11. Florian

Chapter 11

Florian

The kitchen had outdone themselves. No, that wasn’t even the right term. They always made incredible food, but for Fawn’s tea party this afternoon, they’d made little cakes with a dozen different layers of cream and jam and sponge and I didn’t know what else, but they were both beautiful and delicious. It was more than they usually had time for, as they tried to fulfill Father’s ridiculous demands for five-course dinners with exotic ingredients that weren’t easy to come by, even when you had all the money to get them.

Most importantly, the spread of cakes and little crustless cucumber sandwiches and cut fruit at the tea party clearly made Fawn feel like a princess.

She was glowing with all the positive attention she’d gotten in the past day, and it made me feel...well, a lot of things. It wasn’t bad, of course. Fawn being happy could never be bad.

It was, however, a bit of a wake-up call. No matter how hard I tried, and how much I wanted it to be true, I could never be enough for her all on my own. She needed support from other people. Like the kitchen staff who could make her feel like a princess at her tea party. Like Cove Moonstriker, who clearly made her feel safe and secure in a way neither of us had ever felt before.

How could I make her feel safe when I didn’t think we were safe?

Particularly with Adger and Courtney wandering around the place, ready to jump out of every dark shadow. They had never hurt Fawn physically in the past, but Adger had broken a doll once, and Courtney liked to talk down to her, like maybe she couldn’t even understand simple words. I assumed it made him feel better about himself, that opportunity to treat someone like they were less than him, because he seemed to avail himself of it at every opportunity.

Father, of course, hadn’t cared.

“No one can make you feel like you’re less than them unless you are less than them,” he’d told me, tone snide, almost daring me to talk about my own insecurities.

I had shut my mouth and let it be, like I always did. Maybe I was less than them, because I never really fought back anymore. I only argued with them when they were bothering Fawn, because I didn’t care if they thought they were better than me. I didn’t care if they were better than me. Me fighting with them wouldn’t change anything, and I couldn’t make myself a different person to suit the situation even if I tried. I knew, because I’d spent years trying.

“Did I make the tea wrong?” Fawn asked, leaning toward me. “You’re not drinking it.”

That startled me into the moment. “No, of course not. I was just...thinking.”

She smiled at me. “Is it about Cove?” She drew the name out and her voice raised an octave while saying it. From the tone, I wondered if I was about to get blasted with questions about whether I was going to kiss him.

Did I want to kiss him?

He was fucking gorgeous; it couldn’t be denied. But he was also terrifying. Almost as terrifying as Father. Hells, he was more terrifying in some ways, since I couldn’t read him the same way I did Father. I never knew if he was about to fly into a rage. He hadn’t done that yet, but that didn’t mean it would never happen. It only meant I hadn’t seen it yet. I’d been trying not to anger him, and if there was a single thing I was skilled at, it was not pissing powerful people off.

“He’s been very nice to you so far,” was what I finally managed to say to Fawn.

She considered for a moment, then nodded. “To you too.”

Her tone was questioning, like she thought she was right, but wasn’t sure and wanted me to confirm. She wasn’t wrong about it, but also, that was less of a concern to me. Most people—bar my cousins—were at least pleasant to me, if not kind. I was the next Dawnchaser, so they were probably afraid of me, or at least afraid of what I would become someday. How people treated Fawn was my real test of what kind of people they were, since no one believed she was going to be their lord someday.

I wished she was going to be the Dawnchaser.

I was about to agree and go back to my tea when movement caught the corner of my eye. I turned to look, hoping it was the gardener, whom I’d been meaning to speak to about thorn-free rose varieties.

But it wasn’t the gardener.

It was him .

Father’s assassin, Kit Emrys.

He was wandering through the garden, a bunch of tiny purple-pink hydrangeas in one hand, bag over a shoulder, and as always, sword hanging on his hip. He wasn’t wearing his usual bright crimson suit, but a similar style in a slightly less eye-catching color, a dark blue. Just like his usual suit, the jacket was cut so short it barely met the top of his trousers, and everything was so tightly fitted it had to be a stretchy material or he wouldn’t be able to move in it. Every single line of his body was shown off by the outfit; it was ridiculous. Hells, it was almost obscene.

I stood and took off running like a shot, knocking my chair down behind me. I didn’t even respond when a slightly alarmed Fawn called after me, not wanting to get his attention any more than my swift approach was already going to get for sure.

He did turn to look at us, but not soon enough to prepare properly for me. More than that, I didn’t stop when I reached him, but barreled right into him, knocking us both off our feet. The flowers went flying, his bag dropped to one side, and for that crucial moment, his sword was trapped beneath him.

I pulled back my fist and drove it forward, right into his face, connecting with a satisfying crunch that told me I might have broken his nose, and a thrill of victory went through me. Then, of course, he took control of the moment, bucking me off and flipping us so he was atop me, not the other way around.

Blood was dripping from his nose, but he was still grinning as he pressed his forearm into my neck, a not-so-subtle threat to cut off my air. “That was pretty impressive, little Dawnchaser. No one’s knocked me off my feet in years.”

I stared up at him, panting and spent after the scant few seconds of running and then hitting him, or maybe it was the adrenaline of the moment, but I still thought about trying to wriggle out from beneath him. Perhaps trying to shove my knee into his balls.

But his gray eyes, full of mirth, were so very like and unlike Cove Moonstriker’s that for a moment, all I could do was stare into them.

No. He wasn’t Cove. Even now, with his nose bloody and one hand holding me down after I’d attacked him, he was amused. Father would be beating the hells out of me if I’d dared hit him. Cove? Cove would be still and silent, likely. He would be an oasis of calm in the madness that was my miserable life—a life that was so constantly filled with excesses of motion and emotion.

“Angry about something, kitten?” Kit Emrys asked me, and it made me want to punch him again, even if it’d get me knocked out for my trouble.

“You abandoned me.” He blinked at me, so I corrected, “you and Father.”

His lips quirked up on one side in a little smirk. “You wanted to come with us, when we were being chased by the law? It was for the best that we left you there and you know it. You got to establish your innocence.”

He said that like they had thought it through before they’d left. Like maybe Father hadn’t wanted to drag me into the disaster he’d wrought.

But no. If there was one thing I’d learned in my near twenty-three years, it was that my father didn’t give a single fuck about my safety or future, especially not before his own.

Dinner the previous night came back to me, though. Kit being related to the Moonstrikers. Kit telling Fawn stories about cobbler’s sons.

My father wouldn’t have given a damn, but Kit Emrys might have thought about whether I would be better off if they abandoned me there at the castle, odd as the notion of anyone helping me without expecting something in return was. Or maybe he would expect something back.

Not that he had to ask. I didn’t like to be in anyone’s debt, real or perceived, so I offered him the only thing I had that he might make use of.

“The Moonstriker is here,” I told him, watching his face, waiting for a reaction. He didn’t disappoint, eyes widening in surprise, face paling.

“He’s . . . Cove Moonstriker is here?”

“Here to kill my father,” I agreed. “He has permission from the other family lords. He’s going to end him.”

Kit fell back, sitting in the grass across from me and pulling a handkerchief out of his pocket to wipe at his bleeding nose. “Do they...have they said anything about me?”

“They know who you are,” I said, without telling him that I myself didn’t know. Maybe I’d get lucky and he’d give me more information.

He did wince, sighing and dropping his head. I thought maybe he muttered “fuck” under his breath, but maybe I was just imagining what I would do under the circumstances. After a moment, though, he drew himself back together and looked up at me. “Any messages you want me to relay to your father for you?”

Without thought, a bark of laughter escaped me. “How about ‘fuck you’?”

He lifted a brow. “You want me to tell your father you said ‘fuck you’?”

“No, you’re right,” I agreed. “That’s not enough. Tell him to go fuck himself sideways with a rusty garden tool.” I thought back to something Father had once said to Fawn, and continued, “Tell him if he was any kind of decent person, he’d have died and saved us all the trouble of dealing with him. Tell him he’s nothing but a fucking drag on our whole family, and I wish he’d never been fucking born.”

“He’s your father,” Kit said, cocking his head, looking more confused than reproachful.

I scoffed. “What, so I’m supposed to love him even though he doesn’t give a damn about anyone but himself? Even though all he’s ever done is hurt me and everything I love?”

The confusion didn’t go away, but he did smile at me. I wondered if Cove would look so light, so lovely, if he smiled with amusement like that. “No, no, he’s a worthless ass. You’re right. I’m just saying if he’d never been born, he couldn’t have fathered you. You wouldn’t exist.”

I stopped and thought about that for a moment. Would it be worth the price, not to exist, if Father also hadn’t been born? He couldn’t have hurt so many people. He couldn’t have murdered Oberon Gloombringer and thrown the whole future of the Summerlands up in the air like a juggler, then ducked away and abandoned his responsibility to catch what he’d set in motion.

But if Father had never been born, there would be no Fawn either. Besides, it would just be some other Dawnchaser in his place. Adger, or Courtney’s mother Afton, who was a horrid manipulative monster, maybe even worse than Father. Possibly Aunt Ivy, but that wasn’t likely. She was too good for us. Too kind and caring.

No, Father not existing wouldn’t have improved things. I sighed. “The whole Dawnchaser family,” I said, sitting up and hanging my head. “We’d have to all not exist, to protect the world from the mess we make of everything.”

“Or you could just not be like them,” he suggested, leaning his head back and trying to stanch the flow of blood.

He hadn’t hit me back. Didn’t even seem to want to. Wasn’t angry at all. What the hell did that mean? Why wouldn’t he at least want to hit me back? He...he’d agreed that Father was a “worthless ass.”

What the hell?

“You work for Father. You . . . hate him?”

He shot me a look around his handkerchief that said he was questioning my sanity. “Everyone except Huxley hates Huxley. Even your jackass cousins who also wish they were him. Did you think I liked him? He pays me. I get to eat. That’s the extent of our relationship.”

Something about that didn’t ring true, though, and I shook my head. “You’re a Moonstriker. You don’t need Father’s money. You have your own.”

He rolled his eyes. “In order to have Moonstriker money, I have to live in Moonstriker lands. Follow Moonstriker rules. I’m not much of a rule-follower.”

I snorted at that. “Dueling is full of rules, and you follow those.”

“They make sense,” he shot back, then winced. For a moment I was afraid he was in pain, and reached to check on his nose, but he shook his head. “They—the Moonstrikers—I don’t belong there. I’m not like them. I’m not smart and upright and all that bullshit. It didn’t work.”

But I didn’t buy that. Sure, Kit seemed more mischievous than the other Moonstrikers I’d met, but I didn’t have a second of doubt that all three of them would have been happy to have him around. It had to be something else. Not to mention—“You’re smart enough to navigate Father’s moods. That’s hard. It took me years to learn it.”

He blinked at me, cocking his head, considering. For a moment, it made me think of the fox he was named for. “It’s the wrong kind of smart,” he finally said. “Mother wants physicists and mathematicians, not people who are clever at dealing with other people.”

“Then stay with Cove. He likes people. He’s very good with them too.”

For a moment, we stared at each other. “Huh,” he finally said, like somehow what I’d said had been a surprise.

“He’s...he’s also taken over here. He said Dawnchaser lands are forfeit. That they’re his now.” I didn’t say that the notion seemed somehow off to me, because I didn’t want to show my ignorance.

Kit snorted, and just a drop of blood came from his nose. He winced, but then looked at the handkerchief and nodded in satisfaction. “You don’t buy that, do you?”

Shit. Direct questions. Father never asked things like that. He didn’t care what I thought unless he was testing me, and in that case he’d have already started lecturing me about listening to Cove Moonstriker at all. Funny, since everything had come into focus since he was gone, and I realized he wanted nothing more than to be just like Cove.

“It...doesn’t seem quite right,” I admitted. After all, looking unwise in front of Kit felt slightly safer than almost anyone else I knew. And maybe I’d get lucky and he’d explain why I was wrong. “The other families wouldn’t accept the Moonstriker suddenly controlling half the Summerlands.”

“They wouldn’t.” He finished wiping the blood off his face, then reached for the bag he’d previously had slung over his shoulder, extracting a water bottle and pouring water into the bloody cloth, rinsing it, and then using the damp cloth to clean his face better. “He’s doing it to try to piss off your father, make him come out of hiding so he can kill him.”

And that? That made perfect sense. I imagined it might work, even if Father also saw the true intention. His massive ego wouldn’t allow someone he so despised and envied to say that he owned his lands.

And somehow, even though it made sense, and even though I wanted it to be over—maybe even wanted Cove to kill my father—this idea bothered me.

Not because he’d lied to me. I’d been lied to thousands and thousands of times, for just as many reasons. Sometimes even by Aunt Ivy, and she always did it to be nice. To spare me pain. No, lying in general didn’t bother me. Cove had arrived at the estate not knowing me at all. Why would he have trusted me with the truth? I wouldn’t have trusted me.

So why was I bothered that it was a lie? I should be thrilled. Cove didn’t intend to take all of father’s property and money, which meant that Fawn and I would have it, and we’d be safe.

It meant that when Father was dead, Cove would leave.

Cove, who’d been kind to Fawn. Who had terrified all my cousins so much that most of them had run off with their tails between their legs. Who had every reason to be cruel to me but had not. Who was fucking gorgeous.

“It’ll probably work,” Kit went on, sighing. “Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Huxley will try to prepare before sliding out of the dark and taking his shot, but he’s not just going to let it go. Even if it’s obvious that Uncle Cove is doing this to get a rise out of him. He’s going to give it. Your father is too fucking arrogant not to.”

“You work for him,” I pointed out.

He sighed and let himself fall back on the grass, staring up at the sky. “I know it.”

“Are you going to...help him?” I hated to imagine it, but...well, Cove had implied there might be reasons Kit would want to hurt him. When Kit rolled his head up enough to give me a sardonic look, I realized he needed to know that. He deserved to know that. “Cove said at dinner that you might hurt him. I think he thinks it might be justified. Especially with the way Father can twist things to make them ugly.”

“Your father doesn’t know who I am.”

“White hair,” I said. When he just raised a brow, I gave a sigh. “Almost no one your age has naturally white hair. I thought you were dyeing it before, and maybe he does too, but maybe he doesn’t. Maybe he knows who you are and is planning on using it against you at the worst moment.”

He let his head fall back again, staring into the middle distance, and after a moment, he nodded. “That would be like him. Unfortunately for him, he doesn’t know what I know.”

“What’s that?”

“Uncle Cove has always been my favorite.” He pushed up again, grabbing the bag and putting it over his shoulder. “He used to fight like cats and dogs with Mother, trying to get her to understand that I wasn’t like her. That who I was, was okay. Not that I expected my siblings to do that for me, but...he never fought with her for anything but me. Whatever it is your father might think he can use against us, it’s not going to work.”

Uncle Cove. Cove Moonstriker only had one sibling, and they were partners ruling the family. That made Kit one of her children. One of the heirs of the Moonstriker. My heart suddenly went out to Rain Moonstriker, coming to dinner that first night we’d arrived at Gloombringer Castle to find his own brother posing as a duelist working for Father.

Not that I could ever end up in a situation like that, since Fawn couldn’t even grip a sword properly, let alone become a duelist, but it hurt to imagine the scenario nonetheless.

“Frost is worried about you,” I added, defending the man I’d rather come to like over the weeks I’d known him.

Kit smiled. “I don’t doubt it. Frost is the best of us. The only one without a bit of duplicity in his soul.” He leaned in, gripping the back of my neck and pressing our foreheads together. “Worry less, kitten. Whatever your father has up his sleeve, it isn’t going to change my course. But that doesn’t make him any less dangerous. Even without me backing him up, you need to remember he’s the luckiest man alive.”

He’s wrong , Navia whispered in my ear, and that strange feeling of someone looking over my shoulder came back to me. You’re the luckiest man alive, Lucky. It’s just that no one knows it yet. We’ll show them .

I hoped she was right. But first, I needed to settle something else. Cove Moonstriker needed to know that I was done being lied to and used.