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Even after all this time, it still was unnerving to watch the three of them talk as one conscious thought. It was something I had never gotten used to. Maybe it just reminded me too much of a sharing my body with a demon for so long.
“But my worry,” the king continued, “extends to you and your men as well.”
I shrugged. “It’s nothing I haven’t done before.”
“Demons are strong,” the king replied.
“They can read auras, same as the Judges,” Vito said.
“So while you look for their weakness, they look for yours,” Hugo added.
I looked between the three of them and shrugged again. “I don’t have any more weaknesses. They’ve been beaten out of me.”
The king nodded thoughtfully. “You’re incredibly strong, Jacques. To that, I agree. But there are new things in your life now that the demons can use against you.”
“Like what?” I asked with a laugh. “My wealth? I’ve lived without it before.”
He shook his head. “No, Jacques. Your family.”
I licked my lips, glancing to the wall and not answering.
“The boy who watched his mother’s tragic spiritual trial and then tried to kill the king himself because of her sentence did not go unnoticed by the spiritual world,” the king said. “Now that you’ve united with your father, they’ll try to dig open your soul until you break.”
He stared at me, but I didn’t reply.
Yes, I knew it. Which is exactly why my father needed to stay as far from me—andher—as possible.
There was a moment of silence. I broke it with a dry laugh.
“Don’t worry, Your Majesty,” I said. “Should my father suffer the same fate, it won’t affect me as it did my mother. I’ve learned that everyone rightly pays for their sins eventually.”
“That wasn’t my point.”
“I should get back to my men,” I said. “Do I have your permission to be dismissed?”
He rubbed his finger against his lip and then twirled his hand in a gentle motion to leave. I did, not looking back.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure who I hated bringing up the past the most: the demons, the king, or myself.
THIRTY-EIGHT
“Stop taking your shirt off in front of me,” Esmeralda snapped, folding her arms across her chest but notactuallylooking away.
I whipped the shirt off for extra emphasis. “You’re the one who jumped out of a siren suite. This is your own fault. Get used to it.”
I changed into a pullover shirt, throwing the previous shirt in the corner of the room. I hated how physically exhausting demon extraction was. It was soaking sweat into all my shirts.
I glanced over to check Esmeralda’s aura. I couldn’t hold back my laughter when I saw that she was both attracted and annoyed at the same time. She was pretending not to be looking at me through the corner of her eye, but I could tell that she was. For a siren, she was quite awkward around men.
No, she was awkward with only me, come to think of it. Charmspeak worked on everyone else.
“I don’t know why jumping out of Luc’s room means I have to share a room with you,” she eventually replied.
“I can lock you in one of the cells with the demons if you’d like. It’d be easier to keep track of you.”
“And where do you expect me to sleep, exactly?” She pointed to the bed. “There’s only one bed here.”
I stepped in close to her. “We only need one.”
