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“If I say I failed, would it change your mind?” he questioned, creeping closer.
Scarlett’s green eyes shifted between the two of us in thinly veiled amusement.
“Why are you so determined to stop me, Toby? You know better than anyone what’s at risk if I do not at least try to salvage all I can before it’s truly gone forever.”
Feeling him beside me, I turned towards his person just in time to see blonde brows slam together in confusion—or maybe anger.
“Then what is to become of us if it’s your life he wants?”
“If he kills me, at least I died doing all I could to save our people. If I gain nothing, what does it matter when we’d have already lost everything?” I fought the urge to lay a grime covered hand on his cheek, instead clutching the worn skirt of my dress. This was not the time for comfort or coddling.
“You know he is the only one capable of helping us,” Scarlett added.
Toby looked between the two of us, eyes widening in disbelief. “H-help? Help who? I’m not sure we’re discussing the same man, because that monster does not help unless it benefits him.”
Lips flattening into a straight line, I huffed out an irritated breath and took two steps back to get a full look at him.
“For the past few weeks, you’ve been certain it was my stepmother, or Cronus, the man who was like a second father to me. Both are either missing or dead. Now, it could be the Purgatory King?”
He made a disgruntled sound in the back of his throat, swiping the crumpled flier from the ground. “Tell me,” he began, unraveling the paper. “What is it you see on here?”
I didn’t need to look. I was fully aware of what was on it. Our names, the astronomical sum that would be awarded to whomever brought us to the self-made king, and clear instructions that we were not to be harmed.
“It looks like the same flyer that’s posted all through the town that’s falling apart, littered on the streets paved with blood, and being broadcast every hour.”
“And I see a ploy to lure a desperate queen right into his region so that he can snatch her crown away,” he retorted.
“For one, do not ever call me desperate again. This is not an act of desperation. It’s a well-considered decision to save the supes you seem so ready to let suffer,” I corrected tersely, “For two, the King of Purgatory suddenly decided to attack Zenith and destroy it for my crown? Is that your new theory? If that’s true, he already failed. I’ll never abdicate—not ever—and unless someone shows up with my corpse, the kingdom is mine.”
Scarlett’s head bobbed in agreement. “If he wanted this region, he would have announced his claiming of it by now, and his insignia would be all over the place. Nothing is stopping him.”
“We don’t exactly have an army ready to go balls to the wall for us,” she added dryly.
“She’s right. Furthermore, he would want our heads delivered on a pike, not our living, breathing bodies unharmed.”
I gestured to the flyer to hammer in my point.
Toby scrubbed a hand over the scraggly beard now covering a large portion of his face.
“You think you’re going to go there and that he will help do what, exactly? Have you not been paying attention? He’s snatching demis off the street left and right and turning them into sex puppets. Do you not think it odd that they vanish afterward? Not a word has been said about what’s been done with them. We can conclude he’s killing them, that those filthy depires are butchering them.”
I kept my expression stony, weighing it on him until his eyes diverted to mud-covered boots. I wasn’t a fan of the depires either; more so, I was against defamation and accusations that couldn’t be proved.
Words were a dangerous weapon.
“You seem to have an answer for everything. Why don’t you explain why dozens of demis were just massacred by the same depire who is now having them snatched off the streets?”
His eyes remained diverted, no response to dispute my words.
“We leave at next dawn,” he mumbled before turning away from me all together.
It wasn’t easy to watch him walk away. He’d been one of my closest companions since I was just a girl.
I wanted to explain that I wasn’t any happier about this than he, but our personal feelings mattered little now. As a princess, I was afforded many privileges. As a queen, I lost nearly all of them.
This was it.
I quickly plaited my hair in a braid, leaving the tail to dangle down my back. Hands bundled in wool gloves, the finished product wasn’t all that neat or smooth, but it would suffice.
Across the room, Keith, the other guard with us, assisted Jacinda into our only jacket. The wheezing that came with her every breath cemented the fact she needed it much more than Scarlett or I.
