Hidden Worlds

by Kristie Cook

  Ian’s voice trailed off as his eyes widened. He nodded slowly, as if a realization had just dawned on him. He smirked again, his pale eyes moving back and forth between Tristan and me.

  “Ahhh. That’s right. They’re still using ya, aren’t they? Have a little assignment for ya to do?” Ian’s voice was mocking. Tristan stiffened.

  The question dinged in my head like an alarm or a reminder, but I couldn’t grasp at the thought trying to come forward from the back of my mind.

  “You’re wrong,” Tristan said.

  “Oh, I don’t think so. They let ya have a little taste of royalty arse here—” Ian flicked his hand toward me again “— they get what they want and ya get to walk free. Nice little assignment, ya lucky bastard.”

  “Lies, Alexis, remember what I told you,” Tristan warned me. Instead, I remembered that thought I had tried to grasp . . . Tristan saying something about an assignment he had when we first met. Is that what Ian’s talking about?

  “Ha!” the ogre barked. “I was there, there when all the plans were made. Remember? Lil’ Alexis, just a babe then, and they had it all planned for ya.”

  “Remember, Alexis, he’s a deceiver.” Tristan’s voice had that steely undertone to it.

  “No, this is the truth, lassie.” Ian looked at me with glee in his eyes. “You were just a tiny bundle when the Amadis planned everything. You and Tristan here . . .”

  “Shut the hell up, Ian!” Tristan nearly jumped out of his seat. Several people glanced over at us again.

  My throat closed in and my stomach knotted as I realized what Ian said. Is it true? I tried to believe what Tristan had told me, repeating it to myself. Deception is his most powerful weapon. Ian carried on in a mocking tone and it was too hard to block out.

  “Oh, yes . . . Princess Alexis and King Tristan, the perfect combination, making the most powerful Amadis baby ever.” Ian bounced in his seat with excitement as he watched my reaction.

  “What?” I choked.

  “Don’t listen,” Tristan whispered. “He’s just trying to take advantage of the situation, turning things around.”

  He stood up and leaned threateningly over the table toward Ian. His voice was low, but no longer a whisper. “If you don’t shut the fuck up, I will make it so you can never talk again. Witnesses or not.”

  “You two got a problem, take it outta here,” the bartender called over in our direction.

  Tristan held his hand out to me. “Come on, Alexis, we’re done here.”

  I started to move.

  “Ah, so ya don’t know yet,” Ian said to me, stopping me, somehow mesmerizing me with his voice. Or maybe it was those pale blue eyes, like shallow pools of water, just deep enough to pull me under. “Looks like Seth’s the one who’s been doing the deceiving. What’d he do? Pretend to fall in love with you? He’s the best liar, I’m sure ya believed every last word . . . every kiss. Did he feed ya the Amadis lie? Did he tell ya that you’re meant to be together when he don’t even believe it?”

  The air caught in my throat as I tried to breathe. My chest squeezed and my pulse throbbed in my ears. I looked up at Tristan, my eyes wide and burning. With no air, my voice was small. “Tristan?”

  He turned stiffly to look at me. Muscles in his neck bulged and his fists clenched, veins popping out.

  “I’m sorry you had to find out this way,” he said flatly. Then he turned back to Ian, his eyes hard as marbles, his voice cold as ice. “She means nothing to me. Leave her alone and deal with me.”

  The air I’d been holding in my lungs came out in a whoosh. I shook my head, tears stinging my eyes.

  “So you did lie to her. Back to your old ways, huh?”

  Too fast to even see, Tristan had Ian pinned face down on the table, his arm twisted sickly behind him. “GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE. NOW!”

  I trembled on the rickety wooden chair as everything inside me plummeted to the darkness of hell. It is true. Tristan’s been lying. I heard a choking sound and thought it was Ian but realized it was me, my chest heaving, my throat squeezing. He doesn’t really love me. Tristan. Doesn’t. Love. Me.

  Ian rolled his eyes up to me, drinking in my reaction.

  “Looks like my work is done here anyway,” he said with a smirk. “Ya know you’ll be welcomed back where ya belong, Seth . . . if the Amadis don’t kill ya.”

  Several people surrounded our table by then, including Owen and the blonde. I couldn’t focus on everything going on as I tried to simply breathe.

  “Vanessa, I swear to God, if you touch her, I’ll come after you myself,” I heard Tristan say from what seemed like far away.

  “So now you’re swearing to God, huh?” a musical voice responded, sounding just as distant.

  There was a lot of commotion and then I heard Ian’s cackling and a chiming laugh fade toward the door. I vaguely heard Tristan say we were leaving, too, but I couldn’t move. I was frozen, lost within myself.

  Tristan doesn’t love me. He never did. It was all just a lie. His words echoed in my head. She means nothing to me. I wrapped my arms around myself, clutching at my abdomen, my chest still heaving. My heart felt like it had been squeezed until it ruptured and now just sat in my chest, limp and lifeless, a burst balloon. I’m just an assignment to him. Nothing else.

  Tristan came over to me and I shrank away from him.

  “Alexis, we need to go.” He reached out for my hand and I jumped off the chair, knocking it over. “Let me take you home and explain.”

  “Don’t you touch me!” I screamed, not caring who surrounded us.

  He grabbed my wrists with one hand and pulled me close to him, holding my chin firmly with his other hand to make me look up at him. He was too strong for me to break loose. “You have to listen to me because you cannot believe him.”

  “But you even said . . . ,” I choked out.

  “I told you I’d have to say things I didn’t mean. You have to believe me that I really love you, Alexis. Please believe that. Please trust me.”

  No, he said he would have to say things he didn’t want to say. There was a difference. He even lied to me now. The tears disappeared as anger enveloped me. I broke away from him, yanking my hands out of his. My voice rose in volume and octaves so I didn’t even sound like myself.

  “Trust you? After all this, you expect me to trust you? This whole thing has been nothing but a lie! You are a liar! You are the deceiver! And you are so good at it because that is what you are made to do!”

  I glared at him as if he were a monster. I didn’t even know who he was. His eyes—his whole face—filled with pain. And I was glad. I wanted him to hurt. I wanted him to hurt like hell. Because he had done the ultimate pain job on me.

  “Go back to wherever you came from, Tristan, because you don’t belong with me!” I ran through the pub, out the door and across the street to the beach.

  Although the sand made it difficult, following the beach was the quickest way home. I ran for a while, not noticing the rain, not caring how dark it was, with only the light of the moon reflecting on the water. Someone came out of the darkness and grabbed me by the waist. I kicked and screamed.

  “It’s not safe for you out here,” Tristan growled.

  “I don’t care!” I yelled, still kicking and thrashing my arms. “I’d rather be dead!”

  “Alexis, please don’t say that,” he murmured in my ear.

  “You’ve already ripped me into pieces. I’m as good as dead, anyway!”

  “Lexi, please . . .”

  “Let me take her, Tristan.” Mom’s voice came from the darkness. Her small frame stepped out of the black trees and shrubs lining the top of the beach. “I’ve got her now.”

  I squirmed and Tristan let me go. I ran into Mom’s arms and fell against her, my body racking with sobs.

  She held me and stroked my hair while I cried, the rain pouring on us almost as fast as my tears. “Let’s go home, now.”

  We left Tristan on the beach, standing alone in the
rain. The last image burned on my eyes was his beautiful face contorted with agony.

  Chapter 17

  As soon as we were home, I stripped my wet clothes off, put on sweats and a t-shirt, crawled under the covers of my bed and sobbed. He doesn’t love me. He never did. I mean nothing to him. The phrases chanted in my head like a sick mantra. When my stomach and chest hurt too much to sob anymore, I just lay there, tears streaming silently. I don’t know when I fell asleep or for how long, but when I woke up, it was still dark and I was still crying.

  As the new day dawned, I realized it was the first day of the rest of my life without Tristan. Without love. Without hope. When the tears didn’t come, anger did. Anger at Tristan, anger at my mother, anger at myself.

  “How could he do this to me?! Why would she let him?! How did I fall for it?!” I screamed at the walls and the ceiling. I beat on my pillows and bed, letting them take the wrath, and finally broke down into sobs again . . . then silent tears . . . then exhaustion.

  Sometime in the late morning there was a knock on my door.

  “Go away!”

  “Alexis, I need to talk to you,” Mom said through the door.

  “I said to go away!” I turned over on my side, facing the wall, my back to the door in case she came in anyway, but she didn’t knock again or say anything else.

  Later that afternoon, I quietly slipped to the bathroom, relieved Mom didn’t catch me. When I came out, though, she was waiting, a look of deep concern on her face. I glanced past her, into the living room, and saw the familiar sandy-brown hair over the top of the couch. Fresh tears sprang into my eyes.

  “Leave me alone,” I muttered and rushed back to my room. I swung the door closed, but she caught it. I crawled back into bed, my back to her.

  “Alexis, please let me explain,” she said.

  I turned over and glared at her. “Why? It’s all just bullshit lies.”

  “That’s why. So you can understand the truth.”

  I sat up and hardened my eyes. “You mean the half-truth—no, not even half, the partial-truth. You two never tell me the whole truth. The only two people in this world who I thought I could trust. Why should I believe anything now? It’s all lies!”

  “You have to believe he really loves you, Alexis.”

  I glared at her. “And that is the biggest, bald-faced, bullshit lie of them all!”

  I heard heavy footsteps, then the front door open. Mom looked over her shoulder toward the door and then back at me. “You’re killing him, you know.”

  “Good! He’s already all but killed me. In fact, I would have been better off if he had killed me when he wanted to.”

  The front door slammed shut. He’d heard that. I was glad. Not really. No, not really, but I wanted to be glad.

  Mom came over and sat at the end of my bed. I scooted myself away until my back pressed against the broken headboard, a casualty of my anger fits.

  “You know what really gets me, Sophia?” I fumed. “You knew all along. You let all this happen. You’re supposed to be my mother.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “That’s exactly why you need to listen to me, Alexis. I am your mother. I would not let anything or anyone intentionally hurt you. Do you really think I would have let this go on with him if I didn’t believe he truly loved you?”

  “Wasn’t that the plan?” I spewed.

  “You don’t even know the plan. You’re all worked up about something you don’t understand.”

  I crossed my arms over my chest. “So educate me. Tell me what I’m missing here that makes the lies okay.”

  Mom studied my face, took a deep breath and blew it out. “Over eighty years ago, when I went through the Ang’dora, we thought our bloodline would die out and the Amadis would collapse. Remember, the Amadis is a society. Our family started it and continues to rule it. It’ll fall apart without us. I was the last in our bloodline and I’d had no children. Since no one had ever reproduced after the Ang’dora, your conception and birth seemed like miracles to us. Realizing there was hope for us to continue, it was decided it’d be in our best interest of survival—possibly our only chances of survival—if you joined with the strongest, most powerful male with original Amadis blood . . . .”

  “Tristan,” I spat.

  “Yes, Tristan. A child from the two of you would guarantee our survival for many centuries. I can’t tell you what it means for the Amadis to survive, but perhaps you can understand if you remember the Daemoni are our enemies and, well, let’s just say it’s not good for them to be left without us.”

  I nodded reluctantly. I knew where this was going.

  “So where does this farce of a relationship and love come in?” I demanded. “Haven’t the Amadis heard of in vitro fertilization?”

  Mom shook her head. “Just back up a bit here. When you were born, I took you to the Amadis and that’s when the council made its final decision . . . the plans for you and Tristan. I adamantly opposed it, believing it would not turn out well. Tristan opposed it, too. He thought it wasn’t fair to you. But the council was settled.

  “The council, in general, believed the two of you were meant for each other and you would be true soul mates. They tried to convince Tristan and me, but neither of us believed it possible. We both eventually agreed to the decision, though. For the next eighteen years, he went his way and I took you my way. I figured at some point, when you were much older than you are now, the two of you would find a way to make it happen and then go your separate ways.

  “After waiting and brooding over this for so long, though, Tristan became curious. As soon as you turned eighteen, he came looking for you. He’s told you the rest from there.”

  I stared at Mom. I still didn’t get how the last nine months had anything to do with it. “So it was all just a set-up. Why did he have to lie about loving me, though? How can you justify that?”

  “I don’t believe it’s a lie, Alexis,” she answered quietly. “I feel it’s the truth. I’ve felt it since the day I came back from that trip and saw how happy you two were together. I just didn’t want to feel it then. But not wanting it doesn’t make it go away. I believe the council was right and you two were meant to be together. You belong together.”

  My eyes hardened with my heart. “I don’t buy it. He came here to complete his little assignment so he could get on with his long, miserable life. I was just a responsibility and he wanted to get it done and out of the way.”

  “You’re being ridiculous, Alexis, and you know it deep down in your heart.”

  I shrugged. I didn’t want to know what hid deep down in my heart because it meant pain (love).

  “Whatever,” I finally muttered. I punched my pillow and lay back down on my side, facing the wall again.

  “Alexis, you love him, don’t you?”

  I ignored her. She eventually got the message and left.

  She was right. I did love him, to my core. If I wasn’t sure before, the intense pain I felt now proved it. But he didn’t really love me. He had to play through the whole thing so he could get used to being around me without wanting to kill me. After all, we couldn’t create a kid if he murdered me in the process. He just needed to make it seem real to keep me around long enough. Even went so far as to propose . . .

  I broke down in tears and then full-body sobs again. When the anger followed, I mostly directed it at myself for being so damn stupid. A part of me knew it all along . . . the part still protecting my most vulnerable, intimate areas . . . the part that knew he really was too good to be true, that it never was real. That I had good reason not to trust him. I cried through another night.

  The next few days consisted of crying, anger, staring at the walls and restless sleep. I didn’t eat and had to force myself to even take a shower. No school, no Tristan . . . no reason to care. My future, my whole life was over. Not over, as in I wanted to kill myself. Just over as in that chapter ended and I couldn’t find the beginning of the next one. So many unknowns loomed in my future, and th
e one thing I’d finally become so sure about—my anchor—was gone. I didn’t know what to do with myself anymore.

  I lost all track of time. He came by the cottage several times, but I stayed in my room and refused to acknowledge him. He could only be there for one reason—to explain himself and end it in person. I couldn’t deal with the rejection all over again. It was easier to just be mad, because I was afraid of what my heart would do if I even heard his lovely voice or saw his . . . Nope, not even going to think about it. When I’d hear him leave, I had to fight the urge to run after him. So I cried instead.

  ***

  “Good to see you out of your room,” Mom said one morning when I slouched into the kitchen. She was about to leave for the store. “It’s only been nearly a week. You look like hell.”

  “A week?” I couldn’t believe I’d wasted so much time being miserable.

  She looked at me with concern. “Maybe you could at least go to the beach or something. I bet you’d like that. It would make you feel better.”

  “Yeah, maybe,” I mumbled. I doubted it would make me feel better. I loved the beach, but it happened to be where I had a lot of memories I didn’t want to stir up.

  Mom left as I sipped a cup of coffee, staring at the cream-colored kitchen walls and trying not to think. I eventually poured a bowl of cereal I really didn’t want. I took a couple bites and watched the rest turn to mush when there was a knock at the door. I stiffened in my chair. It could only be one person. I panicked. I couldn’t slip to my room without him seeing me through the door glass. I didn’t want to answer it, but he’d become familiar enough to usually enter on his own. I leaned over in my chair to peer around the corner at the door. Whew.

  “Hey, Owen,” I muttered when I opened the door.

  “Hey, Alexis. You, uh, look like hell.”

  I still wore pajama bottoms and a tank top, my hair pulled up in a sloppy pony. I could only imagine how red and swollen my face was.

  “Nice to see you, too,” I said. I peered at him and noticed bruises all over his arms. “You look like hell, too. What happened to you?”