Kicking my dinner tray away, I tucked into myself on the bed, facing the wall. I had no sense of time, only my meals giving me a base of measure. When I got eggs or oatmeal, I figured the day was beginning for most above. Sandwich or soup equaled midday. Stew, burritos, and chicken told me the sun had probably already set on my prison.
Going off this, two days had passed since the King’s last visit.
Once I gave in and started eating after Lars left the last time, I realized what a fool I was for letting all those other meals go to waste. I’d give Lars one thing, the prison food here was amazing. Rather than gruel, I was getting chef-style meals, better than anything I’d ever had in my life.
What was up with that? Why treat me so well? It didn’t make sense. Was it because of Kennedy? Or was he doing some strange reverse psychology bullshite on me? Was my chicken enchilada a device to break me? Get me sucked in by the delicious sauce so I’d let my guard down? If he took it away from me now and gave me gruel, I might break.
Goosebumps flushed over my skin the instant he walked in. I rolled away and folded in tighter against the feel of his presence.
“Ms. Cathbad?” His deep voice slid over my shoulder, entering my ear.
I was a prisoner, and he still called me by my family’s given name. Names held respect. It was another thing that annoyed me—the possibility his formal pleasantries would make me mad.
I turned to address him, air halting in my lungs. Bloody hell. Today he wore a deep navy suit with a yellow-and-gray striped tie, his hair brushed back. It never looked gelled or greasy. Most likely his hair was too scared to disobey his order to wave back in perfection.
My mouth pinched together, my gaze snapping back to the wall.
“I will take that as an answer to my final chance I have so generously given you.”
I snorted.
“Get up.” His voice went icy cold, drawing my attention back to him. The King stared at me; his heavy gaze held power and irritation. “Now.”
“Done playing nice?” A smile twisted my mouth; sweeping my legs to the floor, I stood up. “It’s about fucking time. Now we can finally start getting to the point.”
“Yes, we can.” He replied so unemotionally a chill scampered down my spine.
He tilted his head down at me. Fear coiled in my gut. Something had changed. His confidence burst out of him similar to an overstuffed turkey.
“Travil?” he called, keeping his attention on me.
The guard who caught me in Ireland stepped into the room. He had long dark hair pulled back with a band. He stood an inch or two shorter than Lars, built wide and muscular. Not someone you wanted to run into in an alley. I could never imagine him cracking a smile. His beefed-up bow and arrow hung from his back and a beautiful carved knife draped against his hip.
Fabric hung from his fingers, draping like chains.
With nowhere to go, my legs still took me backward toward my bed. He held Druid’s kryptonite. A gag. How sad was that? A piece of cloth could bring Druids to their knees.
Travil was in front of me before I could blink. I hated how fast fae could move. It was unnerving.
“Open up.” Travil ordered me, his eyes glinting with glee. He was enjoying this immensely. His dislike for me was palpable every time he dropped off my meals, clouding the room in a dense fog.
Glowering, I pinched my lips together.
“Even better,” he said so only I could hear, his hands clamping down on the sides of my face, the cloth pushing at my lips, trying to divide them.
I tried to turn my face, but his fingers dug sharper into my skin. With a grunt, he parted my teeth. The gag skated back, ramming into the corners of my mouth. I shoved against Travil, my head waggling, trying to break free. But it was too late; a knot dug into the back of my head as he tied it.
“You should always be this way.” He knotted it again. “Muzzled.”
“Travil.” Lars said his name like a warning. Travil backed up, but his glare still fixed on me. “Ms. Cathbad, you wanted to see the level I will go? Let us go find out.” He turned for the door.
Tying my hands behind my back, Travil yanked the rope as if it were a leash, forcing me to follow the demon. Anger boiled inside, ready to spout out, though physically I could not do anything. I was only five-three and a wee thing next to these brutes. Only my magic made me a giant among fae.
I never believed Lars would play fair. He was a cruel, selfish, demented man, caught up in his superiority, thinking himself untouchable. But the moment I could, the King would find he’d met his match.
“Come, Ms. Cathbad, you have guests.” Lars’s smug gaze drilled into mine.
Guests? More than one? I figured my time was up and he was going to force me to face my sister, but he was too smug, too haughty for it to just be Kennedy.
Sour acid pitted deep in my gut. No. He couldn’t have found out. There’s no way. The King had the means to find out things others couldn’t, but what I hid was untraceable back to me. I had made sure.
My throat struggled to swallow. Travil pushed me to trail after the formidable King, his bloody expensive shoes snapping the floor like yipping dogs in front of us.
Travil’s fingers dug into my arm, shoving me rougher than he needed to down the hall. Clearly he was one of those still bigoted against Druids. He disliked me purely because of what I was.
Well, okay, he might also hate me because he almost died in a bombing when I planned to kill a group of vile noble fae. To be fair, I did not know the King and Queen were there. Killing the King and his men would have been a lucky happenstance. And yes, I sent strighoul to attack the compound, but only after my first warning went unheeded, and the King dispatched a dark dweller and a siren to come for the spear. I learned my lesson. My warning had not been enough; I was too soft. So, yes, I ordered the strighoul to take one of his people and threaten him with them.
Lars would have done no less to me.
Protecting the Treasures of Tuatha Dé Danann was my first priority. History had shown us they should not be obtained by fae, especially all the objects together. Devastation and destruction would follow. The power was too much for anyone to handle. Every fae before thought they would be the one to have the strength to control them. They never did. And kingdoms had fallen.
Lars already had two I was aware of, but it was possible he had three. There had been whispers in Ireland, years before the war, that the Stone of Fáil had been turned up by a Wanderer and a human girl. As fast as the buzz came around, it went silent. There was a great probability he had found a way to secure it from them, the same way he obtained the Spear of Lug from me.
I hoped I was wrong. If he had it, we were in so much trouble. The only thing that could challenge the stone was the cauldron, but that didn’t make me any more inclined to hand it over to him. For now all I could do was guard the Cauldron of Dagda with all I had and keep a final piece from him.
Lars stopped at a door at the end of the hallway, turning to look at me over his shoulder. “Last chance, Ms. Cathbad, before you force me into extreme measures.”
I glared at him, hoping my eyes screamed fuck you.
His lip curled into a slight smirk. He opened the door and stepped in, and I followed along with his crony. I was ready to see a torture apparatus or at least my sister. I found neither of those. My neck turned my head to survey the room.
It was stone like my cell, rectangular and empty. A large, dark window took up most of the wall on one side. My eyes couldn’t penetrate the darkly tinted glass, but I knew we were still far below the ground surface. This would not be a window looking outside.
Travil moved me to face it. I gulped, acid burning my esophagus. Anxiety alighted all over me like sudden cold snow. I trusted my intuition, and it told me to be scared. Whatever he had planned for me, I might be wishing for torture.
“I would love to untie and ungag you.” Lars came up beside me, sliding one hand into his pants pocket. He was at ease, which only twined
my nerves into clusters. “However, I have little faith you will not try to attack me.”
I shifted my chin higher. He was right. No point in denying it.
“I have tried from day one to work with you, Ms. Cathbad.” He flicked his chartreuse eyes toward me. “But you have forced my hand. You want me to play dirty?” The color in his eyes deepened in vibrancy. “I am a king. A demon. I can go to depths you never even dreamed of to get what I want.”
The intensity of his gaze and the authority in his voice stirred a burning heat through my body. I snapped my head away from him, feeling abhorrence and anger explode against the heat similar to a buffer. My hands clenched, letting the hate rise inside me and pushing back against whatever disgusting response this demon could make me feel.
“Go ahead, Travil.” The demon nodded to his man. The dark-haired brute walked over to the wall and flicked on a switch. It was exactly what I thought—a two-way mirror.
Light from the other side brought the room to life, showing what he had in store for me.
A gasp clogged my throat. “No!” I tried to scream through the gag, but it came out muffled. My feet moved me to the glass, my arms trying to wiggle out of the binds behind my back.
Olwyn!
My heart dived down to my toes at the sight of the old woman who raised me. She sat in a rocker, a blanket over her, her lids closed as she tipped the chair back and forth, sound asleep. She had hit a hundred and twelve last year. She only continued to live because I had extended her life. Even though she had lost most of her mind and her health a long time ago, she was all I had, and I didn’t want to be alone.
I should have known Olwyn wouldn’t be safe from him. But did he really think she was my Achilles heel, which would crumble me to a pile of rubbish and spill all my secrets? I didn’t bend for my sister; did he think a woman of almost one hundred and thirteen would have me selling out humanity?
I turned to stare at the King, straightening, my gaze level on him.
Another disturbing smile ghosted his mouth as he moved closer to me. “I figured.”
My forehead crinkled in confusion. If he knew she wouldn’t break me, then why act as though he had a winning hand? Another dose of fear flooded my gut, swiping at the lining in my stomach.
“Goran?” Lars hit a speaker button next to me on the wall. “Bring her in.” He shifted his head, his face close to mine, his voice a low whisper. “I warned you there is no depth I would not go to get what I want, to discover your most hidden secrets.”
In my peripheral I saw movement in the small chamber next to Olwyn’s. Time began to move slowly as I rotated around to see the bodies walk in. One large. One small.
Oh. Gods. No.
The earth buckled beneath me. My knees crashed to the ground and a guttural scream lashed against the fabric in my mouth. Like clamps cranked down on my airwaves, oxygen stuck in my lungs and locked in my chest.
He did it. He found the one thing I thought I had hidden so deep no one could ever find. Not just my Achilles heel, but my soul.
Fire ripped through my chest as I blinked back hot tears threatening to come. She was supposed to be safe, far away from me, from this life.
I stared at the little girl holding Goran’s hand, a stuffed animal wrapped tightly in her other, and her long brown hair shielding part of her face. Goran leaned down, whispering something. She looked up and a gasp hitched in my throat.
Deep blue eyes like her father’s glistened in the light, but everything else was me. My family genes, down to the freckles sprinkled over her nose.
She was beautiful. Perfect.
My daughter.
Chapter Five
Fionna
Pain and love pounded in equal tempo, more tears cascading down my face. I could not stop staring at her, my hands aching to reach out.
“Mother” was a word I had never claimed for myself. I had given birth to her, but I was no mother. I never even let myself hold her before they took her away.
It was for the best, I’d told myself. She would never have been safe, surely used against me by an enemy, and would spend her life in a world of death and darkness. I thought I had done the right thing, protecting her from my world.
Lars came up beside me, his figure towering over me, arms behind his back. He watched the little girl as Goran sat her down with some toys. She didn’t move to them, rolling her arms into a knot at her chest, while longing flooded from in her eyes. Goran, the huge asshole, was on his hands and knees, trying to gently encourage her.
“You hid her well. But my men are considered the best for a reason.” Lars broke my attention from her. “I did not want to use a child. You gave me no choice.” My head shot up so sharply a vein popped in my neck, heating it with blood. He slowly turned his chin down to me, his green eyes set on mine. “I am going to untie you now, Ms. Cathbad, because you understand perfectly what is at risk if you do anything to me. You grasp what will happen if you do not say yes to my request?”
My nose flared, fury boiling in my stomach. He had me completely under his command and he knew it. An inferno of hate seared through the tears trailing down my face. I had no choice.
Nodding, my lids squeezing together, the last tear soaked into the cloth wrapped around my mouth. With a nod from the King, fingers dug into my wrists, undoing the rope binding my hands. Once freed, my palms flew to the glass, pressing against it. Travil ripped out strands of my hair removing the gag, but I hardly felt it, all my attention on her.
“Ms. Cathbad, I bind you from using magic on me, anyone in this home, attached to me or this property. No loopholes or tricks. Do you understand?”
“Yes,” I whispered, feeling as if he were stripping me of my soul.
“Do you agree to this contract?”
I sucked in air, letting it flow over my lips in a long exhale. Staring at my little girl, I only had one response.
“Yes.” The moment I agreed, energy descended on me as palpable as when Lars’s ogre had decided to use me as a chair. My shoulders sagged under the weight, my teeth gritting through the pressure. Then it was gone. But I felt the bind wrap around me like a noose.
Goran sat down with the girl and nodded toward the toys. She sat but still didn’t move to touch the toys; her long silky hair blocked most of her sweet face. I couldn’t take my eyes off her for more than a moment.
“What kind of a man are you, using an innocent little girl?” I hissed.
“If you saw the family who had adopted her, you’d be thanking me for taking her.” Lars slid his hands in his pockets, nodding toward the girl. “She’s an extremely special girl. It is incredibly lucky we found her. Got her away from there…from those people,” he snarled.
“Where was she?” I croaked out, peering up at him. “What were they doing to her?”
“She was near Dublin. The family from whom I took her have filed reports several times with the police and adoption agency. They complained of her being possessed by the devil, that her tongue was controlled by demons.” Lars tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves, his forehead pinched.
My neck swung back to the tiny child. Bloody shite. She was too young to be getting predictions. She was only five. I had hoped her fully human father would water down the Druid magic, but it seemed only the opposite had happened.
I’d thought about her every day after that warm June morning when I had to give her up, wondered what she was doing, what her life was like. If she was happy. Had friends.
“They hoped beating her would expel the demons,” he growled. “When that didn’t work, they tried to get her exorcised.”
My hand went to my mouth, doing little to hold back my anguished cry. Guilt pummeled me and bent me over. I was unable to swallow over the agony I felt, air fighting to get down into my lungs.
What had I done to her? What horrors did I let happen to her because I thought I was doing the right thing? Gasps ricocheted out of me. Air wouldn’t make its way over the barricade in my throat. My nerves trill
ed with fear and anxiety.
Fingers came up under my chin, forcing it up with a jerk. Bright greenish eyes caught mine. “Calm down,” the voice ordered me. “Take a deep breath.”
Without hesitation my body followed the command. My shoulders dipped lower as I halted the short breaths, taking a long controlled one.
“Again.”
I sucked in through my nose, feeling the blockage dissolving on my tongue after a few more inhales. Slowly my panic ebbed, allowing me to notice the King squatted down next to me, his fingers wrapped around my jaw.
“Thank you,” I mumbled out so low most ears wouldn’t have heard, but Lars was not like most.
He nodded at my appreciation, his expression holding no emotion. “One more time.”
“I’m fine.” I tried to pull away from his hold.
“Humor me.” He leaned his head to the side, keeping his grip firm.
Normally at the first hint of anyone, especially him, telling me what to do, I would have swung out a right hook. Instead I took another deep breath, closed my eyes, and centered myself.
“She will never be harmed again. That I can promise you,” he said quietly, his voice like butter, coating me in warmth. A promise to a fae was binding. They did not toss them around casually, Lars least of all. He meant it.
Fionna, wake up! Don’t get caught in his glamour. This is all a trick!
I yanked away from him, scooting backward, my defenses slamming up.
“What is your game then? If you aren’t going to use her against me?”
He watched me for a few beats before rising.
“I never said I wouldn’t use her against you.”
Fuck. Shite. I knew it.
I flew to my feet, my shoulders rolling back. An overwhelming need to protect my daughter caused me to snarl the same as a wild animal. Magic clawed up my throat, ready to strike.
“Don’t.” Lars glared. “I warn you, even if you physically attack me, I will retaliate. You have something to live for, Ms. Cathbad, so don’t take away this little girl’s mother again.”
His words were a knife in the chest. I stumbled a step back, remorse slowing me down.
The Fall Of The King (Lightness Saga Book 3) Page 3
