| |
“You wished to speak with me, Your Majesty?”
“I did.” Queen Circe’s gaze was trained on her long, painted nails, each one tapping a dangerous rhythm against the quartz tabletop. Click. Click. Click. The movements of her long fingers were both distracting and a threat. The tips of her fingers were a dark red. Like blood on the tip of a steel blade.
A part of me was too frightened to move.
Queen Circe was regent, at least until Odele ascended the throne. But now I was not blind to the truth of the curse in the Malabella lineage.
Not a curse at all, but her.
She’d killed every threat before her, and she’d surely kill Odele, were the princess before her now.
“The doppelganger is to pose as a bride in but a short two weeks,” she commented all too casually.
Had she thought I’d forgotten? No one who was present in the room would be likely to forget.
“How goes the search for my stepdaughter?” The clicking of her nails ceased, and her preternatural stillness seemed much more dangerous somehow.
“I regret to inform you that the search for her has proved fruitless. She is nowhere to be found in the kingdom of Thalassar.” The way the queen’s features slashed with unconcealed rage made me glad for it, too. Hopefully she was far away from here, so far away that the murderous grip of the queen would not reach her.
Queen Circe straightened in her chair, as if it were the royal throne itself. Click. Click. Click. “Tell me, Captain Saber, is your family well?”
A shiver of unease slid down my spine. I let my cool composure and obedience fall into place, the mask I wore to serve the royals. I would not let her scent my fear. “I believe they are, Your Majesty.” It was dangerous to answer any other way.
“It’d be a terrible shame if, in a few weeks’ time, they find themselves unwell.”
“Majesty?” I had to feign ignorance, even though the threat didn’t go unnoticed. Oh, it was very well implied in her tone, in the nefarious clicking of her fingernails against the table. Like they were the blades she intended to slit through my family’s chests herself.
Click.
Click.
Click.
“You have one week, Captain,” she ordered with finality. “One week to find my stepdaughter. If, by the end of the week, she is still gone, then consider it your resignation. Are we clear?”
I swallowed the lump of fear that tightened my throat. “Very clear, Majesty.”
Her lips curled into a smile. “Good. Now leave.”
As I turned to leave, my thoughts whirled like the stirrings of an oncoming hurricane. Without saying it directly, she had threatened my family. She had threatened me. Perhaps she thought me a stupid guard and captain, and maybe I was. But I was not a stupid merman, to think they were idle threats.
For Queen Circe had never specified as to whether it would be the resignation of my job...
...or of my life.