*Maddox*
“You look like hell.”
Seth shakes his head at me as he walks toward me in the hall. I narrow my gaze at him, but I can hardly be mad at him when what he’s saying is absolutely correct. I’m sure I do look like hell. I probably look like hell twice warmed over.
He has my morning protein shake in his hand, and rather than chastising him for making fun of me, I say, “Give me that.”
“All right,” he says, handing it over. “But I’m pretty sure it’s not gonna help with… whatever’s going on here.” He raises a hand toward my face and moves it around a bit as if to indicate which part of me he is mostly talking about.
I literally growl at him and take the drink, sipping a bit of the vanilla-flavored concoction as I glare at him over the top of the glass. “You’re so helpful,” I mutter. “Thanks.”
“Maybe we should call in Willa?” He sounds hesitant to say such a statement, and he should be. I groan in disgust. “Oh, come on! It’s her job, Maddox.”
The hallway is empty. I know it must be for him to so casually speak my name. He doesn’t do it often, not anymore, not since the last time he accidentally did it in front of a dignitary from another land, and I almost bit his head off–also literally–but that’s Seth’s way of telling me that he is concerned about me.
“Willa?” I repeat, still complaining. “You know how much I hate wearing makeup.”
Willa is the woman we keep staffed at the castle to make me presentable. She’s a professional and very good at making the bags under my eyes and the placid, grayness of my skin dissipate. There was a time when I needed her services almost on a daily basis. Back when Rebecca had first passed away, I was a fucking wreck every damn day. It didn’t matter whether I’d fallen asleep drunk off of my ass or completely sober. When I woke up, I looked like hell.
Most of the time, I’d gotten two or three hours of sleep at most, gained off and on through the night, while hammered. Drinking was the only thing I could do to manage the pain. And while it obviously didn’t work, I convinced myself that being drunk was better than being sober.
The fact that my Beta was trying to convince me that I needed to go see the miracle worker now was alarming. Did I really look that bad now?
If I had slept, just like after Rebecca died, it had been intermittent. A few minutes here and there. Most of the night, I’d laid away thinking about Isla and the huge fucking mess we were in.
“You didn’t talk to her?” Seth asks me as I continue to walk toward my office. I had filled him in only briefly after I left Isla’s room the night before. He knew about the baby, and he knew about the island. He knew about the fountain, and he knew about the curse. That was about it.
“No.” My answer came quickly, sharply. I didn’t want to talk to him about not talking to her.
“You know, I bet if you go to her, you can probably–”
“Enough!” I turn and glare at him, and he makes the face he always makes when I scream at him for absolutely no reason. Immediately, I am reminded that I am an asshole. But that’s nothing new. I soften my tone when I say, “Let’s just get through the ceremony first, all right?”
“Of course,” he says, and we make the rest of the trip to my office in companionable silence.
Once we arrive, I give in and give Willa a ring, sighing as I hang up the phone. I know how bad I look. I don’t want to admit it, but if I’m going to stand before the people and try to portray myself as a mighty king, one who has his shit together, I am going to need her help. Right now, I look like a derailed train that’s bitten off more than it can chew and can’t continue to tread water–one huge cliche of ruin.
Seth and I go over the expectations for the ceremony, which will start in less than three hours. He has jotted down some remarks for me to make. I go over it and change a few words so that it sounds more natural to me. “No one says, ‘henceforth,’” I say, looking at him across the desk.
“It’s an official-sounding word for an official sounding speech.” He shrugs his shoulders like I am the one who is being weird.
I shake my head but decide that the rest of what he has written will accomplish my goal.
Willa comes in, and immediately, the middle-aged woman pulls a face. “Eek,” she mutters. “So… rough night?”
I stare at her for so long, she tips her head down and turns it to the side, exposing her neck, and I can only mentally think, ‘Yeah, that’s what I thought.’ But I don’t reply to her remark. “Come on,” I murmur, and she crosses the room, setting her makeup kit on my desk as she does her work.
It takes about thirty minutes, an indication that it is pretty bad. But a great deal of that time is letting the concoction she puts on the bags under my eyes begin to work. When she’s done, she is smiling. “There we go. You look a thousand times better, Sir.”
Saying anything other than, “Thank you,” is likely to get me into trouble, so that’s all I say, and she leaves.
“I’m going to go make sure that the prisoners get their last meal and are ready to go,” he says. “They’ll be moved to the holding pin an hour before the ceremony begins.”
I nod. We have about two hours before it’s set to start, and I should probably be working on the stack of papers that’s begun to accumulate on my desk while I was off chasing Zabrina, but I can’t. Instead, all I can think about is Isla.
“The crowd’s already gathering,” he continues. “I’ll make sure we have enough guards around the platform to hold them back.”
My brows furrow. “Are they against what is about to happen?” I ask him.
Seth shakes his head. “No, from what I can tell, about ninety percent of them are here out of morbid fascination, that and the need to support the actions of the kingdom. But there are always those who will want to afford change through their own actions, especially people from Zabrina’s home pack and Hill Country pack.”
“Make sure the people from Duster pack have a good view, especially the families of the servants who were killed–and Alpha Hayes’s family.” I know that his children will not be here. I’ve left them in the care of responsible enough people that they would never bring them. In fact, it is against the law for children under the age of twelve to attend hangings. That’s a change I made back in the beginning of my reign. Not that we had the weekly hangings like used to take place under the reign of some of my ancestors. Back then, the children of the prisoners would be brought to the front of the gallows so that the criminals–or alleged criminals–could look into the eyes of their offspring as they hung there, swinging, no bags over their heads.
A particularly gruesome hanging came immediately to mind as I thought about the time my father had hanged six men for conspiring against him. One of them had insisted that he was innocent until the very end. He had three small children under the age of ten, two boys and a girl. They stood there with their mother to watch the hanging, as they were required to.
The hangman had made a mistake with the noose, and rather than hanging him, when the floor dropped out from beneath him, the knot severed his head. It was the vilest thing I’d seen at that time.
I’ll never forget the looks of horror on the faces of those children.
A shudder goes down my spine as I think about it.
No matter what happens today, it can’t be worse than that–can it?
I don’t want to find out.
My work blurs before my eyes as I think about Isla. I can’t possibly sit here and pretend like whatever the fuck is on these papers is more important than me going to speak to her. I know she kicked me out last night, so she might not even want to speak to me, but I’ve got to try.
With a sigh, I push up from my desk and head to her room. I hope she’s awake and feeling well, but at the same time, if she’s still sleeping, that’s good, too. I want her to get everything that she needs as long as she is carrying our baby.
My stroll down the hallway reveals the castle is in a flurry today as servants and others rush by, on their way to make sure that the ceremony goes off without a hitch. They are all respectful as we pass, and I nod and let them go on their way.
What am I going to say to Isla? I don’t know. I hope when I look at her, the right words will emerge. I do realize that her brother may still be with her. I won’t kick him out again, as much as I want to. She doesn’t get to see him much, and it wouldn’t be right for me to make him leave her.
At her exterior door, I pause for a deep breath, hoping the words form on my tongue when I open my mouth, but when I walk into her antechamber, I freeze.
I can hear the sound of Isla’s voice, and whomever she is speaking to, she is doing her best to remain firm and fair; I know that tone. But then, when there is a reply, I almost knock the door down in my haste to defend her.
It is Poppy talking back to her, yelling, and regardless of what has happened, my instinct to protect her kicks in, and it’s all I can do to stay on this side of the door and let Isla resolve this issue herself.
She is fully capable of doing so, after all, and I can’t expect her and Poppy to get along one hundred percent of the time. Still, that’s my woman in there, and she’s carrying my baby, and Poppy has picked the wrong day to be a bitch. My hand hovers above the doorknob when I hear Isla say the one phrase that practically rips my heart out of my chest.
“Poppy, I need you to be reasonable right now. You and Maddox can’t both be irrational at the same time. I can’t bear it.”
A sigh escapes my lips as I think about the fact that Isla is right.
And I can’t bear it either.