Page 26 of The Dark Lord’s Guide to Honeymooning (and Other Acts of Tyranny)

Of course, she would have seen most of it through our bond. I forced myself to meet her gaze. “It feels like power,” I said slowly, “but corrupted. It’s different than before—when I first placed it on my head, it was just raw potential. Overwhelming, yes, but pure. Now there’s something else underneath.” I flexed my fingers, trying to shake off the phantom sensation of a foreign presence.

Her worried concern was written plainly across her face. “I’m fine,” I snapped, turning away from both the artifact and her penetrating gaze.

“You don’t look ‘fine,’ ” she pressed. “You look like you were about to be sick again. What’s going on? What’s so important about conquering that godsforsaken kingdom that you’re willing to risk… this?” She gestured vaguely at me, at the Heirloom, at the entire mess we were in. “Why Solandris? Why are you so obsessed?”

I whirled on her. “Why not Solandris? It’s rich, it controls key trade routes, its resources would strengthen my position against the Syndicate, and it’s ruled by a self-righteous hypocrite who deserves to be brought to his knees. Are those not reasons enough?”

“There are other rich kingdoms. Other strategic locations.” She shook her head. “This is personal to you for some reason. Why, Kazimir?”

Her hazel eyes pinned me, her truth-sense stripping away my deflections, wanting honesty. And something inside me, some long-locked door in the dungeon of my soul, creaked open.

I sighed heavily and ran a hand over my face, feeling the rough scrape of my stubble. Why Solandris? It was a question I hadn’t allowed myself to fully articulate in years.

The fight drained out of me, replaced by the weight of memory. I leaned back against the cold stone wall. “It’s complicated.”

“I have time,” she said softly, moving closer until she was standing just a breath away. She didn’t touch me, but her presence was an invitation. Talk to me.

And for some insane reason, I wanted to.

“You know I killed my father.” I watched her face, saw the flicker of acknowledgment. “He was a mercenary warlord. A brute named Vargus who called his own lands Azroth, a petty but brutal fiefdom on the eastern coast. He wasn’t my father in any meaningful sense of the word. He was my progenitor. A biological necessity.”

I paused. The memories were still so vivid I could taste rust coating my tongue, feel old blood slicking my palms. “My mother, Amaryska, was a powerful sorceress. But when Vargus’s army landed on her small island in the eastern sea—or the Shattered Sea as many call it—the population was easily overwhelmed. The mercenaries took what they wanted from the island. He took what he wanted from her. And the result was me.”

Arabella’s breath hitched. She knew about my mother carving the runes into my bones, but not the circumstances of my conception. I saw the horror dawn in her eyes, quickly followed by a wave of emotion. It wasn’t pity. Pity, I could have handled. Pity, I could have sneered at. This was something that felt dangerously close to understanding.

I blew out a frustrated breath and sank into a chair.

“Amaryska raised me as a weapon.” The words came more easily now, a torrent held back for too long. “A tool for her revenge. The runes in my bones, the training, the constant lessons in warfare and sorcery… it was all to forge me into something that could one day slit his throat. She saw the potential in my magic, in my ambition. So she nurtured it. She was a brilliant, ruthless teacher. And a monstrous mother.”

I pushed out of the chair and began to pace again. “I slaughtered my first battalion for her when I was fifteen. At seventeen, I led a rebellion against my father, finding allies among the rebels Vargus had crushed. It wasn’t difficult. His own people could barely stomach him. I walked into his hall during a feast, with his own commanders at my back, and beheaded him at his own table. That’s how I became the Scourge of Azroth.”

The memory was as clear as yesterday. The look of shocked disbelief on Vargus’s face. The spray of blood. The satisfying thud of his head hitting the floor. It was a triumphant moment.

“And your mother?” Arabella asked quietly. “You said she abandoned you.”

I gave a short, bitter laugh. “Once her revenge was complete, she vanished. Her weapon had served its purpose. She didn’t need me anymore.”

Arabella remained silent, letting me gather my thoughts. I hesitated at the next part. The nightmare that stalked the edges of my mind in the darkest hours, the thing I’d spent sixteen years trying to bury so deep it could never claw its way back to the surface.

The demon.

Even thinking the word made my skin crawl, made the scars on my chest burn with phantom pain. “The commanders who had backed me, my supposed allies… they saw a seventeen-year-old boy who had just toppled a warlord. A threat. So they sold me.”

“Sold you?” she whispered.

I met her gaze, and for a moment, the Chamber of Accords materialized around me. I saw Zaraiah’s venomous smile, heard her taunt. Has your new wife heard stories of that incident? I remembered the hot spike of fear, the cold rage at having my deepest wound exposed. I’d shut Arabella out then, viciously. Because Zaraiah had wielded the story as a weapon, and I refused to let it hit its mark.

But this was different. Arabella wasn’t wielding anything but a request for the truth. A truth she had earned a hundred times over when she bound herself to the Heirloom, when she fought for my home as if it were her own. She’d seen me at my most powerful and my most pathetic, and she was still here. To keep this from her now wasn’t guarding a weakness. It was insulting her strength.

“When Zaraiah mentioned this,” I said, forcing the words out, “I refused to speak of it. She wanted to use it as a dagger. For you, it’s just a fact. Another ugly stone in the foundation.” I took a breath. “They sold me to a demon.”

Arabella’s breath hitched. A flash of understanding—and something fiercely protective—lit her eyes as the pieces clicked into place. Zaraiah’s comment about my fascination with demonic anatomy. The memory of my fury in the Chamber of Accords, the splintering chair, the thorns thick with poison. Arabella’s expression wasn’t one of horror at the revelation, but of recognition at the weight of my confession. She knew what it cost me to say those words aloud to her now.

“That’s what she was talking about,” Arabella murmured, her quiet way of telling me she understood.

“Yes.” The memory was a room in my mind I kept locked. The seduction, the slaughter, the sheer, messy trauma of it all—I still wasn’t going to give her every detail. But I could give her the shape of the thing. “I escaped,” I said simply. “I came back, raised my own army, and took Azroth for myself, along with its strategic port city on the coast. I killed every last one of the men who betrayed me. Slowly.”

I stopped in front of Arabella. Her expression wasn’t pity. It was a cold, hard fury that mirrored my own. “I spent the next few years building my power. Taking what I wanted. Proving that I was beholden to no one. I took Skyspire. I took the kingdoms on the eastern coast, one by one. I clawed my way into the Syndicate’s good graces by loaning out my mercenaries to them—for a fee, of course—until I became so indispensable to them they had to offer me a chair. I built an empire on a foundation of fear and control, because it’s the only foundation that holds.”