Chapter 9

CHAPTER NINE

Ilaunched myself around a corner and barely stifled a scream as strong arms caught me, a man almost twice my size whirling me in his grip before pushing me back against the closest wall.

“Kyra?” Calvari gasped in surprise, his features lost in the darkness, but I recognised his voice as his shadow loomed over me.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him, trying to pull free, but his hold on my arm remained tight.

“I had a feeling you might have come here,” he grunted. “When I went to your house and found it abandoned.”

The clouds shifted beyond the window beside us, pale moonlight filtering in and throwing his features into a little focus at last. He was frowning, concern and something I couldn’t place in his dark eyes as he frowned down at me in the shadows, still not seeing me clearly, still unaware of the blood which marked my flesh in evidence of what I’d done. And I realised then that he knew, he knew who had killed Aalia, and he knew I would come here, so he had come too. But I just didn’t know why.

“You know what he did?” I breathed, looking up into the eyes of the man I had spent countless nights with. The man who had shared my bed and been to my home often enough to know my sister, to have eaten at her table and seen her playing with her children. He’d experienced the kindness of her soul first hand. He knew her, and yet his fingers were biting into my arm, his grip on me unrelenting like he was afraid I might try and escape.

“I’m sworn into the service of the emperor,” he replied, something flashing through his eyes which could have been sorrow, or regret, but he wasn’t letting go, and a sour feeling pooled in my gut as I took in his stance before me. “My duty is to him.”

“And what if he was dead?” I breathed, the hint of a smile forming on my lips as I looked up at him in the brightening light as the moon broke free of the clouds outside, parting the shadows around me and he finally took in the blood that coated me, reading the truth of what I’d done all too clearly.

The shouts of the royal guards filled the air, and I knew they would be upon us at any moment. They would capture me and kill me and oh…how I welcomed the prospect of death. Let Herdat take my stained soul and deliver it to the Garden where my sister waited for me.

“Then my duty would fall to his heir, Savinia. I am bound in service to the royal line, and whoever killed him would be a traitor to the crown,” Calvari said, his fingers still biting into my skin as he stared down at me like he was trying to make it false. Like he wanted to will the blood from my flesh and the murderous glee from my golden eyes. But he knew. And he understood it too, because if he was any kind of Fae, then he would have done the same in my place.

“You would serve a man who killed my sister for the simple denial of his attention? You think a brutal beast who takes what is not given freely and destroys a mother, a sister, a gentle, beautiful soul for pure spite and embarrassment is worthy of your devotion?” I hissed, the thundering footsteps drawing closer still. It was over. I’d known that the moment I walked into this place, and all I really felt at that fact was relief.

Calvari frowned for a moment, like he really might have been questioning that undying loyalty, like some part of him knew how fucked up it was to blindly follow the rule of a Fae who would do the things Farish had done. But then a guard somewhere deeper into the palace shouted out in his hunt for me, and it was like a switch flipped in the depths of Calvari’s gaze.

“Sometimes, when I was fighting for my life and my empire on the battlefield, I would think of you, Kyra. I would wonder if I might love you one day. If I might take you for my bride if we ever got the time to see if what we had might be more. But I see now why that never came to pass. You’re wild, impulsive, and dangerous. You forget that the strength of the empire is the strength of us all, and that the emperor is the divinely anointed head of our fates.”

His words were filling my veins with that ice again, the truth of who he was and what he believed settling over me like a wet cloud. Disappointment and something akin to hurt twisted in my chest, but more than that, there was something far worse, because he was still talking instead of handing me over, still speaking even though there was no reason to, and with every word that passed his lips, the tension in my limbs grew like I already knew what he was going to say, even though I stood before him utterly ignorant of every word.

My muscles tensed where he held me, the power of my Affinities rising to the surface of my skin as I called on them to aid me, filling my flesh with the power Bentos had gifted me while I let Calvari speak.

“It is our duty to serve the emperor in whatever way he sees fit. If your sister had simply bowed to his desire, then she would still be…” He blew out a harsh breath and I recognised that look for what it was – guilt.

“You met her in the market,” I stated, and Calvari flinched the barest amount, but he didn’t deny it. “The emperor had seen you with me, so he asked his Fated Warrior to prove his loyalty by delivering Aalia to his bed.”

“Kyra,” Calvari breathed, his grip bruising while his gaze punctured mine, like he wanted to beg for my understanding but was struggling for the words.

“She trusted you because of me,” I went on, the truth becoming so clear now. “Did Carioth tell the emperor of the trick he had played with our memories, or did that simply make your job even easier?”

Calvari swallowed thickly before continuing, his words a rush, like he was a desperate man seeking absolution. “The emperor believed the gods were playing games. I don’t know precisely what he had discerned from his advisors and the priests and priestesses, but he was confident she would be in the market. Kyra, you have to understand. It was a test of my loyalty. I had no choice-”

“No choice but to save your own sorry arse,” I bit back, and he recoiled from the lash of the words as if I’d struck him.

“I didn’t know he’d kill her,” Calvari insisted, shaking me with his desperation to make me understand. But I understood all too well. He had tracked her down, used her trust in him and brought her to the bed of a man he knew she had no interest in fucking. So what if he’d believed Farish would release her once he’d taken what he wanted? That didn’t make it any better.

I should have suspected him from the start. He had been entirely absent since Aalia’s death, no doubt caught up in self-pity and guilt, but I didn’t give a fuck about how he felt. Because he had been the one to bring her here, he had been willing to let her suffer for however long Farish had desired purely to save his own pathetic soul.

Rage consumed me, and beneath the rage was something so much worse. Betrayal.

He was supposed to have just been a man I fucked when the fates aligned to put us in each other’s paths, but that had been the arrangement we’d made over a decade ago. In that time, we had shared a friendship along with our bodies, perhaps I had even been fool enough to believe it might have been something more than that from time to time. We had been something to one another. He had been welcomed into my home, he had dined with my sister, laughed with her husband, smiled at her children, and then…this.

“When he summoned me to dispose of her body, something broke in me, Kyra,” Calvari went on, his words a lashing sea against the walls of my mind as a heavy ringing started in my ears.

He was still talking but I couldn’t hear him, my entire being consumed with the knowledge of what he’d done and my flesh buzzing with the weight of my Affinities as I called out to Bentos to aid me.

I felt the brush of a kiss against my cheek, and I knew the god was answering my prayers.

I pushed up onto my toes and kissed Calvari, cutting off his words, the heat of his mouth against my bloodstained lips awakening a feral beast within me.

I’d once thought I knew this man. It had never been close to love, but it had been something, or the prospect of something. A kindred spirit, a taste of the adventure I’d once longed for so hopelessly. But I could see now that the freedom I’d seen in him had only ever been an imagined one. He wasn’t free. He hadn’t been living some fabled life of adventure and excitement. He was a coward who bowed to the whims of a monster. And he was going to pay for letting that blind devotion steal my beautiful sister from this world.

Bentos’ power imbued my flesh as I pushed into the Affinities the god of seduction had gifted me, and Calvari groaned as he drew my body flush to his, lust colouring his actions as his lips parted for my tongue and my hand ran down his abs towards his belt.

For several seconds he was blinded by his desire for me, his cock hardening against my stomach just as my fingers found the knife strapped to his hip.

“She’s here!” a voice bellowed behind him, and Calvari jerked back a second before I thrust his own blade into his neck, the iron sinking deep and cutting fatally.

I sneered as I backed away from him, a feral, animal glare which was as hollow as my soul and as empty as my heart.

Calvari dropped to his knees before me, clutching at the blade where it still protruded from his neck, staring at me in shock and horror while two guards grabbed me from behind.

My healing Affinities awoke as I watched him gasping for breath like a fish out of water and I let the light of that power glimmer in my fingertips as I was dragged away.

“I could save you,” I called. “I could heal you in a matter of moments, all praise to Luciet. “I could make you whole again, Calvari. Perhaps if the emperor were to demand it, I would be a faithful subject and bow to his desire to do so. Oh…but he’s dead now too, isn’t he? Perhaps when you meet him in the Garden, you can ask what his command would have been. Would he have ordered me to heal you? Or would he have just told you to accept your fate the way you accepted Aalia’s?”

Calvari choked and spluttered, blood spilling from his lips as the guards hauled me away from him, and I cursed that twisted tendril of betrayal which was carving its way into my heart, reminding me who had been responsible for allowing him into our lives.

I found some small sense of satisfaction at the sight of him falling to his face on the tiles which his precious emperor had kept so brightly polished, but it didn’t bring her back.

Your fault, that voice inside me spat with venom, and I knew that she was right on that count.

“One kiss from the one who betrayed me!” I called loudly, the deal I’d made with the god of tricksters resounding through my mind as I realised what I had done, and I swear I heard Carioth chuckling in reply.