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Except he lifted his hand, halting me before I could escape.
Dammit.
I just hoped my thrashing wouldn’t be too severe.
Squinting, he asked, “Do you sneak in here and spy on me often, whipping boy?”
Nearly every day.
I shook my head, however, and looked him straight in the eye. “Tonight just seemed like a special occasion, Your Majesty. I was merely curious.”
“Curious?” The king pinched his expression into a scowl. “Curious? Why, you damned nuisance!”
Picking up his bowl still filled with bread rolls—since he’d already thrown his goblet—he heaved it at my head, missing me with the bowl when I ducked to the side out of the way, while still managing to pelt me in the arm with a hardtack of rye.
“How dare you think you have the right to my private business, you worthless whore’s son. God, how I wish it’d been Murdock and not you who’d come home from that bloody battle. Why couldn’t you have been the one to die?”
I didn’t answer, wisely remaining mute as I watched his cheeks fill with angry color.
“Why did you have to be the only pathetic bastard to ever come back from either of those blasted wars we declared on them? No one returned but you. That’s not how it was supposed to happen.”
“By God, you’re right,” Greggor said suddenly, sitting up in his chair as if a brilliant idea had just occurred to him. “He is the only one of us who’s been to Donnelly and back.” Spinning toward the king, he added, “Tor, I believe we just found the very person we need to send on your crusade to kidnap that princess.”
“What?” I cried with horrified doom. “The fuck if you have!”
Over my dead body was I going to kidnap Princess Nicolette so they could rape and maim her.
The king seemed similarly appalled. “You can’t possibly be suggesting I send Farrow to Donnelly?”
“Why not?” Greggor shrugged. “What’s so wrong with the idea?”
“What’s wrong with it?” Torrance blustered. “Well, he—it—this is an honorable king’s mission, worthy of great praise and the highest esteem. And he’s a fucking bastard.”
Only thanks to you, I wanted to mutter.
“Then it’s no loss if Donnelly catches him and slices his throat before he completes the task,” Greggor said in such a logical tone that I lifted my eyebrows his way, but he paid me no heed. “Think about it, Tor. He’s the only person from Far Shore who’s been to the Kingdom Within the Sand and lived long enough to return and tell us about it. Hell, he claims he’s even been inside their Iron Castle.”
I had, but my father huffed in disbelief and rolled his eyes.
“It’s not as if he hasn’t been trained by our knights’ royal guard either,” Greggor went on, motioning toward me. “You certainly had no qualms about sending him off to battle five years ago with the rest of your elite crew.”
“That’s only because he was on the front line,” the king grumbled reluctantly. “I expected him to die within the first five minutes in the hopes it’d give my experienced warriors ample time to breach the castle.”
Wow. I was really feeling the love here.
“Well, he didn’t die, and he was able to breach the castle walls himself. So what’s to say he can’t now as well? He’s our best chance. We can send him in, clandestine this time, with two knights for assistance, and he can snatch the Donnelly bitch for us, right out from under her fat brother’s nose.”
The king scowled, wringing his hands. “I don’t know. I want someone experienced, someone I can trust to get the job done.”
I arched an eyebrow, offended to the root of my being.
The idiotic asshole had no idea he’d never find anyone as loyal to him as I was. I could’ve taken off to anywhere after Nicolette helped me escape the Iron Castle. I could’ve done anything. But I had come home. To him. While a part of me hated him and resented everything he’d ever done to me and my mother, another part was more strongly tied to him than anyone else in the Outer Realms.
The man was my father. Aside from his daughters, he was the only family I had left. Evil or not, he was who I served.
But I said none of that to him. Despite the fact he could trust me more than any of his dignitaries or special knights, this was not a quest I wanted to take.
I mean, kidnapping the princess of Donnelly? Nicolette? No. I wouldn’t. She had saved me. I was alive because of her. I had no desire to kidnap anyone, but I especially couldn’t pay her back by dragging her to what would become her own death. And a brutal, drawn-out, traumatic, painful death, at that.
