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What I believed about Randal wouldn’t sustain me anymore. I let go of my hopes and beliefs like a shipwrecked woman letting go of her life raft. Letting go was easy. So much easier to let go than hold on.
If Randal knew I was alive, he had forsaken me.
And if he thought I was dead?
God help me.
I would be soon enough.
Chapter 17
Randal
In the days after Iris was murdered, vengeance alone fueled me. At night, alone in my quarters, I drank until I passed out. I punched the walls until my knuckles bled. I raged against the loss of the one good thing I’d ever known. And I fucking raged against myself for loving her.
It was my fault that she was dead. That guilt, that burden, would always be mine, as if I had slaughtered her with my own hands.
At first, I refused to believe it. Nobody could produce a body, nobody could tell me in any certain terms what had happened. I had seen the dungeon with my own eyes, seen her clothes gone, and I’d seen Erik’s bloody corpse. Whoever had killed him, they were brutal, it was hard to believe that Iris had been taken gently by such a man.
I had my own guards search for her, for any sign of her. They asked questions in taverns, they interrogated merchants and travelers, but there was nothing.
Then, on the morning of the third day, the worst news was confirmed.
The body of a young woman washed up on the banks of the Aramoor River, so badly beaten by the rocks on the riverbed that it was barely recognizable as human. A few strands of blonde hair clung to her battered skull. Nobody came forward to claim a lost daughter, wife or mother, and though rage consumed me I came in the end to accept that it was her.
My Iris.
To be killed in such a way was horrific.
Every night, I raged myself to sleep in the bed where she had slept beside me. I could still smell her on the sheets. I dreamt about her sweet flesh and woke up with tears in my eyes and my cock fucking throbbing. Her loss broke me, as if I had ever been whole without her at all.
During the day when I was at court, I went through the endless goddamned motions of becoming the next king of the land. I listened to my father’s wishes, agreed to be crowned while he still lived.
I met with his advisors, signed the device for succession, did all the things I needed to get done. But inside I was molten fucking lava, churning and boiling and waiting for my chance. The only good thing about taking power, the only reason I still agreed to go through with it, instead of simply riding off never to return, was that once I wore the crown, there was not a motherfucking thing Queen Patara could do to stop me from having my revenge.
Exile was still what my father urged.
“Do not start your reign with bloodshed,” he said. But in my darkest moments, drinking hard alone in the dungeon where I’d kept Iris, I thought of darker fucking things. I thought of torture and terror. When my father passed, it would all be up to me. My desires would be the law. I could do whatever I fucking wanted to that bitch.
Iris would have been my queen. Her murder was on Patara’s hands.
The moment I became king, she’d go from queen to queen-killer.
A thousand arrows would suit her just fucking fine. And I’d shoot every motherfucking last one of them into her myself.
One by agonizing fucking one.
My coronation day started with a thunderstorm that shook the castle walls. The skies poured rain, like heaven was fucking grieving right along with me. I woke up on the floor of our dungeon, with a hangover that felt like I’d been cold-cocked with a broadsword on the battlefield.
For two blissful fucking seconds after I opened my eyes, I thought Iris was still alive. But then I remembered the sight of her body, so swollen and battered that I could only hope she was dead before she went into the water. And I had to tell myself the same goddamned thing I said every time I dragged myself out of unconsciousness. It was all real. It had all happened. She was fucking gone.
Rolling over and getting to my feet, I dunked my head in a cold bucket of water. The fucking room spun but still there was that pain in my heart. That emptiness. That raw, unhealing wound. I missed her so much that I’d rather be dead. But today was the day that I became king. So I downed a long swig of grain alcohol cut with lemon juice and salt, put on some half-clean clothes, and went straight to my father’s chambers.
