AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“No matter. She’ll be safe in our care as soon as the demon Theodopolis gifts her to us.”
“She’s a person, not a thing to be given away. A gift would be a new gameboard for you or a collector’s anime miniature for me. We shouldn’t be taking her like she’s a present wrapped in a pretty bow. Just like we shouldn’t be stalking her.” Not that I’ve been able to help myself on the last.
“We’re not stalking her.” He straightens, and his wings rustle. “We’re protecting her.”
“While following her without her knowing about it? Most would call that stalking.” I stare at Atticus, trying to read him which is as impossible as ever. “She’s not a game of chess. Not when you’re playing with her life.”
“What about our lives? Don’t forget that part of this mission, brother.”
As if I could forget the century we spent trapped in stone on the Bridge of Souls because of my failure. “Are we setting up another queen candidate for disaster?” I hate my voice for coming out small when I’m a fucking giant—bigger even than my brother.
But I missed the signs when I brought the last woman to the Bridge of Souls for the queen trials. Sure, she’d won the trials and been chosen as queen, but then she—Dyphena, my mind whispers—chose death over a life with monsters.
Monsters like me.
Specifically, she chose death over me.
I mistook her kindness for friendship, flirtation for affection, and compassion for actual caring. I screwed up, and my twin paid the penance of a sentence in stone along with me. I can’t let him suffer again for my mistakes, but I also can’t drag another woman through the queen trials when it could mean a repeat of the worst day of our lives.
“Rosemarie is the one,” Atticus says. “She’s the prophesied queen. Any doubts are your fear talking.”
The gods-awful, overwhelming fear rises in my chest and transforms my stone heart to ice. The kind of fear he doesn’t allow himself because it might mess up his plans and schemes.
We’re all pawns on a board only Atticus can see.
“How can you be so sure?” I ask him when it’s really me that I’m questioning. I’m the one who trusted Dyphena when she smiled and laughed with me. I believed that she would make a wonderful queen even if she didn’t choose me as a mate. I put her in that horrific position of picking death over me.
As if the divinities choose this moment to taunt me for my failures, Rosemarie looks away from her patient and out the window. She meets my gaze as though she sees through our shadow magic.
That’s impossible.
She’s human. Our ability to wrap darkness around us can’t be penetrated by anyone without magic. Yet she stares directly at me.
“That’s how I’m sure,” Atticus says. “She senses us as a mate would.”
Heat crawls over me, sending a wash of need through me. A spark of attraction races along the spines of my wings to the tips of my claws and tail. I force myself to look away from Rosemarie. “She’s not meant for me. No more than the last candidate we took to the Borderlands.”
“It’ll be up to Rosemarie to choose her mates, as all gargoyle queens do.”
“If she’s crowned. You can’t make her enter the queen trials.”
“She’s ours.” Atticus says the last on a snarl and curls his claws into fists. I haven’t seen his control slip like that.
Not when we lost our last candidate.
Not when we were sentenced to a century atop the Bridge to watch it crumble beneath the rule of the wrong queen.
Not when Rosemarie’s sobbed prayers stretched from her great-grandmother’s grave to the Bridge to shake us out of our stone exile and bring us back to life.
“She’s not a gift for some demon to hand over,” I insist. “Gods damn, did all that time stuck in stone warp your brain? Nothing is worth the risk to Rosemarie. I won’t do it. I won’t drag her back to the gargoyles’ keep. Not for anything.”
“You would rather us both be executed for failing to bring the next queen back to our realm? We won’t get another chance. She’s our only way to redemption.”
My heart plummets at the thought of condemning my twin, but the alternative? The mere thought snatches the breath from my lungs. “I won’t push her to play savior. Not when the Bridge could send her to the After Worlds if she loses.”
“She won’t lose.”
Rosemarie presses her palm to the window. I would give anything to splay my hand to the other side of the glass, to see where her fingertips might meet my claws. Of course, I would retract those before going near her. There’s no way I would endanger her.
