The world shattered.
A strangled shriek escaped me as another guard jerked me out of the circle and restrained me with his arms. A wave of confusion and terror exploded inside me. My veins turned to ice and splintered to pieces. The image of Mareena’s final moments replayed itself over and over, seared into my mind, taunting me. The sound of the sword slicing through the air echoed in my thoughts.
“Let. Me. Go!” I screeched, the words sharp as knives. My nails found the man’s flesh, and he abruptly released me. I frantically scrambled over to where Mareena lay.
Her brown hair had fallen over her face, and I quickly brushed it away. I peered into her brown eyes. Her eyes, once full of light, were now dull and lifeless. Life had been ripped from her.
Needles stabbed at the back of my eyes, and hot tears streamed down my face. I took a shuddering, emotion-filled breath as I clutched her hand, a hand that didn’t squeeze back. This wasn’t a nightmare, though I wished it were. My fingertips grew numb and tingling as my mind broke, rejecting reality.
I refused to glance down at her neck, but I knew what it looked like. The image remained there at the back of my eyelids, appearing each time I closed them. Never forgotten. Never forgiven.
My thoughts echoed like the palace hallways. You failed, Syona. She’s dead.
“Check the records.” Raymon’s voice gave the order to the guards. “See if there were any dissenter incidents around the time she was born, about three and half decades ago.”
Another voice, one I didn’t recognize. “We don’t keep records of that, and most of the traitors aren’t even accounted for. We can’t keep track of all the people who sneak between kingdoms.”
“Check anyway! There must be something!” someone snapped.
My muscles shook. The tears kept falling, splattering against the marble. I drank in the warmth of her skin, warmth that I knew would fade away soon. My eyes fell on the bracelet dangling from her wrist, a simple piece of jewelry but one that had condemned her. I snapped it off her wrist and tucked it into my pocket. I didn’t know if they let me take it or just hadn’t seen me do it. Crevan’s face entered my field of view.
My voice was a ghost. “Kill me, please. You’ve killed everyone else.”
He winced. “We can’t.”
“I have nothing to live for anymore.”
“You’re too important. Sorry.”
A full ten seconds went by. I counted them in my head, each one a small eternity, ticking like a clock. “Did you ever love me?” Stupid. A stupid question to ask in that moment of complete vulnerability.
He didn’t answer but simply turned away so I couldn’t see his expression.
I didn’t say anything more, but I felt so many negative emotions. Betrayal. Complete disbelief. You were the one who gave the order to kill her. You were the one who did it. I hate you.
I was full of conflict. I wanted to hate him, but my feelings for him barred me from doing so. Previously spoken words kept surfacing in my memory, the beautiful words that had passed between us, that I thought we were both relating to:
I just don’t like talking to people that often. I’d rather be by myself and sit in the background. Does that make any sense to you?
I observe. I think. I listen. Just. Like. You.
We’re more alike than you might realize or care to admit. Any heartache, any trouble you’ve ever been through, I will know what it’s like. I’m sorry that life is so hard on you.
It wasn’t possible that someone so empathetic and relatable would give an order to kill someone.
It wasn’t possible.
Surprisingly gentle hands untangled me from her body and drug me away. Something with a sickly smell was pressed against my face, but by then I was already fading.
My dreams threw me into the past, reliving a memory that was now painful:
Her stern expression morphs into a smile. “I’m really happy for you.”
“You are?” I try to turn around in the chair, but I can’t. Not with her holding my hair. You can practically hear the eagerness in my voice.
“Yes.” She sticks a few hairpins in her mouth and tries to talk around them. “I didn’t think you’d survive until your eighteenth birthday.”
I laugh, something I want to do more often. “My birthday’s tomorrow. Something still might happen.”
She snorts. “Don’t talk that way. It’s practically impossible. Nobody can touch you now. Besides, you’ve gotten so good at hiding your emotions that I can hardly tell you’re a Malopath anymore.”
“Is that a compliment or an insult?” I don’t want to seem like I’m not human, but it happened to be a matter of survival.
“A little bit of both,” she muses. “But don’t run away from that side of yourself, okay? It’s not healthy.”
“Yes, Mother,” I say jokingly.
In the reflection of the mirror, I see her face twist into amused puzzlement. “Mother?”
It’s a risk. Mareena’s sensitive to her sister’s death. She usually doesn’t want to be called Mother, saying it’s disrespectful to Ionda. I try to counter it. “Aunt? Lady. Mareena. Lady Mareena. Princess. Princess Mareena? Fellow Malopath Who Is Also My Mentor Who’s a Little Hard on Me Sometimes but I Love Her Anyway. What do you want me to call you?”
She continues to weave her fingers through my hair. “Actually . . . Mother would do just fine.”
It took me a long time to drift back to reality. Maybe my subconscious brain didn’t want to return there; it knew that in the real world, my family was dead, my friends were missing, and the people I thought I could trust had betrayed me.
Mareena. Mother. Mareena. The two words echoed in my thoughts like a voice far away, intertwining so tightly that they were synonymous with each other.
They had murdered her.
No. Crevan had murdered her. In front of me.
My eyes snapped open, and I bolted upright, breathing heavily. I tried to untangle myself from the memory. My hair fell into my eyes and across my face, but my hands immediately reached up to brush it away. Sweat drenched my face. I angled my neck back so I could stare up at the ceiling. It was a light tan color with a swirling texture.
Wait. Where was I?
Light flooded in from a source on my right. I turned and saw a stained-glass window on the adjacent wall right next to me, but the curtains were blue, not red like I was used to. I was sitting on a bed. I was in a bedroom, and based on the color scheme of my surroundings, it was a bedroom in the kingdom of Tanum.
“Oh, good. You’re awake. It’s been so boring with nobody to talk to.”
My head shot to the side, toward the sound where I found Raymon stretched across a sofa. Blue to match the colors in the room, the sofa was tucked into the back corner near the door. He draped over it like a curtain, hands folded behind his head. His eyes were dazed, vaguely staring in my direction. He looked relaxed, like he always did. Like he didn’t care.
I snapped off the necklace I still wore and chucked it across the room in his direction.
Even though he appeared completely relaxed, his hand shot into the air and snatched the necklace before it hit the ground. “I advise not doing that. These are expensive. Do you know how much effort it took to create them?”
“You don’t deserve any cooperation from me,” I hissed.
“We do, actually. This is on diplomatic grounds. You are in a neighboring kingdom.”
“Diplomacy is nonexistent at this point,” I seethed, clenching my fists.
“That may be, but you were given time to visit the kingdom of Tanum. Even though the alliance is broken, you remain bound by that original contract, which was on diplomatic grounds. This is your vacation! Isn’t it exciting? Now, are we going to have a conversation like civilized people, or do I have to bring some guards in here to restrain you by force?”
I hated how calm and slow his voice was, as if he were explaining something to a child. He was minimizing the situation. Slices of anger shot through me. My world had been destroyed, reduced to burning splinters. I hated him for it. There was no way he could distort what had truly happened. A fire smoldered inside me, waiting to burst out.
“I’ll talk to you.”
“Good.”
Needles pricked at the back of my eyes again, but I refused to submit to them. I would not cry. “Why did you do all of this? I deserve to know that.”
“Ah, that’s the question of the century. Well, I didn’t appreciate you Ashlons when I found out you split from my kingdom in the past. I mean, we were oppressing your race and all, but I thought it would just be better if you were with us again.” He clapped his hands together, making me flinch. “So, when the previous king died and I came to power about thirty-five years ago, I kept thinking, How can I get them back? How can I get the kingdoms back together again?”
I despised the way he explained it; his voice was high and mocking, like he wasn’t taking any of this seriously.
“Then all of us got to thinking: what if we start a war between the two kingdoms? It was easy enough to do as there was already a resource problem. It was only a matter of time. Then we created these . . . stones.” He held the reflective sapphire in his hand. “Stones that take away emotion. Stones that can control emotion. It was a foolproof plan. You do have to appreciate the genius of it. Wars cause devastation and destruction. People want to feel numb in the middle of a war. We created them, stuck them in a convenient place, and waited. It didn’t take long for you to find them and discover what they could do, and they spread all over the kingdom.”
“But what about the other setting that makes it possible to manipulate the wearer’s emotions?” My fists squeezed so tightly that my nails jabbed into my skin—a familiar feeling.
“Ah, yes. That was so we could control everyone’s emotions and change them to total hopelessness or apathy. We knew it would be easy to waltz in and take the kingdom from a people crushed by despair. Unfortunately, we didn’t expect so many—how do I put this—dissenters from our kingdom. Obviously, these traitors settled down and started families with people from yours. Malopaths are people who have just enough of our blood for the stones not to work. They started popping up everywhere. Fortunately, your father actively hunted them down and killed them, which took care of that problem. Unfortunately, we didn’t expect you and your aunt to be one. That’s for sure.”
It made sense. It clicked. We were two different races of people. We had different traits and appearances. Mareena and I had already inferred that being Malopathic was a trait passed down in families, but we didn’t know how it came to be or how it worked. But the two races intermixing? That I could understand. I have Tanum ancestry. Mareena knew almost nothing about my grandparents, but one of them must have been from Tanum—or both. That’s why royal people have never been Malopathic.
Oh. A flash of memory and inspiration came to me. That’s why they wanted to know if there were any dissenters at the time of Mareena’s birth. They were checking to see if . . . Oh.
It was a small amount of satisfaction, finally knowing my origin, and it sapped away some of the pain I had been feeling. It was a single ray of light in an overcast world.
I started talking again. “If you could take the kingdom that easily, then why did you bother with the war lasting thirty years?”
“We couldn’t just go in and capture the kingdom, even with the stones and all the control we had,” he mused. “If we had done that, the people of your kingdom would always have the drive to rebel and split apart again. It wouldn’t work. No. To gain their loyalty, we couldn’t do it by force. We had to do it . . . politically.”
“The marriage alliance,” I whispered.
“Good girl.” He nodded, a little patronizingly. “We figured that, sooner or later, we would have heirs and your father would have heirs, and we could take the kingdom subtly through an alliance, through marriage. Crevan is a prince of your kingdom now, which means he can rule.” He stared down at his hands and the volume of his voice dropped significantly. “And maybe I just wanted to get into the palace so I could kill the king with my own hands.”
I didn’t understand the burning hatred he held for my father, and he probably wouldn’t tell me if I asked, so I shot seething words back at him. “That means you don’t have any power. Crevan does. He’ll be the king. Not you.”
Raymon snorted. “You think Crevan has any real power? He can’t do anything. Not if I don’t let him. Besides, even if you throw out technicalities and quote as many rules as you can remember, it doesn’t matter. As long as we have you in our kingdom, you can’t do anything.” He huffed, possibly annoyed that I had thrown off the rhythm of his monologue. He then smiled a dark smile. “Anyway, for my plan to work, your kingdom could only have one heir.” He folded his arms behind his head again. “And that was easy enough to do.”
I should have expected it, yet the world came crashing down on me all over again. When I spoke, my voice was steel: “Davin didn’t die in a hunting accident.”
He had the audacity to chuckle. “No, of course he didn’t, and I couldn’t believe how simple it was. All we had to do—”
I leaped off of the bed and onto the floor, fuming. “Don’t. You. Dare. Don’t tell me how easy it was to kill my bother. But do explain why you chose me as the heir and not Davin.”
Raymon was a bit ruffled by my sudden outburst, but he maintained a smooth composure. “You were female. I had to use Ashlon’s female heir since I couldn’t possibly risk marrying off one of my useless daughters. And I liked you. You seemed smart and quiet, easily controllable . . . if you want me to be blunt.”
I clenched my teeth so hard my jaw started hurting. “I am not easily controllable.” Not . . . not anymore.
He stood up, and I resisted the urge to back away from him. “You keep telling yourself that, but you are. You’ve been like that your whole life, and you’re never going to change.” His face relaxed. “But if it makes you feel any better, you are my favorite daughter.”
My blood turned to icicles. He was trying to manipulate me, and I hated it. “Stop it. I’m not your daughter.”
“You are, though, by marriage. You’re also the last surviving member of your family. You have no friends, and you’re alone. Our kingdom now has complete control over yours.” He stopped advancing toward me. “I’d better go. You seem . . . unstable.”
“No! You haven’t told me everything!”
He didn’t listen to me. He paced to the door and opened it in one fluid motion. “I’ll be locking the door behind me if you’re wondering that too.” He closed it with a confirmative clicking noise.
I rushed over to the door and started pounding my fists on it. “Wait! Why do you want the kingdom of Ashlon? If I knew, maybe there’s a way we can work this out! Why did you hate my father so much? What did he ever do to you? How . . . how did you create the stones in the first place?” I grasped at the doorknob, but it was indeed locked. “Wait! Come back!”
But he was gone, leaving me with a pile of never-ending questions.
Never asked.
Never answered.