“Do not say her name,” I snarl. The sound that tears from my throat is strained. “How could you? And to give the task to Modok…”
“I asked you to do it,” he says, calm as ever. “More than once. You could have ended her quickly. You refused.”
Pain slices through me. I stagger back a step, breath catching. “She could have lived,” I whisper. “She wasn’t hurting anyone.”
“She would have,” Lanneth interjects, her voice like silk soaked in poison. Her hands curl around the throne’s arms as she stands. “It was only a matter of time. The houses would have used her, twisted her. Or worse, she would have awakened on her own. And then…”
“You don’t know that,” I breathe, shaking my head. My voice cracks. “You don’t know.”
“We knew it was a risk we couldn’t allow,” she replies coolly.
My rage burns white. My lip trembles. “We. Who is we?” My eyes snap to her, and I spit the words like venom. “You are not my queen. You’re just the body that keeps my father’s bed warm. You wear my mother’s crown like it was made for you, but you command nothing.”
“Careful, Daedalus,” my father warns. “You speak out of turn.”
I look at him. Truly look. At the male who raised me, loved me once. At what he has become beneath her spell. A shadow of himself. A Fae undone by lust and lies.
“You were once a king,” I say quietly. “Now you’re just her puppet. She told you to do this, didn’t she? She told you to have Zema killed.”
“She was a distraction, Daedalus,” Lanneth cuts in and there it is. Confirmation. The rot beneath the crown.
My fists curl at my sides, the bones aching with restraint.
“Now you can stop wasting time on that forsaken island,” she continues, as though offering a kindness. “Focus on your future. A wife. A child. Your duty as the favored son of the Father Below.”
I tear my gaze from her poisoned poise and lock eyes with the one I once called father. My jaw is clenched so tightly it aches.
“Do you make any decisions yourself, King Kaelus?” I snarl. “Or does she pull all your strings? What other betrayals have you swallowed to earn your reward between the legs of this poor imitation of my mother?”
“Daedalus! Enough!” Father roars, his voice shaking the stonework, and at that same instant, lightning splits the sky beyond the windows. The throne room is bathed in a sudden white light and in that breathless flash, I see it.
Not the queen.
Not the female.
But the thing beneath.
Where Lanneth should be is a corpse in silk. Sagging flesh over brittle bone, a mouth unhinged in a silent scream, hollow eyes like pits of night.
The light dies.
So do I.
I vanish into the void.
In a blink, I reappear before her, the shadow-slick magic still clinging to my skin. She looks the same, composed, porcelain, cruel, but I know. I see her now.
I seize her by the shoulders. My fingers bite into her flesh.
“What are you?” I roar. “What have you done to my family?”
It’s the first time I’ve seen her break. Her mask fractures. She quivers in my grasp, lips parted, but no sound escapes. And then something cracks in me.
A vision floods my mind, spreading like oil across water. I stagger, disoriented, the world blotted out by what I see.
Endless stairs spiraling into nothing.
A room that shouldn’t exist.
