by Queen, Nyna
His eyes flew open, and he made a grab for her, but Alex had already broken away and scurried to the door. Not giving him any chance to keep arguing, she bolted out of his bedroom and flew down the hall toward her own rooms, her bare feet barely touching the floor.
Her guest rooms waited for her, clean and untouched, bathed in the pale morning light that sifted through the blue curtains. Last night, when they had driven over from the townhouse, she hadn’t brought a lot of things with her—expecting to only stay the night, if that—but her guest rooms at Helton Manor were equipped with all the basic necessities, anyway, given how much time she’d spent here during the last months. Not that she needed much. She was used to traveling light. Weapons usually took up most of her capacities, and this rodeo promised not to be much different in that regard.
While hastily putting on the most functional clothes she could find, Alex plowed through the rooms and threw everything she might need into her backpack: toiletries from the bathroom, underwear, socks, spare clothes, hairbands, the crayon drawing Max had made for her, showing her jumping through the trees on spider legs. Granted, the latter might have been a little sentimental but it didn’t really take up any space, so—screw it! She had no idea how long they would be on the road and she wanted something to remember the kids by.
Despite the shock and pain of Belaris’ death and the prospect of a potentially deadly lam, her chest hummed with a soft warmth. He’d said he loved her. Alex couldn’t stop her lips from splitting into a wide, goofy grin. Darken had said he loved her. She actually got the shivers just remembering the look in his eyes when he said it. Oh, she’d known that he’d been burning for her, that she was more to him than just a casual sex affair, but love? Her entire body tingled giddily in response to the thought.
Darken Dubois-Léclaire was in love with a shaper girl, how about that? If she didn’t have to hurry packing, she would have jumped through her room and pumped her fists, calling ‘woohooo’ like a teenager asked out on her first date. It occurred to her that she and Darken had finally confessed their feelings for each other during Midsummer Night, shortly after she’d danced around the enchanted apple tree. Oh well. She would never again take trueborn superstition lightly.
Alex squeezed a bra next to her med kit and shook her head. Stupid man! To think that she’d let him go alone. It was rather sweet that he wanted to protect her. Sweet but foolish. He stood a much better chance if they were together, that was a simple fact. They would watch each other’s backs just as they had in the Scarlet Mountains and in Duncan’s Teeth, and somehow they would come out of this alive.
A soft tingle of magic brushed against her. Alex froze with the full backpack in her hand. A chill ran down her spine. They couldn’t be here yet, could they?
The spider growled softly and arched its spine, sampling the energetic currents in the air, tasting the magic. There it was again, a gentle tingle, shy like the first raindrop that preceded a coming downpour, and almost as easy to miss. Slightly familiar, too.
Alex concentrated. She was hit by another wave of magic. Definitely familiar. Almost like—
The backpack slid from Alex’s fingers, hitting the floor with a thud.
No! No no no no no!
Vaulting over the wicker chair, Alex dashed across the hall to the opposite room, wrenching the cream and gold brocade curtains aside and ripping them down in her struggle.
Down below to the left, the garage door flew open and the charged hover-cycle jumped out like a rearing stallion made of metal and magic. Exhaling a burst of blue energy, it raced up the driveway at full speed, Darken bent deeply over the handle bar, and vanished between the trees.
“Noooo!” Alex hammered her fist against the window frame. It snapped with a nasty crack, spitting splinters into the air.
No. She stared at the empty driveway, her pulse pounding in her ears. No, it wasn't real. It couldn’t be real. Her eyes must have played a trick on her. He wasn’t gone. He wouldn’t have left without her.
Her threads burst out of her like attacking snakes, slithering through the cracks in the walls, racing along the floors, probing every room in the house, searching for a sign of his presence, anything that would disprove what she’d just witnessed. Just a flicker of life.
Nothing.
She pushed her threads farther, spinning them out, out, out, beyond the boundaries of Helton Manor, farther and farther, thinner and thinner.
Sweet Jester, please! He had to be there. Had to—
Her threads snapped with a sharp mental pop, and she stumbled backward as if hit over the head with a baseball bat. Blinding pain exploded behind her forehead, and for a second glimmering black dots filled her vision. Her fingers grabbed the window sill to keep her steady.
When the world slowly regained its shape, something wet touched her lips. Alex slowly raised her hand to her face and then stared, stupefied, at the blood smearing her fingertip. Her gaze went past her fingers to the empty driveway again.
Darken was gone. He had told her he loved her and then he had left. Without her. Without goodbye, without another word.
He said he loved her and then he’d left her.
Why? Why would he go without her?
His deep voice echoed through her memory, brimming with agony and resignation—speaking to Belaris when he insisted on joining his fight. Then we’re both dead men walking.
His eyes, boring into hers, only moments ago. I just wish we’d had more time.
The realization struck Alex like lighting. To die! He’d left without her because he didn’t expect to survive this. He wasn’t planning on coming back.
It burned through her like fire. He wasn’t coming back to her.
For a blazing second, Alex’s entire body went scorching hot before going ice cold. Her fingertips tingled. A high ringing filled her ears, making her dizzy. The world became too bright, too crystalline, growing white and fuzzy around the edges.
Pain squeezed her chest, wrapping it so tightly she couldn’t breathe. It balled into a taut, hard, pulsing knot in her stomach, threatening to choke her.
She pivoted in place like a sleepwalker. Before her, the antique-style tea room, which was affectionately dubbed the ‘Golden Room’ by everyone, all but glowed in the bright sunlight spilling in through the windows: elegant tables laid with delicate, gold-rimmed crockery and folded napkins; ornate chairs with silk-upholstery embroidered with colorful birds and exotic flowers; glass lamps blooming in bunches of flowers from the walls…
The sun rays glittered on the displayed luxury, jeering Alex with its sickening perfection.
The ringing in her ears increased, turning into a shrill, cackling laughter. It ripped through her, squeezing her, burrowing so deeply into her that it reached the hard knot of pain in her middle. It burst and the pain exploded out of her in a surge of mind-shattering agony.
With a scream, Alex raked her arm across the surface of the nearest table, sending cups, plates and glasses clattering to the floor. They shattered on the parquet, spilling glass shards across the floorboards in a wave of crystallized water, sparkling like frozen jewels.
To Alex’s right, a graceful sculpture made of gossamer ceramic and silver glass rose from a small coffee table. Alex hammered a kick into the table. It careened, almost in slow motion, the sculpture balancing on its edge for a long, breathless second, before time pressed the speed button again and the sculpture hit the floor, shattering into a thousand pieces of lost beauty and wrecked fortune.
She kicked over another table, then grabbed the wooden pieces and tore them apart, hurtling them across the room with a furious howl. Her claws snapped free, and she swerved around, raking them across the still hanging curtains, scouring fabric and wood again and again and again, while she screamed and screamed and screamed, until her throat was nothing but a raw, burning ache.
At some point, the screams changed into dry, heaving sobs. Alex reached for another wooden figurine, but it slipped from her fingers, suddenly too h
eavy to hold, and clattered to the floor, rolling a small distance before lying still. Her hands were shaking uncontrollably. Her breath was coming in strangled gasps, choking in her throat. Salt wetted her lips. Alex didn’t remember starting to cry, but her face was wet and her t-shirt was a soaked mess of blood drops and tear stains.
Her entire body was trembling so hard, it almost knocked her off her feet. She swayed in place, feeling as if she’d just run an entire marathon, but instead of relief, only emptiness waited for her across the finish line.
Her legs gave out and she sank to her knees in the middle of her wreckage. Tiny smithereens cut through the fabric of her pants and bit into her palms, but she hardly felt them.
In front of her, a big shard of the smashed sculpture glinted weakly in the light. Her memory served up Josy’s image, telling her with a proud, solemn face that this sculpture was a family heirloom from the very beginnings of the Dubois dynasty, handed down from generation to generation over decades. Invaluable. Irreplaceable.
A low moan escaped Alex’s lips. Oh no. Great Mother, please no. Following a ridiculous impulse, she crawled forward on all fours and reached for the shards, gathering them up and trying to piece them back together with her bare hands, getting more and more frantic as they slipped from her fingers.
There had to be a way to fix this, for Jester’s sake! There had to. But the truth was, she didn’t give a damn about the sculpture and was only looking for a way to mend herself, which was just as futile as trying to mend this sculpture. It was irreversibly broken, forever destroyed—just like her life.
Alex sank back, holding the broken shards of the sculpture in her real hands just as her mental hands were holding onto the broken shards of her life while the cuts they had caused were silently bleeding.
For one moment, one short, glaring moment, she’d allowed herself to believe that things could actually change for her. That she and Darken could have some kind of future together. That, after so much going wrong in her life, something would finally go right.
But the soap bubble had popped just as she’d feared it would, and now Belaris was dead and with him any chance to solve this mess and prove her innocence, and the man that she loved was going to his death, and she could do nothing but watch everything crumble in front of her eyes.
Alex squeezed her eyelids together, trying to keep the tears contained, but they kept coming and coming in burning streams of despair. Sobbing silently, she curled herself into a ball amidst the shards, pressed her fists against her forehead and surrendered to the pain.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
WOODEN steps squeaked faintly as someone conquered the stairs to the second floor of the mansion and then walked down the hall from one door to the next with familiar vibrations, the sound startlingly loud in the muffled silence that had fallen over Alex’s mind like a tear-soaked burial shroud.
A few moments later, Hector’s tall, sophisticated frame appeared in the doorway to the Golden Room, a worried frown wrinkling his thick white brow. “I noticed that the hover-cycle garage is open, so I suppose Master Darken has—”
He froze. His eyes glided over the upturned tables, the torn curtains, the shattered mess of porcelain littering the ground like an exploded jewelry box, and ended on Alex slumped against the wall, knees pressed together, feet wide apart, cradling a big fragment of silver glass to her chest. They became wide. “Miss? Are you all right?”
If Alex hadn’t felt so completely numb inside, it would have warmed her heart that the old butler, at least for the time being, was more worried for her well-being than the fate of the priceless assets she’d destroyed during her freakout. But there was no feeling left inside of her, only emptiness.
She stared at Hector’s glossy black shoes, catching a whiff of recently applied shoe polish, that characteristic mix of wax and turpentine oil. It reminded her painfully of her sire and fresh tears stung her eyes, playing on her current weakness.
Alex kept staring at Hector’s shoes, the only clear shape in her blurred field of vision. She wished she could tell him that she was okay. That everything would be okay. But nothing was okay, and she wasn’t okay, and the world was a fucking mess. Just how could it all have gone so wrong? Only a couple of weeks ago life was a normal drudgery, an everyday grind between long hours of work and short periods of sleep—mostly miserable yet familiar. But since then, the entire game had changed, and she was still struggling to make sense of the rules while everybody else was playing with marked cards. She had never been afraid to play. Playing was easy when all you had to lose were a handful of pennies. Except the stakes had been raised without her consent during the last round, and suddenly she had so much more to lose.
A stray ray of sunlight touched the tip of a huge chunk of ruby red glass stuck in a crack between two floorboards. It glinted like a frozen drop of blood. Red like fire. Red like Darken’s demon eyes when he was furious.
Alex’s chest constricted painfully. Darken’s deep eyes, so full of loving exasperation when he was looking at her. His smug, lazy smile. The feeling of his arms around her, the only thing that had made her feel safe in such a long time. All gone.
Her lips quivered and a sob threatened to escape them, but she held them together, pressing them into a sharp, thin line. Her hand curled around the shard she was still holding in her fist, the sharp edges digging into her skin. The pain burned through the haze of numbness that had settled upon her, tearing the burial shroud apart with a snap.
The spider slowly shook itself inside her like a beast roused from a drugged sleep and perked its head up with a snarl. Alex clutched the shard tighter, embracing the pain. The old Alex would have grabbed her backpack and run. That’s what she had done all her life. Run, run, run. Whenever a situation got complicated, she’d cut her losses and do a bunk, then hide somewhere and lick her wounds. Build something up, watch it burn, run, start from scratch. Sweet Jester, she was so sick of it!
She had finally found the man she loved and who, against all the odds in the world, had decided to love her back, and she wouldn’t let this chance slip through her fingers.
No. Fucking. Way!
The old Alex might have run, but this Alex—this Alex would stay and fight for her happiness, or die trying.
Alex finally raised her head and whatever Hector saw on her face, it made him turn pale and take a small step back.
Alex realized she’d slipped the leash and that the spider was glaring out through her eyes in all her dark, malicious fury, but she didn’t try to contain her. Not this time. No more freaking apologies!
Pushing herself to her feet, she brushed tiny shards of porcelain and glass from her clothes. They tinkled to the floor like the rubble of pulverized chains she hadn’t known had shackled her to the ground until now. Wiping the tears from her face with the backs of her hands, she surveyed the destruction in the room and made a decision.
Time to go all in.
She approached the old butler who, admirably, stood his ground. “Hector, can you please take me back to the townhouse as quickly as possible?”
The elderly man regained his composure in record speed and bowed without batting an eye. “Of course, miss.”
“HOW dare they?” Stephane shredded another piece of paper and crumpled the snippets in his fists. “How dare they? Compromising my brother—my brother, a descendant from one of the highest royal bloodlines!” His face turned a dangerous shade of red, the shade of boiling rage and bloody murder. “And the Prime—that gutter son of a whoring bitch—involved in this infamy! The disgrace! His father, the Great Mother bless his poor soul, would turn in his grave if he knew.”
Alex gritted her teeth as she watched Darken’s brother pace and rant behind the desk in his study, working hard to keep her own temper in check.
The moment she had arrived at the townhouse—unkempt hair, puffy face and all—she had dragged Stephane into the privacy of his study, locked the door, and recounted everything she’d overheard from the call betw
een Darken and Belaris, and about Darken’s overhasty departure.
Just speaking of it almost made her go to pieces again, and she’d had to use every last bit of her self-control to keep herself from cracking. By the time she reached the end, she was trembling, and she wasn’t sure whether it was from anger or fear. Probably a bit of both.
Stephane was a lot easier to decipher. He was positively fuming with rage. For the past ten minutes, he had been swearing and breaking things, giving Alex virtually no opening to butt in.
Alex shifted a little at the wall to avoid the bright stripes of sunlight sneaking across the almond-colored paint. The bright room smelled of freshly brewed coffee and pastries and of the bouquet of summer flowers that had been arranged in a glass vase below the window. It was an ‘idyllic world’ smell, which was completely at odds with the broken feeling inside Alex—as though the shards of her shattered life were still rubbing painfully against each other under her skin.
On the way here in the coach, Hector had brought Alex up to speed on Roukewood’s latest activities. As she listened, clutching her seat upholstery tightly to keep her claws from slipping out of their beds and murdering the only person in reach who had done absolutely nothing to deserve her wrath, an idea had begun to form in her head. She wouldn’t go as far as calling it a plan, but it was an idea. A crazy, lunatic idea.
Now all she had to do was convince Stephane of it. Piece of cake.
At last, Darken’s brother stopped and braced his fists on his desk, breathing hard. He stared at the torn pieces of paper still clasped in them. From the look on his face, it was the list of the Consortium’s shareholders she’d brought with her.
Remembering her own act of, well … vandalism … at Helton Manor, Alex politely pretended not to have noticed his lapse in control.
There were probably lots of things she could have said at that moment to ease his anger, but Alex didn’t even bother to think of them. Anger was good. She wanted him angry. If her time here had taught her anything, it was that Senator Stephane Dubois-Léclaire was prone to making rash decisions when he was riled. Considering what she had hatched, she needed him nothing short of livid.