“Lena.” His voice cracked when he finally pulled away. His face flushed, his chest heaving, looking as dazed and disheveled as I felt.
I couldn’t quite seem to catch my breath either. When I glanced down, I noticed the only clothing I wore on my torso wasn’t clothes at all, but his hands on my breasts.
The sight of his dark, dark hands covering my pale globes snapped me out of the haze I’d been in. I growled, but this time when I tried to slap him again, he grabbed my wrist and said, “Don’t even think about it, woman.”
“How dare you! How could you—” I slammed my palms against his heavy-as-steel chest, shoving him back not even a smidge. Which only made me angrier.
When had the beast gotten to be such a...a man?
“The king has died; I claim you by right!” He thrust his face into mine, his visage angry but his eyes still gleaming hungrily.
I was not ashamed to admit to myself that having the penetrating stare of a fully pledged dragonborne bearing down on me had my pulse quivering. He could rip me limb from limb if he wanted to. Even with my powers, I was not physically much of a match against him.
Once, I’d have been certain he would not hurt me. But I didn’t know Ragoth at all anymore. All I knew was this: he’d snatched me up from a funeral procession, ripped my clothes off my chest, and had groped me.
“You stupid, selfish, unfeeling boy!”
A rumbling growl vibrated through his barrel chest. “Call me a boy again, Lena, and I will—”
“What?” I notched my chin, giving him a glacial, frosty stare, very much aware that he’d still not taken his hands off my breasts. I hated to admit that I enjoyed his touch. “You will do what to me exactly? Eat me? Roast me? Take me up to the heavens and drop me? What exactly will you do?”
Over the years I’d perfected one art form very well, and that was my ability to come across as cruel, unfeeling, and unflinchingly cold. He heard it now and shook his head with a confused expression on his face.
“What is this?” he grumped. “I saved you. I—”
“You’ve done no such thing.” I sniffed, gathering up the tattered edges of my gown and tying them around me as best I could. He’d made me burn under his touch, made me want and feel things I’d not felt since that day I’d tried to run away with him. The day I’d felt the highest of highs only to come crashing down to the very depths of despair soon after. But I was a woman now. A queen, and what he’d done had been wholly unacceptable. “I am burying my husband. Take me back, Ragoth. Now.”
His nostrils flared, and I could imagine there was steam rolling through his lungs. He quivered with anger.
I merely twitched a brow.
“I kissed you. You kissed me back.” He pounded his chest.
“Yes. And?” I crossed my arms, tapping my slippered foot. “Did you think you could come out here and have relations with me? Is that it?”
I laughed.
He glowered. Shoving twin fingers through his thick hair, he visibly swallowed. As though swallowing words he wasn’t quite sure he should speak into life.
And for just a second I wanted him to deny it. I wanted the hero of my young heart to be the pure, wonderful creature I remembered him being. The white knight who’d done anything and everything for me. The boy-man who’d treated me like his greatest treasure, who’d cherished me, and had made me feel and know love.
But when he shook his head and laughed, leering at my body with heat and lust still twinkling in his sea-glass eyes, I knew that that boy and this man were no longer one and the same.
He’d changed. Just as I had.
And that thought felt like a knife twisting through my soul.
Wiping his mouth with his fingers, he shrugged. “I’ve heard the rumors of you, queen of hearts. ‘Off with his head,’” he sneered. “Tell me, love, how many heads have rolled for your avarice? How many men have you used to get where you’re at?”
I gasped, and this time, I used my magic and not my hand to slap him. Slamming a wall of it against him so violently that he rocked back on his heels and was in very real danger of losing his footing.
A slide of rocks tumbled down the cliff face.
“How dare you? You know nothing of me.”
He rubbed at his chest, his palm open and mechanically moving up and down. Eyes narrowing, he sneered, “I know you let him into your body. I know you let others in there too. I know you—”
“You left me!” I screamed, saying words I’d had no thought of saying. “You left me with him!”
He shook his head, as though denying it, but pain I hadn’t known still existed came pouring out of me—a flood of it that threatened to drown me.
“You left me and I wanted to die. You have no idea...no idea how awful...”
Realizing I was about to confess all to him, I sucked in a breath and turned my face to the side. Fighting back the tears for all I was worth. I would not let him see me cry.
I knew why he’d left. I knew we couldn’t be together, but as irrational as it was, a part of me blamed him for leaving me as he had. And the worst of it was, I hadn’t realized that until now.
“Lena, I—” Devastation scrawled a path through every corner of his face and I couldn’t bear to look at him any longer.
Without finishing that thought, he roared, I knew immediately to shut my eyes as the tear-inducing flames of his transformation enveloped him. In seconds I was once again snatched up by his large claws and trapped within them.
“You...you beast!” I screeched at him. But he was unrelenting in his anger, and again without speaking, he flew us back toward wonderland.
I could hate him. Hate him easily. Despise the man he’d become. The drunkard and the wastrel I knew he now was. He’d not been the only one to keep up on the goings on. In rare moments of deepest melancholy I’d call a looking glass to me and watch him. But when I’d seen one nymph after another after another take and taste of his body, I’d stopped peeking. Stopped spying on him. I’d released him to his avarice, and I’d given into my own.
Yes, I’d slept around, and no, it was none of his business.
The king and I had had an understanding. We hated each other, so why not seek comfort where comfort could be sought? I’d used the men, but willingly. Never without consent, and always with the understanding that it was little more than meeting the needs of the flesh.
Ragoth returned me to where he’d snatched me up from in the first place; he didn’t transform back to human or speak another word to me. But he did stare at me, as though he could see through the mask, see straight into my very soul, and in that moment, I hated him for making me feel so horribly vulnerable.
And then, just like that, he’d gone. Flown off and faded into the distance.
The paid mourners and most of the citizenry had left by this point. We’d been gone maybe an hour, but without me here, there’d clearly been no reason to remain. The only ones who had stayed behind were my loyal Druscella and a few members of my staff.
The king’s casket sat inside the grave, adorned with the finest of wealth and jewels from all parts of Kingdom. But it struck me then, in a bizarre sort of way, that for all his wealth and power, at the end of the day he was merely a corpse in a hole with no one left to mourn him.
Not even I, his wife.
I hugged my arms to my chest, ignoring the fact that I basically wore a shredded gown barely hanging on. No one was around to see me like this, and those who were would never breathe a word.
And not out of loyalty to me, not really. I was a realist. They didn’t speak, because they understood reprisals would be swift and brutal. Or so it would once have been.
I feared I no longer really knew myself.
I hadn’t seen Druscella move in toward me until suddenly I was draped in a fur coat of crimson chinchilla. Nodding my thanks at the only person in this world I considered a friend anymore, I murmured, “Where have they all gone?”
Crossing her arms in front of her, she di
pped her head, speaking in the gentle cadence of hers. “They left when the dragon appeared, my queen. Scattered to the four corners of the wind.”
Sniffing, feeling absolutely dead inside and irritated by the fact that I wanted to see Ragoth again, if only to slap him one more time for making me appear weak before my people, I nodded. “Find the groundskeepers. Tell them to bury the king with due haste. Night falls soon, and I wish to be far from these haunts when it does.”
Nodding, she twirled on her heel and began barking orders to my valets.
“Well, you heard the queen, make haste!”
The few remaining attendants scattered to do my bidding, but Dru remained behind. Without the eyes of court upon us, I settled into the comfortable familiarity with her we shared when behind closed doors.
“Zelena,” Dru breathed, wrapping me up in a tight hug. “What in the devil was Ragoth doing here?”
Almost crumpling into her arms, I shook my head, feeling a suspicious heat creeping up behind the corners of my eyelids. “I don’t know, that bastard. I don’t know why he came. Or what he wants. Other than to call me a whore.”
She gasped, pulling away to stare deeply into my eyes. “He didn’t!”
I couldn’t help but give a pitiful smile at her fury blazing scarlet across her cheeks.
“The bastard, I’ll take my blade to him should he dare to—”
Tsk-ing, I patted her cheek and stepped away, attempting to gather myself. “Do not worry your pretty little head about him. I doubt we should ever see him again.”
In an hour of weakness, a year ago, I’d confessed my love for the dragonborne to her. I’d been in a low place that night and drinking far too heavily. It’d been the very night I’d been forced to witness the execution of the farmer I’d declared a thief.
The shame of my decision to let the people dictate my actions had led me toward the bottle, and after hours of heavy drinking, Ragoth’s ghost had come forcefully to the fore and Druscella had learned all there’d been to learn about my past obsession with my dragon boy.
To her credit, she’d kept my confidence and ever since I’d considered her the only person in the world I could truly trust.
Holding up a finger, Dru rushed to my carriage, grabbed a large blanket and returned in moments, smoothing it down onto the ground. “Sit”—she pointed—“and let’s talk.”
I sighed. I knew what she was going to say. Ever since Charles had come down with his mysterious illness, we’d been skating around this issue.
“Dru,” I said sharply, with a warning tone in my voice.
But she was like a rabid little bunny, all sweetness and smiles on the outside, while inside she was the very devil incarnate. Casting me a haughty glare, she tapped her dainty slippered foot and said, “We can do this the easy way or the hard way, but you’re not getting out of this discussion again. You know we need to do this, so let us just get on with it already.”
Growling, wanting to bite her head off for being such a forceful shrew right now, I plunked myself down onto the blanket. “I loathe you, woman.”
She scoffed. “You might. But you know I’m right. And this is as fine a chance to talk as any. There is none about, a rarity for us.”
Rolling my eyes, I pinched the bridge of my nose. “Well.”
Sitting beside me, she tossed up her hands. “Well, is right. What are you going to do, Zelena? Your powers grow weaker every day, and now that Charles has died, you’ll grow far weaker still. If you’d been at full strength no matter what Ragoth had done, he’d not have been able to snatch you up against your will. We must—”
I hissed. “I’ve only just come out of a marriage. One I loathed with every fiber of my being. Let me at least enjoy my time without the hindrance of a man behind me, even if only for a month.”
“But you don’t have a month,” she pressed on aggressively. “You know this as well as I do, and once the people discover your weakness, what do you think they’ll do?” She nibbled on her bottom lip, and her gray eyes suddenly shone with anxiety.
I knew what she was thinking, and what she wouldn’t say. And the fact was, I felt it too. That fear, the knowledge that perhaps Charles’s and my heavy hand upon the people had made us less than likeable, was almost a certainty of fact.
I’d been young and inexperienced, trained by a woman who was as evil as the day was long to despise and hate others, but that was hardly justification enough for the way I’d handled matters. As I’d matured I’d begun to slowly accept the fact that ugliness only beget more ugliness—that my people weren’t loyal to me because they loved and respected me, but because they feared my reprisals. That lesson had finally struck home with the death of Alerid.
That truth was unsettling and frankly terrifying to me. I was a morphling with no power to draw from anymore. Charles was dead, which meant the power in his ring was also dead to me.
In order for me to regain my full powers, there’d need to be another king. But the thought of allowing another man to rule beside me, to possibly even share my bed, let alone my body, made me want to wretch.
I’d handled relations among my people so poorly, but I didn’t know how to make any of this better. I didn’t even know where to start.
Dru grabbed the hand I had draped across my lap and squeezed gently. “Zelena, I am loyal to you, and I will always remain loyal to you. But if I may speak frankly?”
I snorted. “When haven’t you spoken frankly?”
She stuck out her tongue at me, but then the laughter in her eyes dimmed. “I see you in a way no one else does. The real you. The person behind the crown. The caring, sometimes unsure monarch, and while it is a privilege and an honor to know you thus, I must admit that I too am fearful for my own safety. My queen, I know you’ve been wanting to change how you deal with your subjects for many months now, but I fear that without the power of the stone behind you—”
“The people will sniff out my weakness and overthrow me. Yes, Dru, I know.” That same fate had happened to many of the Heart’s clan.
She thinned her lips.
And I knew her thoughts without her even speaking them. I would never get to be a queen unchallenged, never get to change the course of how I ruled my subjects on my own. Maybe if I’d been compassionate and caring, maybe if I’d been more quick to listen and less hasty to make snap judgments, I’d not be in this situation now, but I couldn’t roll back the hands of time.
I couldn’t undo the damage I’d done, the discord and distrust I’d created. I could scream from the tops of the mountains that I aimed to make this a new wonderland, that I was no longer the queen I’d been just a few months ago, that now I’d seen the error of my ways. But words were simply words. They meant nothing without the action behind them to back them up.
Staring at the nature surrounding us, I finally saw the wild beauty of wonderland. Finally understood what it was I stood to lose if anyone discovered my weakness.
We sat in a graveyard full of rolling curls of fog, with crooked and antiquated headstones poking up from the ground like withered fingers. Surrounded on all sides by stomping willow trees that would smash you if you walked too close to them. I heard the ghostly cries of wailing birds that sang the song of the dead each and every night.
The skies were aglow with fairy light, and leaves the colors of spun sugar waved down at me from gnarled and twisted tree branches.
It was all such lunacy and madness, but there was beauty in it too. A comforting presence I’d taken for granted for far too long. And only now that I stood to lose all of it, did I finally understand just what I had.
Dru scooted into my side and draped an arm across my shoulder. “All is not lost yet, Zelena. We can still fix this.”
I squeezed my eyes shut. “But what if I shouldn’t lead anymore? Have you considered that? Perhaps I am the wrong woman for this job. Perhaps it is time for me to step away from—”
“No.” She said it with such vehemence and passion that I looked up at her.
“I refuse to accept that. Because I see the difference in you, I see the woman you’ve slowly become. You love this land, as I do, as all the landians do. I believe in my heart that you’ve never been impressed by power or wealth, and that is exactly what we need. Someone with a firm, yet loving, handle on her people. That is you, Zelena. You only need a chance to show the people that.”
Worrying my bottom lip between my teeth, I inhaled deeply. “I’ve made such a mess of things.”
“The great thing about messes”—she grinned—“is that you can always clean them up.”
With stomach rolling, and my heart trapped like a struggling, helpless bird inside my throat, I whispered words that felt like death to me, “Prepare the banners then, Dru.”
And getting up, I wandered off deep into the graveyard, wishing a shade would grab me up now and drag me down to the fiery depths of Tartarus with it.
Ironically, the ghosts left me be this eve.
Chapter 8
Ragoth
I reached for a strand of Aphrodite’s golden curls that just so happened to be nestled against the curve of her delicious looking breast, ready to whisper words of my undying devotion to the goddess of love, when she smacked my hand away and glared at me. Causing the glittering pink specks in her eyes to glimmer frostily.
“Stop that, dragonborne, you shame yourself.”
I snapped my fangs at her. I’d come to a bar to drown my sorrows in dragon brew. I hadn’t gone whoring, hadn’t gone and razed a town (though every inch of me had screamed for a release to this horrid violence I felt curling through my bones). No, instead I’d played nice and come here to drink, get drunk, and hate the very idea of Zelena Hermosa.
Problem was, after seven drinks I was still far from hating her, and now Aphrodite somehow found me and began wagging a finger in my direction.
“What is it you want then, woman?” I barked at her.
Yes, probably not wise to anger a goddess. But I was a dragonborne with far too much drink in his gullet to think sensibly at the moment.
Blessedly, the bar was a tiny hovel with room enough only for ten to sit comfortably inside its stone façade. If it’d been bursting with drunkards war likely would have broken out when the goddess undid her silver-dusted cloak, draping it gently across her arm and revealing herself to be completely bare save for strategically placed swaths of diamond-dusted nude-colored fabric across her nipples, crotch, and bum.
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