My father might be proud of me—if he were here—but I’m filled with self-loathing. I no longer hate the king nearly so much as I hate what I have become and what I must do.
I lean against the railing for who knows how long, letting the night air wash over me. Eventually my gaze drops from the sky to the gardens.
A figure sits on one of the stone benches, his broad back facing me.
Montes.
Has he been there the whole time? What could he possibly be musing about deep into the night?
I push away from the balcony and leave our room. My shoes click down the hallway.
I want to see him, my king. Even though I’m plotting against him, and even though he’s bent and broken all wrong, I want to see him.
You see, I love him.
So much.
I can finally admit it to myself now, at the end of things. It’s been there for a while. Quite a while. I was just always afraid of it.
I stride out the palace’s back doors and head down one of the paths that winds through the garden. My steps slow when I catch sight of the king’s form. He sits next to a bubbling fountain, his forearms on his thighs, his head bent.
I am not the only weary one here.
He tilts his head in my direction when he hears my boots click against the stone, but he doesn’t turn around.
When I reach him, I touch his shoulder. “What are you doing out here?” I ask quietly.
His hand goes to my arm, like he wants to make sure I’m tethered to him. “My wife wasn’t in my bed.” He smiles wanly, his focus on the fountain ahead of us. “I’m discovering I can’t sleep when you’re not in my bed.”
I move to sit down next to him, surprised when he doesn’t try to pull me onto his lap.
“So you came out here?” I fill in.
“You’re not the only one that gets tired of those walls pressing in.”
There something frightening about the way he’s talking. The way he’s acting. I might finally understand why Montes panics when I pull away. I can feel the anxiety there, right beneath my sternum. He’s the one whose life will soon end, and he’s acting distant, and I’m pursuing him. He’s the decent one, and I’m the great evil who will destroy every last thing he holds dear.
When did our roles reverse?
He finally looks at me, and God, the look—I could live and die in it.
“Stop it,” I say quietly.
He cups my cheek. “Every time you say that, I know I’m doing something right.”
I frown, even as my eyes well with some soft emotion.
“Nire bihotza, why are you sad?”
I should be asking him the same thing.
“There’s a lot to be sad about.”
He shakes his head. “I’ve had a hundred years to be sad. I don’t want to be sad any longer. And I don’t want my queen to be, either.”
But that’s impossible at this point. The two of us have spent too long drowning in horrors of our own making.
That’s all we know—pain and bloodshed.
Montes threads his fingers through mine.
I glance down at our joined hands, and amend my earlier statement.
All we know is pain, bloodshed—and this.
And it’s this last one that will kill us.
Chapter 49
Serenity
There’s one last person I need to speak with, and he will be the one to play the most pivotal role.
I find Heinrich in his office. The grand marshal is on the phone when I enter, his voice gruff. The moment he catches sight of me, he straightens in his chair, rushing the caller off the phone.
I take a seat in one of the guest chairs across from him.
“Your Majesty,” he bows his head.
I’m struck all over again by how hardened this man is. He’s seen his fair share of carnage. I can tell he respects me, but I bet he also thinks I’m a bit naïve and disillusioned. Me with my grand speeches and rosy ideals.
He doesn’t speak, doesn’t ask me why I’m here, or what I need.
“How loyal are you to the king?” I finally ask.
He rubs his chin and speculates me from where he sets. “I would die for him. And for you, Your Majesty.”
You can’t trust people. Even the most decent ones can turn on you for the right price; I know that better than most. But I decide to trust this man because I’m out of options.
“What if I told you that I needed your help to end the war?”
He stares at me for several seconds before saying, “I would ask you what you need from me.”
“I was hoping you’d say that.”
And then I tell him exactly what I intend to do.
I’m not even finished speaking when he starts shaking his head.
“No,” he barks out, “I know what I said before, but I won’t do this.”
“Then I will die, and the world will continue to be at war.”
“It’s too risky.” He’s arguing with me, which I take as a good sign. It means he’s considering it on some level. “For you and for the king. I will be executed for treason,” he says.
“How many people has this war already killed?” I say. “How many more people will it kill if we don’t end it? You and I both know I can manage it.”
“Listen, let’s forget for one second that we’re not equals. Let me put this plainly: I like you, Serenity. You have a good heart. But this is madness.
“I won’t tell the king you came to me. Just forget about this whole plan.”
I run my hands through my hair. I need this man backing me.
I try one last time. “When I was nineteen, the general of the Western United Nations, our leader at the time, asked me to marry the king, the man who had killed my family and countless numbers of my countrymen. That was the king’s price—if the WUN handed me over, the war would end.
“I couldn’t imagine a worse fate, but I agreed to it because I knew the world would be better off.
“I’m asking the same thing of you now,” I beseech the grand marshal, “to rise above the ethics of it all to serve the greater good. I know that’s not fair of me to ask, but I can’t do this alone.”
He runs a palm over his buzzed hair. He shifts his weight. Deliberating, deliberating. The entire time, those flinty eyes watch me.
Finally, his jaw tightens, and he blows out a breath. “You have my loyalty, Your Majesty. I will do what you ask.”
I feel my muscles loosen. I didn’t know how tense I was until he accepted.
“Then this is what I need you to do …”
The King
Someone raps against my closed door.
I drop the report I’m reading, and lean back in my seat. “Come in,” I say.
My grand marshal enters the room.
“Your Majesty,” Heinrich says, bowing, “I have something alarming to tell you. Something that concerns the queen.”
I feel my muscles go tight. “What is it?”
And then he tells me.
The news is a hit to the gut—so much so that it takes me several seconds to get my emotions under control.
Once I do, I lean forward. “You’re going to go along with her plan,” I say.
“But, Your Majesty—”
“You’re going to go along with her plan and mine.”
That night, when I see Serenity, Heinrich’s words echo in my head. I had to go to the gym and beat the shit out of an inanimate object to work off everything I felt. And I felt so goddamn much. Neither Serenity nor I can escape what fate has always had in mind for us.
She sits across from me at the small, intimate table. Seeing that loose golden hair of hers framing her bittersweet face, it’s a shock to the
chest.
I can tell by the way her leg jiggles that she wants to kick her heels up to the edge of the table and slouch in her seat.
Instead she runs a hand over one of the flames. “Why are you looking at me like that?” she asks.
I almost hunted you down and confronted you. I almost threw your damn body in a Sleeper. I almost went on a warpath in this palace. Only a hundred years of wisdom and temperance stopped me.
She’s oblivious.
There’s a deep ache in my bones that I can’t drive away.
Her hand stops over the flame. “Is everything alright?”
I move her hand out of the way. “It’s been a long day.” I lean forward to kiss her scarred knuckles.
This beloved, wild creature. She doesn’t belong here, inside these gilded walls, sitting in front of an intricately carved wooden table set with delicate china.
It was foolish of me to think that she could ever be caged.
I’ve been running from everything she represents for so very long. And I’m tired of running.
It’s time to stop being so afraid.
It’s time to accept everything she is.
It’s time to set her free.
Chapter 50
Serenity
The days turn into weeks. Time bleeds away, stealing hours from me. And as the time slips by, so does the strange happiness that had grown in my heart.
I might never believe Montes is truly a good man, but I’m not sure I ever wanted good. He’s complex, and terrible, and at the end of the day he’s my monster.
And I have to slay him.
This is what remorse feels like. It’s premature, which is almost worse. Because I have time to change the course of my actions, but I won’t. I made a promise to the world, one I intend to keep.
Things appear to go back to normal. The king watches me, and I swear he sees everything. But if he does, he doesn’t stop me.
I can’t even ponder that possibility.
Each day is worse than the last because it brings me closer to the moment I’ve arranged to kill my husband. I talk with Marco most days, Marco and Heinrich. I plot and plan until every last detail is accounted far.
Tomorrow, at precisely 9:30 a.m., this place will burn, the king along with it.
It’s the king’s day of reckoning. And mine.
“Everything’s in place?” the representatives ask on the other side of the screen. I’m acutely aware that their thirty day timeframe is nearly up.
I nod, and Marco, who sits at my side, says, “It is.”
The two of us are holed up in my office, hopefully for the last time.
All those years ago I sat next to my father, and spoke to a different set of representatives.
This is the world gone wrong.
“Good. Our men will begin to move in at nine-twenty. A vessel will be waiting offshore. Marco, you’ll radio our men the moment Serenity takes out the king.”
I have to breathe through my nose to curb the nausea that rises at the prospect. I have killed countless people; this should be no different. But it’s a world apart. The man I love, the monster who’s found his conscience, the king who gave up a piece of his empire to hold me in his arms again. Who defied death to have me by his side.
I dread this more than anything I ever have.
“We’ll pick you both up from there,” the representatives continue. “We won’t consider the deed done unless you bring the body.”
They’re looking at me, even though Marco is just as much a part of this as I am.
I pull myself together. “I’ll get you your body.”
“Good. Then we’ll see you tomorrow. We have a peace agreement to negotiate in the coming days.”
Pretty words for ugly intentions. Knowing these men, it won’t be a peace agreement so much as terms of surrender. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be agreeing to anything.
“Get some sleep,” one of the representatives says, rousing me from my thoughts. “You’ll need it.”
Battle fatigue. It’s a very real thing. You’ve seen too much, done too much, and at the end of it all you are so, so weary.
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror.
I thought I had lost everything.
And I had. I lost everything I loved, even things I didn’t realize I could lose—my memory, the past, my hate.
I’ve become something I loathe, and I don’t know how to get back to the girl I was, the one that easily divided the world into right and wrong.
And to be honest, I don’t know if I even want to be her anymore. I’d rather be the girl who was never touched by war. Who knew nothing of sleeping with the enemy, who’d never seen what flesh looks like when it was blown open. I want to be a girl who woke with a clear conscience each morning, whose demons didn’t plague her late at night.
But I can’t have that. Not short of injecting myself with that memory loss serum, and that was no solution. Forgetting doesn’t mean it never happened; it means not dealing with the consequences.
And oh, have the consequences stacked up.
I gaze into my reflection, my hands tightening around the edge of the counter.
I may have suffered, I may have changed, but I know who I am.
I am the girl from the WUN—the girl born a citizen of the United States of America. I am vengeance and I am salvation.
And tomorrow, the world will know it, once and for all.
Not long after my revelation, I hear Montes enter the bedroom, back from whatever business he was attending to. We’ve both been keeping late hours.
I hear his footsteps head directly for the bathroom. A moment later, Montes enters.
Our eyes meet in the mirror, and I see such bottomless sadness in his own.
He knows. He must.
He steps up behind me and wraps an arm around my middle. His other hand clasps my neck so that he has me shackled to his body.
My hands tighten along the rim of the counter, but I don’t fight his grip.
“I’ve never known my vicious little queen to be vain,” he says.
I pass him an annoyed glance through the mirror. We’re both aware that’s not what I was doing.
His lips brush the shell of my ear. “Come to bed,” he says, his voice husky.
My throat works. “I don’t want to fall asleep,” I admit.
The idea of what’s to come tomorrow has my stomach twisted in knots.
“Who said anything about sleep?” he breathes.
I turn my head to face him, and that’s all the opening he needs. He kisses me fervently, his hands moving so that I’m no longer his hostage. They cup either side of my jaw.
I’m gasping into the kiss, and I play it off like it’s passion, when all I’m really doing is choking back sobs.
I push against him, forcing him to back up. All the while I rip away at his clothing. I’ve never been like this, violent with the need to be close to him.
Montes welcomes it with a wolfish smile. He always was just as fucked-up as me.
He helps me shrug off the remnants of his shirt, and then his slacks. And then his large, sculpted body is completely on display. The sight of all that coiled power nearly brings me to my knees.
When my hands reach for the edge of my shirt, he captures them in his own.
“Ah-ah,” he says. He hooks his fingers around my shirt collar, and, pausing just long enough to make it dramatic, he rips the garment down the middle.
This is wrong. To pursue sex with the man I intend to kill. I know it is, and I wonder if Montes ever had thoughts like this before he took me—in the beginning. Because my plans aren’t changing, yet I still want this desperately, and I will take it.
He jerks my pants to my ankles then
tosses me onto the bed. Now, as I see him prowling towards me, I remember why I’m usually the more subdued of the two of us.
I’m not sure I can handle him in all his intensity. Not here, where all the pretty layers that usually make me hardened have been stripped away with my clothes.
Hell lives inside me, and it’s been consuming me for the last several hours.
Montes will see all my ugly intentions the moment we’re locked together.
He unlaces one of my boots and tugs it off, throwing it over his shoulder. He does the same to the other. The entire time he watches me, those eyes.
Carelessly, he removes my pants and lets them drop to the floor. My panties follow soon after. Then he’s between my legs, looming over me, his chest brushing against my own.
Montes searches my face. “What’s bothering you?” he asks.
I need to pull myself together.
Instead of answering, I draw him to me and kiss his lips. My hands find his hair and I take great pains to muss it up.
I hear his rumble of approval deep in his chest. I know he hasn’t forgotten his question, and I know he’s probably more suspicious now than he was before.
I need to make him forget, to make us both forget.
No sooner does the thought cross my mind than he wraps an arm around my waist and rolls us so that I’m staring down at him.
He unsnaps my bra and throws it to the side of the bed.
“You’re no longer shy,” he says.
Belatedly I realize that I used to make a habit of covering myself. I don’t do that now.
“Does that make you sad?” I ask. In the past, Montes took great pleasure in shocking me when it comes to things between a man and a woman.
He sits up slowly, his abs tightening as he does so, until our chests are pressed together.
“No,” he says, touching my scar. “I liked your modesty, but I love this more.”
“Why?” I ask.
“Because it means you’ve accepted me.”
The Queen of All That Lives (The Fallen World Book 3) Page 27