I waited for his confirmation and didn’t wait long. A short burst of nods were followed by, “Yes, yes, of course.”
“Good. I am happy to follow your lead.”
He stepped around me, head bent in submission. “Please do not go there, Mistress. Please say you only wish to see where it is and not to venture.”
“Lead the way,” I ordered, ignoring his plea and following the little man up the stone stairs and into the heart of the Underrealm.
CHAPTER 7
Arthur
Pacing did me no good.
Stretching, examining the spattering of dark bruises across my ribs in the mirror, did me no good either.
Breathing, knocking back a full glass of yagsmead, more pacing—nothing—nothingcould calm me.
Reshina was here.
Reshina was in the Underrealm.
Reshina was…mine.
But she wasn’t.
She never could be.
Another laugh of madness escaped me as I leaned a hand against the tall mirror, catching a glimpse of my deranged state. My eyes of icy blue were bloodshot, yellow hair, dirty and limp down the sides of my face. I followed the line of my scar from the tip of my brow down to the hollow of my cheek.
I hadn’t thought of my father in years, but I did then, finding the reflection staring back at me to be a glimpse of the one I’d seen in portraits of him.
Had he been in such turmoil when my mother had bled onto his land? Had he aided in her capture, dragging her below the frozen surface into the dark of the Underrealm?
I had never asked my mother to tell me the details of her part in this curse. Not due to a lack of curiosity, but as a kindness, as she rarely spoke of anything related to her time below the Castle’s surface. Of howIcame to be.
And now, swiping a hand back through my ragged locks, I wished I had. Avoiding the curse hadn’t worked, nor had taming the Beast to never draw blood from a woman crossing my lands. Reshina had bled on her own—something I did not take into consideration as a possible outcome. I’d been so careful in the past, avoiding allowing the Beast out if I suspected a woman was above.
My eyes found the Reshina’s book, darting to its worn fabric cover, once a deep blue, now almost devoid of color, and frayed at the corners.
I knocked back another glass of yagsmead, the sting hitting my empty stomach. The Beast hadn’t eaten his fill, and now I would pay for it with my stomach rumbling in complaint.
I sat on my bed, picking upThe Cursed Goddess of the Veilfrom my bedside table. This personal volume was small, easy enough to fit into a jacket pocket, which is where I usually kept it before the curse had come to claim me. Tracing over the debossed title, I thought back to the first time I’d read it. I’d been a young Duke of Riche, practically still a boy at the age of twenty-five, finally having found my freedom away from Heartstone.
Feeling invincible, I traveled throughout Revelry, drinking, gambling, bedding women wherever I roamed—the curse so distant from passing on to me, I forgot about it most days. That first taste of freedom had been everything, but it wasn’t until I picked up that book that something else settled into place.
From the moment I’d read the first few pages, I’d been a man obsessed, reading its entirety in one night only to sleep a few hours and pick it up to read again. A strange calm had come over me. I began to see the world differently—through the eyesof a Ravenfae Goddess in her early years, cursed to never feel love.
I stopped attending the parties. Stopped traveling and bringing multiple women to my bed. I’d stopped roaming, instead taking the different fork in the path, reading poetry, taking long walks through the streets of Riche, pondering life and what it meant to love every part of it.
It wasn’t until my mother sent word of my father’s passing that I returned to Heartstone, the third member of the somber party who attended his funeral. My mother begged me to stay, knowing he had been the reason I’d left. But I had a life as Duke of Riche. I could not abandon the newfound pleasure in living quietly, pretending I was nothing more than a Duke. No curse lying in wait for me.
I opened the cover ofThe Cursed Goddess of the Veil, reading the first line I’d muttered aloud on countless mornings and nights.
“Once upon a time, a Ravenfae Goddess was cursed to never love another. And though she would live many centuries thereafter, the curse would haunt her for the rest of her days, for how could she ever know what it was to be loved if she was doomed to never return it?”
It was her book that helped me understand what it was to live and love. It was Reshina’s story, penned by herself over a century ago, that kept me from going mad in those days, waiting for my mother to die, and for my father’s curse to claim me.
And now she was here.
