24

the night I broke Daxeel

TEN YEARS EARLIER

The death in my stare lacks ferocity. It is a mere reflection of my slumped insides, my rotting heart, the deterioration of my soul.

I watch Eamon stride down the edge of the dance podium. His brisk pace is wrought with tension. Hands balled at his sides, a severe set to his tight face.

The violence of his flat mouth looks as though it’s been painted on, a cutting strike of a paintbrush over his deep-toned skin.

He doesn’t turn it on me.

He doesn’t even look over his shoulder at me before he strides out of the High Court.

Somehow that stabs a little harder, cuts a bit deeper than if he did throw his disappointment at me. Now, it’s as though he just doesn’t have the heart to look at me, like he can’t bring himself to do it.

Eamon leaves.

He chases after his cousin.

And I am left alone in my pain.

I force back a thick swallow, the tears I fight, before I glance up at father on the dais.

The weathered lines of his face tighten. Proud, he lifts his angular chin and looks down his nose at me.

Slowly, he nods a single, slight gesture.

Then father forgets me—

Clasps his hands at his stiff back, turns his chin.

Whatever conversation he carries with Lord Braxis, he continues it now.

Father forgets me—and my pain—all too easily.

But there are many eyes on me, too many, so I cannot break yet.

I blink, slow. My lashes lower until all I see is the reddish hue of my lids.

Then I open my eyes.

And just like that, the daze is gone, the clouds of despair evaporated.

The High Court is an eruption of festivity all around me.

Music muted to me in my daze, it screeches in a rising crescendo all the way up to the hissing, writhing vines above. Cheers and laughs and screams—it all tangles together and floods my eardrums and dizzies me.

A practiced grin knits its way onto my face.

I turn it to the stumbling human at my side.

My body twists to follow—and I trace the cursed man through the Eternal Dance, stealing a low-hanging fruit along the way.

I play the part. I perform. I pretend I am not dying.

Plum juices fall down my chin as I take a soft, meaty bite.

My head lolls back, arms spread against the lively air—and for a while, I spin.

To anyone who looks, I will seem like little more than a halfling drunk on fruits, in a pleasure daze, no worries in my empty mind.

To anyone who looks, I do not seem to be the broken soul that I am.

I only stop spinning when the nausea stirs my head.

I wander the Dance, a ghost drifting near the cursed.

Lilac flitters through my line of sight.

I blink on the gentle hue—and force a polite smile in greeting.

Fern aims his soft purple gaze at me, his mouth spread into a grin that shows the yellow of his sharp teeth, stained over decades, centuries, by blood.

The reddish tint of his skin blends into a sudden eruption of thick, fresh blood. Screams rise from the dance podium, but the laughter booms.

Fern melts into obscurity—and I find myself staring at the headless body of a human man.

Crimson streams pour over torn flesh, down a dated collar that tells me this human has been trapped in the Eternal Dance for centuries passed in his realm.

Behind his jerking, twitching body, a dark male stands, smeared in crimson, and holds the head—hand fisted in greyed hair.

Golden eyes gleam like swords.

The glare he pins me with, I feel the ferocity in it.

Dare’s mouth curls over his teeth—

He drops the head. It thuds to the floor.

Then the decapitated body crumbles.

Dare turns his back on the grisly scene and stalks off.

“That’ll teach anyone to knock into moody dokkalves,” Affay’s familiar purr snakes around me. The cool, crisp mint of his breath tickles the curve of my neck.

‘He’s hybrid’ , I want to say.

But I say nothing.

I doubt Dare tore the head off a human because the music of the dance stumbled him. Happens all the time.

That glare he cut me with—

It was for me.

The violence was a warning.

A fuck you .

And the only reaction it lures from me in this painted, practiced mask I wear tonight, is a disinterested hum as I melt back, into the chest and waiting arms of Prince Affay.

For a while, we move with the music.

We sway.

At my feet, the head and corpse of a man in the wrong place at the wrong moment. A man whose death was little more than redirected rage.

I pity only me.

I marinate in it, self-woes, until a glint catches me: green eyes like fresh cuts of emeralds.

I double-take until I home in on the sharp stare aimed at me.

Across the High Court, Taroh watches me. His hands are firm on the white stone barrier of a low balcony.

Pride steals his face, it lifts his angular jaw, finesses his fine nose, and he looks down at me. Down on me.

“Two jaded males,” Affay purrs at my ear, and the peppermint on his breath is cool against my skin.

It takes everything in me—every thread of self-power through the daze of brewing sobs and the haze of all the fruits I have eaten—to not yank out of his soft embrace.

I hear the grin in his tone as he says, “Will I be your third victim?”

Before I can answer, he spins me around and pulls me against his chest. The firmness of his ceremonial brown leathers creaks between our bodies.

He tilts his head.

The silver crown sits crooked on his head of dark, ruffled hair, winking at me in cruel, mocking glitters.

I look up at him, distant death in my eyes. “One day, prince, you will meet a female who will bring you to your knees.”

He flashes me a wide, hungry grin. “I’ll get on my knees for you, Nari.”

My throat tightens.

The nail in Daxeel’s coffin.

The point of no return.

If I accept this offer—and make no mistake, it is just that, an offer—I will be burning the remains of the wounded, dying bud between Daxeel and I.

And yet, I don’t deny Affay as quickly as my heart aches to.

I don’t pull from his hold, turn my cheek to him, reject him as I should.

Rather, I paint a smirk onto my face. “So do it.”

I accept the offer.

Because I must protect myself.

This nail in the coffin, this destruction—it will save me from the Grott. Father’s approval is all I need. But I need it fully, wholly, completely.

I need father to have no doubt in his mind that I have cleanly severed all ties between Daxeel and I. That Daxeel will never forgive me.

I need father to pluck the Grott out of my future.

Affay’s fingers curl around mine. A soft, tender hold—and he leads me through the density of the High Court to the curtained alcoves.

I dip through velvet drapes and instantly feel as though I’ve been stuffed into a green phial, emerald cushions scattered all over the floor.

And I do what twists my insides.

I let Affay get on his knees for me.

My legs drape over his shoulders—and when I find a pleasure that shivers my body once, twice, then vanishes, a pleasure that doesn’t reach my mind, heart, soul, that is when I fall onto my back…

And Affay finds his pleasure in me.

Drapes weave around the arched ceiling, thick velvets and gauzy strips of secrets, a fleeting blur of lilac.

I have those secrets in my silent tears.

I decide, right here in this very moment, I know what it is to be a whore.