The Redeemable Prince (The Star-Crossed Series Book 9)

by Rachel Higginson

  “I’m serious, Bastian,” Avalon whimpered. “It’s going to hurt. Leave it in.”

  “You’re such a baby!” I could not believe him. “It already hurts! I can see your bloody intestines!”

  He clutched at the hilt as if he could hold it in forever. I rolled my eyes because he was seconds from passing out. If we were going to play the waiting game, I was obviously going to win.

  “I’ll do it quickly,” I promised him. “You won’t even feel it.”

  He made a noise that I couldn’t define other than agonized. I gripped the hilt, spread my knees to get some kind of leverage and amped up my Magic.

  I had imagined the blade just slipping right out, the same way it had gone into him.

  That was not what happened.

  It took quite a bit of effort, even with Magic aiding me. By the time the sword came free, I had a fine sheen of sweat covering my brow.

  Avalon’s hands covered his still bleeding midsection where Magic seeped out of him. He closed his eyes and tilted his head back. Mimi cupped his jaw immediately and pressed a gentle kiss to his dry lips.

  “I’ll be fine,” he whispered. “I already feel the Magic working. I just have to wait it out.”

  “Good,” I grunted while my sister started crying harder.

  “Did you get him?” Avalon wheezed.

  “Get who?”

  “Terletov?”

  Was he serious? “Obviously not. He ran off right after he stabbed you.”

  Avalon opened his eyes to scowl at me. “I told you I was fine! You should have gone after him.”

  I staggered to my feet and turned around. Sera had collapsed on the ground and sat there shaking and shell-shocked. Mimi wasn’t the only one deeply affected by the image of Avalon’s guts spilled open all over the floor.

  I bent over and picked her up, cradling her in my arms once again.

  “I can walk,” she whispered.

  Reluctantly I set her back on her feet but kept her pressed against me. “Can you at least tell me my fears were validated?” I beseeched her.

  A small smile tugged at her lips, but she ignored my question. “I can’t believe we didn’t get him.”

  “We got his army though,” I reminded her. “And the Citadel. It wasn’t an entirely unproductive day.”

  Avalon groaned dramatically. I rolled my eyes. Seraphina sighed.

  “He’ll be fine.”

  “Sebastian!” My sister sounded aghast with my nonchalance.

  I shot her a cheeky grin. “I’ll have some of the Titans prepare your room, Your Highness.”

  “I… you don’t understand what that was like for me. I can’t watch that again,” Mimi whispered.

  I looked down at Seraphina and understood exactly. “I know what you mean, sister dearest.” I cupped Seraphina’s face and let her see the undisguised adoration I felt for her. She didn’t look away, but her face flashed with a myriad of confused emotions. “Stay with him, Mimi. I’ll see if I can find out what happened to Terletov. I’ll send someone in to help with your husband and have your room or at least a room prepared for you. Just stay with him. I’ll take care of everything else for you.”

  She smiled weakly at me. “Kiran was right to put you in charge, Bastian. You’re good at this.”

  I winked at her. “I’m good at everything.”

  Before she could disagree, I grabbed Sera’s hand and led her from the room.

  “I should go check on those humans we found. I should see if there are any more rooms filled with abused people.”

  “We can do that together. This day isn’t over, Sera. Don’t even think about leaving my side.”

  “If we split up, we could go fast-”

  “No,” I said firmly.

  “Sebastian-”

  “Sera, did you see that look of horror on my sister’s face when her husband was stabbed and bleeding?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I might not be able to pull off her theatrics, but that’s how I feel about you and about what could happen to you. Do you understand? Do you understand why I don’t want to let you out of my sight?”

  She looked at me like she couldn’t believe I admitted that. Honestly, I couldn’t believe it either. But I was at the point where I would do anything to keep her with me, even if that meant telling her the whole truth for once.

  “Okay.”

  I smiled gently at her. “Thank you.”

  She shrugged and that was the end of the conversation. She stayed with me the entire rest of the day as we tried to make sense of the Citadel and what happened to Terletov. He seemed to have just disappeared.

  We might have dismantled his army and taken away his base of operations, but I knew without a doubt that we hadn’t seen the last of Dmitri Terletov.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Seraphina

  “Can you walk?” I looked down at the emaciated woman that I’d helped sit up. Olivia handed her a bottle of water and urged her to drink slowly.

  When she finished with the water, Liv and I each took her under the arms and helped her to her feet. We tried to steady her, but she had no strength to hold her body up.

  A Titan watched us struggle for less than thirty seconds before he came over to take her from us. We passed her off with instructions to carry her to the medical wing Sylvia had set up before Terletov took over the Citadel.

  There had been a team of Titans, supervised by Ophelia and Xander, working all day and night to set the wing to rights again. The rest of the Titans had been dispersed throughout the castle to open every single door and search for displaced humans and Immortals. Bedrooms were searched, closets, kitchens, secret passages we hadn’t even known existed. Basically, we had people scouring every single inch of this structure and surrounding town in case there were any more victims.

  So far, we had found seventy-six bodies. Not all of them had survived Terletov’s reign.

  I felt bile bubble up in my stomach. It had been a tough twenty-four hours, to put it mildly.

  I didn’t think I would ever recover from the horrors I’d seen and experienced. The smell alone could have knocked me on my ass.

  We had been working constantly, ever since we chased Terletov from the castle. I shivered at the memory that he was still out there, still terrorizing this planet with his sick and twisted ways.

  We needed to find him pronto. And of course that was a major priority. But we also had to take care of these people and return our Citadel to the pristine, noble seat where our Kings and Queens ruled.

  Another riot had broken out in London two days ago, even though the royal family had fled the house. And then yesterday, there had been rioting in Paris where Sebastian’s parents lived.

  Sebastian had been shocked that the Kingdom still associated his family with the Monarchy. I had tried to hide my eye roll. As if people just forgot that Bianca was Lucan’s sister. Or that Sebastian had once been a prince and second in line to the throne.

  The Paris riot had been awful. Immortals had attacked the Cartier Residence with nasty aggression and threatened to burn it to the ground. The incident had made the news in Paris, although the human media couldn’t quite explain the conflict.

  Jedrec had taken Analisa there to heal, and so Bianca had been forced to call the local authorities. Kiran and Eden were there too in order to be with his mom, who had finally, and thankfully, woken up. We all hoped the riots would be put to a stop now that the Citadel was back in our control.

  But it would take some serious work to gain the Kingdom’s full trust again.

  And who could blame them? Terletov had wreaked havoc on this people all across the globe. And he was still alive. We still hadn’t managed to end him once and for all.

  But at least we had our home back.

  “I’m exhausted,” Liv sighed once we saw the Titan and the broken Immortal woman through the door.

  “You’re Magic should help,” I told her. I knew how hard it was for Eden to remember her Magi
c. Olivia probably had the same issue.

  Obviously, that was not a problem I could relate to in any way.

  She leaned against the doorframe and looked at me, really looked at me. I saw it in her face then, exhaustion and something deeper, a tiredness that transcended the physical.

  “I think this is something not even Magic can help,” she sighed. “It’s more like weariness. I’m world-weary. It’s a bone-deep kind of thing, you know?”

  My heart clenched. Now this was something I could relate to. “I do know. How’s Jericho? How is he dealing with the news about his parents?”

  “He’s dealing,” she sighed. “It obviously wasn’t easy news, but he’s been grieving them for a while. If anything, I think the confirmation that they’re dead might have given him closure.”

  “I could see that.”

  She crossed her arms and looked down at her feet. “You know, I hated this world at first. Your Magic and your way of life. I blamed you for ruining me. Well, not you specifically, but your people as a whole.” I nodded, showing her I understood. “But then I guess you all kind of grew on me and I adapted to the Magic and… Jericho.” She cleared her throat and smiled adoringly at her tennis shoes. She was either super in love with Nike or Jericho, and she was in that annoying honeymoon phase. “But it’s so hard here. I mean, my normal life had its ups and downs too, but this is insanity. All of these people! And the killings and Terletov! I can barely wrap my head around the destruction. I don’t know how you survive the heartache.”

  I looked at the once-glamorous room. The silk curtains were tattered and filthy. The polished floor was covered in a thick layer of ash and filth. The rich furniture had been removed and replaced with rubble. This castle that used to smell like promise and excitement had turned rank and bitter. My chest squeezed again.

  “I don’t know either,” I admitted. “Maybe because it’s never been roses and rainbows. To an extent this Kingdom has only known suffering and death. We had a few years of reprieve between the old regime and Terletov, but when you live as long as we do, that’s hardly anything.”

  Olivia’s expression saddened. “That does not sell me on this whole Immortal thing.”

  I chuckled a little at her bleak outlook. “It’s not all bad,” I promised. “There have been bad men that try to destroy us, but if anything it’s made us stronger as a people. We survived Lucan and we’ll survive Terletov too. And after we get rid of him, we’ll piece ourselves back together and crawl out of the fire a brighter, beautifully refined Kingdom. I’m not saying that our trials are good things or that I wanted them to happen, but we are resilient and we’re usually smart enough to learn from these experiences and grow.”

  “How can you possibly grow from this?”

  I thought about Lilly and Talbott, and how afraid to get married Lilly had been. She hadn’t wanted to be a spectacle or gossip fodder for the Kingdom. I thought about Avalon’s push to make the nation a democracy and abolish the Monarchy forever. “The Kingdom has been notoriously slow to change,” I explained. “I think this will be a boost in the right direction. Hopefully.”

  “I suppose there will always be evil in the world.” She sighed. “Humanity obviously has their fair share of tragedy and catastrophe.”

  “It’s what we do to counteract the evil that matters, right? I learned that lesson the hard way a long time ago.”

  “What do you mean?” She stood up straight and cocked an eyebrow at me.

  I couldn’t help the embarrassed smile or the faint blush of red to my cheeks. I wasn’t the blushing kind of girl usually, but my past was the one thing in my life that could bring me to my knees with humiliation. I had just been so… wrong. So very wrong.

  “I used to be the evil in the world, Liv. I mean, I wasn’t exactly the Wicked Witch of the West, but I had my fair share of villainy.”

  “Seraphina the reformed bad girl? I never would have guessed.”

  I laughed along with her. “I know what you’re thinking; I’m just so sweet and innocent. It’s hard so hard to picture me doing deeds of destruction.”

  Her smile turned more thoughtful. “No, it’s not that you’re so innocent or anything. It’s just that… well, I know Sebastian and you were so serious for so long. And I trust Sebastian to make smart decisions with whom he falls in love. I have a hard time believing he would go for someone evil.”

  “I wasn’t exactly evil. I was mostly spoiled. And I was engaged to Kiran when Eden came into our lives. I didn’t exactly play nice.”

  “Ah,” Olivia said with understanding. “Love makes us do crazy things.”

  “Except I was never in love with Kiran. It was just, well mostly a status thing. Kingdom politics and what not.”

  She gave me a look that said she could care less about Kingdom politics. I just loved that about her.

  “I figured it out though,” I reassured her. “I realized there was more to life than being a princess and more to my heart than an unfeeling contract, neither of us wanted to be a part of. I need love and trust.”

  “Truth.” She winked at me. “Sebastian showed you that?”

  “He did.” My voice was a forced whisper. It was hard to admit that was true. He had also shown me what it meant not to trust someone and what it meant to lose someone. My chest already felt tight, but with the reminder of how much I’d loved Sebastian and how much I’d lost when we ended things, my heart fissured into a thousand different cracks and splinters.

  “Can I ask what happened between you two?” I must have looked slightly horrified because she quickly explained, “It’s just that when you talk about him, it’s like you had this fairytale romance. But you’re not together now. I’m just trying to understand.”

  I didn’t answer right away. I didn’t know how to answer right away. The words tumbled around in my head, but they felt empty and inadequate. Finally, I said, “We wanted different things. And neither of us was willing to compromise.”

  “You said that before. I just… I can’t believe that’s all. I mean, seriously, that’s it?”

  Her simple response jarred me. “Yes. I mean… yes.” I shifted on my heels and looked around the room, needing something to do with my hands. Her response left me uneasy and restless. What did she mean that’s it? Of course, that was it! We both wanted different things. How is there a future in that? Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. “What do you mean by that?”

  She gave me a patient smile. “Well, I thought you guys loved each other.”

  “We do! Er, I mean we did!”

  “Then who cares if you want different things? Figure out a way to make it work. Or to give each other what you wanted. Who cares what those different things are. If you love each other, you stick together and make it work. Isn’t it better to be together than apart?”

  “I don’t know about that.” I felt as uncertain as I sounded. “It was hard to be together. We just didn’t… there were big issues there. He wanted one thing and I wanted another and it caused this major conflict between us. It wasn’t something either of us could move past. Obviously. I mean, we broke up because of it.”

  She squinted at me, seeming to try to completely understand me. Good luck to her, because honestly, I didn’t even know how to understand me these days. My excuses for not being with Sebastian were still as present as ever, but her words made sense too.

  If I had stuck with him, would we have eventually figured it out? If I would have gotten over my own narcissistic need to be the center of his world and have everything lined up in perfect little rows with perfect little bows, would we have found a way to be together and still met both of our needs?

  “It’s always going to be hard to be with someone, Sera. Love is hard. Sure it’s easy at first, but the long-term stuff is hard. It’s hard to compromise and be unselfish enough to meet someone else’s needs and desires. It’s hard to give up yourself and what you want when there is someone else to think about. But that doesn’t mean it’s not worth the effor
t. In fact, I think it makes everything so much better. You guys might fight and you might disagree, but you also love each other deeply. There is so much good mingled with the hard. I would argue more good than hard. So yeah, you have to truly work for it to be good and stay good, but that’s how everything is in life. You can be lazy and give up, but then you’re just alone.”

  I balked at her straightforward tone. “Geez, Woman! Why don’t you just make me feel like the worst!”

  She tossed her head back and laughed. Her blonde bob bounced around her chin and I felt a bonding between us. We were becoming friends, real friends. Even after all of these years, I wasn’t used to the concept. I had kept fake people around me for so long that I was always a bit baffled when people genuinely wanted to be friends with me.

  It was actually kind of pathetic.

  A new wave of Titans carting limp bodies walked by and both of us sobered. We watched the casualties of this war move by us with unmoving limbs and a desolate lifelessness in their eyes. If nothing else, this conflict with Terletov had put this life I led into sharp focus.

  We had this alleged Immortality attached to us, yet even Mimi had been terrified when the threat of death reached her husband.

  I thought back to Sebastian and how awful it had been to watch him fight Terletov. I couldn’t deny that I still had feelings for him.

  Okay, I could deny it. And I did deny it a lot.

  What I really meant was that I couldn’t ignore them anymore.

  I loved him. I had loved him for a long time and the intensity of my feelings had never disappeared.

  Sure, for a while, it turned to something ugly and hateful. But when we were together and the emotion between us was as pure and blissful as it was intended to be, I couldn’t hate that. I couldn’t hate him.

  It was time to stop lying to myself and lying to him.

  I flexed my Magic that was still intertwined with his, even though we worked on opposite ends of the castle currently. I hadn’t been able to talk myself into removing it.

  It felt so natural to be connected to him, so familiar… so right. So much like home.