Nectar of the Wicked (Deadly Divine Book 1), page 15
His bedchamber was the size of a small home. If a kitchenette had been tucked away behind the doors I opened and closed along the wall adjacent to my own rooms, then it very well could pass as one.
Florian’s dressing room was riddled with those soft gaping shirts he preferred, and just as many pairs of tight-fitting black and charcoal trousers. Coats, some dark and spun with wool, others padded with built-in armor, lined the end of the chamber. In the center was an open unit of more oak shelving containing belts and boots—military and formal.
After checking his bathing room, my mouth falling open at the onyx tile-lined tub twice the size of my own, I checked the drawers and found...
Nothing.
Not a thing save for light clothing suited for spring or summer. Seasons that would not visit this kingdom.
A touch defeated, I sat on the side of his outrageously large bed and stared at the vines and thorns carved into the oak headboard. An inkpot sat beside a golden candelabra on the nightstand. I leaned forward to clasp the brass knob of the top drawer. An empty pad of parchment was inside.
Next to a crown.
I almost laughed with shock, blinking down at the onyx vines and glinting diamond and sapphire leaves. Surely, I was not staring at the true Hellebore crown. But after seeing it in so many portraits within this manor, I knew I was.
Florian kept his crown in his nightstand drawer.
I shook the disbelief away and looked through the pad of parchment. I watched each bare page fall free of my fingers, then made to pull my hand from inside the drawer when a flash of silver behind the crown caught my eye.
A necklace.
Gently, I stroked the time-worn chain, the bright red stone that warmed under my touch, but I didn’t dare pick it up.
With the odd exception of the crown, it was clear Florian wasn’t so unwise as to keep anything of political importance in his personal chambers. In fact, aside from the necklace that appeared to be an heirloom, it seemed he kept hardly anything at all.
Nothing but clothing, books, ink, and empty pads of parchment.
I had little to no experience with socializing. Therefore, I didn’t know what most might keep in their private quarters. Yet I knew there was nothing personal about my betrothed’s rooms.
Perhaps he had hidden chambers elsewhere, filled with his secrets and desires and plans for vengeance. I nearly snorted because although there was so much I still didn’t know, I knew right down to my bones that just wasn’t so.
Either Florian Hellebore was as cold as the winter magic running through his veins, or he’d gone to great lengths to make sure no one would find anything that could ever be used against him.
There was no weakness when one held no heart.
“An engraved hairbrush still wouldn’t hurt,” I muttered to the necklace and carefully closed the drawer. “Skies, even a bookmark.” Something to let me know this male contained a sliver of soul.
I looked down at his rumpled gray bedding, tempted to fall asleep in his scent and await his unpredictable return.
Annoyance danced with my growing doubt. Both feelings overpowered the temptation in his absence, and I returned to my rooms for another night of restless sleep.
Florian wasn’t at breakfast the following morning.
Considering the only meal he’d eaten with me had been in a hidden restaurant underground, I wasn’t surprised, and I hadn’t expected him.
Snow stood in thick piles, shoveled from the pebbled path encircling the manor by the groundskeepers. I smiled at the few who looked my way.
None smiled in return. They merely stared or glared. A burly male with cold-bitten cheeks even sneered.
I held the plate of raw beef that’d been delivered to the dining room with my breakfast tighter, unsure what I’d done to arouse such a lack of respect from almost everyone on this estate. It wasn’t because they were Fae, who were known to be unwelcoming to outsiders, but perhaps because they knew I was from Crustle.
A place of which both lands of human and faerie despised.
Henron was in the paddocks with the horses. But I would have liked to think he would have waved in greeting had he seen me do the same to him.
Snow stirred awake from her nest of blankets in the corner of her stall, tail swishing. “Hello, my beautiful,” I crooned, crouching to pet her chin.
She allowed it for a moment, then grew impatient for the meat to be set upon the ground. I watched her eat, marveling at how well her leg had already healed and how much she’d grown in just a handful of days.
Snow’s ears pricked, her head rising. A low snarl peeled her lips back over tiny yet sharp teeth. “What is it?” I asked, and rose to look over the stall door.
She growled in earnest when I heard it—a faint hollering from outside.
I slipped out of the stall, the little wolf attempting to join me before I gently pushed her back inside and latched the door.
I followed the sound when I heard it again, taking the seldom used and rotting rear door of the stables into a small and abandoned field. I stood there a moment, looking at the greenhouse and the woods in the distance.
There was nothing but silence and branches, most bare and others laden with snow. It piled around tree trunks and drowned every dirt-worn pathway. So much so, I almost missed it.
A faded white hut, no bigger than an outhouse, stood just inside the tree line beyond the paddocks.
I peered around. But there was only Henron, whose back was to me as he worked with a giant and seemingly defiant black stallion.
Another shout echoed across the wintry landscape.
Henron didn’t seem to hear. That, or he didn’t care to know who was making such a noise.
Lifting my skirts high, I crossed the field. Snow neared the tops of my boots and threatened to pull them from my feet. The shouting increased in volume, and I pushed forward to discover the hut was not an outhouse.
It was an entry point. The door opened to crumbling dirt steps that led to some type of cellar hidden deep below ground.
“Back already, huh?” a voice called.
This close, the harsh echo startled. I raced back up the few stairs I’d descended and paused outside, my heart racing.
No one followed. Feeling my heart slow beneath my palm, my eyes fell to the lantern upon the ground by the door I’d left open.
I grabbed it and flicked the glass. Glowbeetles awoke, casting the soil stairwell in a golden gloom when I walked back inside.
“Who’s there?” The voice came again. A male’s voice, hoarse from yelling. “I’ll peel your skin from your flesh, I will. Just try to fucking touch me again.”
My nose wrinkled, and I knew I should simply leave.
But whoever was down there couldn’t hurt me, or he would have already. He was stuck. Perhaps bound. Remembering the bloodstained hands in the wagon window, my curiosity and desire to find out what Florian was up to got the better of me.
Halfway down the stairs, I slipped on the flowing skirts of my crimson gown. Dirt crumbled beneath my feet. I smacked a hand against the wall to steady myself. When the male muttered something that sounded like, “Mother, save me,” I seized my skirts and finished descending into the dark.
It was not an outhouse or a cellar.
It was a dungeon.
Iron cells, three on each side, lined the metal and soil constructed space.
“Skies,” the prisoner whispered. “It can’t be.”
He stood in the first cage to my left. One of his eyes was so badly beaten, it was black and swollen shut. He lurched forward to grip the bars with those same hands I’d glimpsed yesterday, hissing as the iron burned his skin.
He released the bars and blinked. “It’s you, isn’t it? He found you after all.”
“Who?” I asked, only to be met with a heavy furrow of his soiled brows. “I’m not sure what you mean.”
His frown intensified. “Tullia.” Then he cursed and stepped back to bow deeply. “Forgive me, Princess. The manners were obviously beaten out of me upon being found in this damned kingdom.”
Princess?
I laughed nervously while retreating a step. “I fear you are mistaken. I am to be queen, yes, but I am not a princess.”
“No.” The male straightened and tilted his head, studying me a moment. “No,” he said again, squinting with his other bruised yet functioning green eye. “It is you. You have her hair and his majesty’s eyes.” He shrugged. “A little soulless, if you don’t mind me saying so, but the same nonetheless.”
Fear and unease slithered through my chest, hitching my breath and my voice. “Who?” I said, dizzied, then sharper, “Tell me who you are.”
“I am Frensroth, Princess. One of many who’ve been sent to retrieve you.”
I stumbled back into the iron bars of the cell behind me.
Frensroth’s bruised eye tracked me, a look of contemplation pulling at his split lips.
I barely felt the burn of the iron, numb to my toes, but I straightened when Frensroth said, “Smoldering skies, you do not even know who you are, do you?” A shocked laugh made him cough. He spat a glob of blood to the dirt while I grappled for my next breath. “Not your fault. That king is a cold and crafty beast indeed.”
I squeezed the rusted handle of the lantern. “I am a changeling.” It was all I could seem to mutter, and so low I was surprised he heard me. “A changeling from the middle lands.”
Another choked laugh before his features settled grimly. “Not anymore. Listen...” He looked at the sunlight sprinkling down the stairs into the darkness, then back to me. “You are a princess of Baneberry, and you are being used—” His eye flared wide.
Then dropped to the dagger embedded in his chest.
I didn’t need to look to know who stood at the bottom of the stairs. His presence cloaked like the energy before a storm.
I stared at the blood spreading over Frensroth’s stained tunic, my heart still and each heaved breath shorter than the last.
The lantern fell from my slack hand to the dirt.
Frensroth stumbled and gripped the blade as though he’d pull it from his heart. Between gritted teeth, he rasped, “You are a plague upon this land, Florian, just as your sister was—” A dagger to his eye ended his frantic words.
And his life.
I screamed, but no sound was made as the prisoner crumpled to the ground. My knees quaked with my stomach.
Florian didn’t move.
The damp dungeon became suffocating as the walls closed in. I couldn’t draw enough breath as blood pooled beneath Frensroth’s body and seeped into the next cell.
You are a princess of Baneberry.
It couldn’t be true, yet...
Like a well-crafted poison that was now spreading to kill, everything locked into place.
The king’s interest in me. The order not to meet with anyone but him during his visits to the Lair of Lust. The contract I could never hope to escape. The careful silence of this estate and the unkind looks cast my way.
Florian’s maddeningly inconsistent fascination with me. The restraint when he would finally surrender and touch me.
I tore my eyes from the blood and looked at the male watching me with unreadable features. “Why?” I croaked, though asking such a thing was futile when I already knew. When he’d already told me.
You’ve been punishing Baneberry.
I have been warning them of what’s to come, yes.
Florian merely stepped back and gestured for me to walk ahead of him up the stairs.
I didn’t move. “I asked you a question.”
“Without enough context for me to answer,” he said coldly, then took two slow steps closer. “Why did I want you? Well,” his tone softened, “I think you’ve discovered the answer to that already.”
I tripped back, almost meeting the iron bars of the cell behind me again.
“Why did I kill him?” A smirk brightened his eyes. “That is obvious.” His gaze dropped to my heaving chest, his brows lowering. “Regardless, he surrendered his life the moment he found the audacity to step foot in my kingdom with the intention of taking you from me.”
“He was trying to save me.” Sweat gathered across my nape, the narrow dungeon closing in further. I swallowed and whispered, “From you.”
Florian smiled at that, beautiful and cruel. His eyes darkened upon my own. “Do you believe you are in need of saving, butterfly?”
“Don’t call me that.”
“The name Tullia derives from a species of butterfly.” He closed the space between us, his scent venomous and his giant form blocking all light. Taking a lock of my hair, he studied it thoughtfully within his palm. “Did you know that, sweet creature?”
My stomach churned. His words confirmed.
His thumb stroked the curled strands.
While I’d been recklessly desperate for mere scraps of information, he’d known exactly who I was all along.
A princess.
“My parents.” It was all I could manage to say, to think.
“Who rules Baneberry, Tullia?” He dropped my hair and tilted his head, awaiting a response I didn’t want to give. “Surely, you know that much from your beloved books.”
One didn’t need books to know the names of Folkyn monarchs, but the barb stung all the same.
Baneberry was ruled by a king. And only a king.
The name was barely a sound. “King Molkan.”
Whoever my mother was, perhaps she was not a part of Baneberry’s court. I asked anyway, ignoring all he’d done in yet another moment of desperation. “My mother?”
“Queen Corina is long dead, butterfly.” The words were flat, emotionless.
My eyes closed. “How long?”
Iced fingers caressed my cheek. “Shortly after your birth.”
I flinched. Not only from his touch and what he’d said, but because I was trapped. I couldn’t move. The iron bars warned in warmth behind me, and he was too close to escape unscathed.
Trepidation made the words a whisper. “Why am I here, Florian?”
“You know why, Tullia.”
A name. My name.
After all these years of wondering if I would never have one, I now knew what it was. I knew, yet part of me wished I didn’t. It was another weapon in this calculated king’s arsenal. Hatred bubbled, erasing the sickness tightening my innards into knots and squeezing my heart in a vise.
Though I couldn’t decide who I hated more—the king or myself.
I’d walked right into this spiderweb, willingly and so perilously desperate. I’d handed him my every desire without once digging deep enough to discover why he would want to know them. Without pushing harder for answers as to why he wanted me.
For it had sat there since my arrival in this ice-cold realm, a bone-deep knowing that something wasn’t right. That things were not as they seemed.
His fingertip reached my lips.
I pushed it away and opened my eyes to glare up at him. They were damp, but I refused to let a single tear fall. “Why am I here, Florian?” I didn’t need to know. I needed him to say it.
He feigned a pout. “No more majesty?”
“Why am I here, Florian?” I nearly growled.
He sighed as though answering the redundant question was beneath him. “You are here because your father owes me and my kingdom a debt he can never repay.”
“He killed your sister,” I guessed, and accurately, judging by the way his jaw hardened and he stepped back. “He killed Lilitha, so you plan to kill me.”
“And yet...” His mouth curved. “You breathe, butterfly.”
If he didn’t intend to kill me, then Frensroth was right. He was using me.
“You’re using me as a weapon in this game of fair play.” I swallowed thickly, loathing the hurt I couldn’t keep from my voice. “I wished only to know who my family was, and now you are using me against them?”
His brow arched. “Your father stole everything from us, Tullia. Everything. He did so without hesitation and without remorse. Then he had the gall to hide you when your mother died, believing I would harm a babe.”
Absorbing that, I said nothing. Couldn’t have if I’d tried.
He licked his teeth behind closed lips. “I will destroy him by any means possible, but I would never do that. That he thought I would...” He let those words hang there. “Well, that tells you all you need to know about this precious father you’ve always wished for.”
With that, Florian turned for the stairs. His dark coat kicked up wisps of snow behind him.
I didn’t follow. I looked back at the cell containing a dead faerie. Questions and unease kept my feet stuck.
Frensroth had come for me. He’d said others had as well.
Which meant despite whatever my murderous betrothed had said, the Baneberry king cared. Enough to want me away from the male intent on ruining him.
Florian waited at the tree line, in quiet conversation with two of his warriors.
I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I couldn’t stay here. I couldn’t stay, but I also couldn’t leave. I’d made a blood vow, and I was bound to it unless we both agreed to break it.
Florian would not release me. I was the blade that would make his enemy bleed even more. I wasn’t going anywhere.
That didn’t mean I couldn’t try.
I ignored him when he called for me. Seconds later, I felt him advancing at my back. I broke into a run, tripping through the snow in my haste to get away—from him and the image of Frensroth’s battered face as the winter king’s dagger had sunk so easily into his chest.
Florian’s calm threat stalked me. “Run, Princess. Waste your time and harden my cock some more.”
Florian didn’t knock.
He entered my rooms as soon as the sun had set. He eyed the coins I’d been fishing out from beneath the bed. “You won’t get far with those, butterfly.”
I’d spent hours trying to devise a plan of escape. I would rather live in the middle lands than be used as a pawn in his sickening game of vengeance. Of course, he would easily find me. The only way I would evade his plans for me was to reach Baneberry.
I couldn’t materialize over such a great distance without risk of the energy rifts tearing me apart. But that didn’t matter. I’d foolishly found my way to Folkyn. Somehow, I would find a way to the realm of Baneberry.
