walk on all fours. Colvin followed them out, saying, “The dining room is on the first floor.”
I peeled myself from the doorjamb to the bathing room, grateful he couldn’t see my smile as I heard him lecture the narlows when they started growling at one another, and then I tried to make myself as presentable as possible.
The gown I’d donned earlier was wrinkling in places, but it would do. I didn’t want to search for something new, including footwear. So I stepped into the slippers I’d kicked off at the side of the bed and finished brushing my hair.
