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“She offered you the right to rule with your sisters, requesting that the past be forgotten.” Ace sputtered, almost choking on her food, but Rehan continued. “She’s offered you pretty well whatever you want, though she seems quite certain you’ll change your mind when it comes to the freedom of the warlocks once you’ve gained your position. I told her that you’d request the senseless killing be stopped, but she seemed to take a great deal of humor in that and told me that it was impossible.”
“She is absolutely ridiculous!” Ace sneered, small bits of her food spraying as she talked. She had enough decency to cover her mouth while she finished the rest of her complaint. “How am I supposed to forget being killed? You don’t just get your throat cut open and a wicked white scar and just ‘oh I forgive you.’ Absurd! Now she’s going to what—bribe me?”
Everyone else nodded along. Margo looked particularly interested as she leaned in as if this was the best gossip she’d heard all year. It probably was.
Nevertheless, Ace continued.“I don’t even want to be a queen. I don’t want their riches. And to think she has the audacity to assume that I can be persuaded out of wanting the warlocks to be freed.” Laughter shook her. “They can’t even…” She coughed through a bite of bread. “Can’t even stop killing.”
“So, is that a no?” Rehan tore at his own slice of bread.
“Clearly, it is a no,” Shelby huffed.
“Wait—your sisters killed you?” Margo’s voice pitched an octave.
Ace grimaced, staring back at the ground as if that might help reel all those words back in. Her eyes still felt watery from laughing. Poor girl had been traumatized enough the past twenty-four hours; she didn’t need to hear Ace’s sob story about how her sisters were the most wicked in all the land.
“We should probably talk about that another time,” Ace whispered, finally drawing her attention back up to Rehan. “No, I will not accept her offer.”
“Perhaps now is the time we call in King Osiris and his troops. We can take hold of the castle and remove them from the throne.”
“I handed his brother over to those queens. I’m not sure he would be so happy to see me.” Shelby was turned away from them, head turning slowly back and forth as he scanned the forest.
“I can speak to him. Plead on your behalf. Taking the castle would mean getting his brother back anyway.”
Shelby turned back around. “You would plead my case?”
“Of course. We are friends, are we not?” Rehan gave him an easy grin.
Hazel eyes, cut with one strip of color, slid to Ace before Shelby turned back around without answering.
To his credit, Rehan only shrugged and said, “I’ll take your silence as a yes.”
The food helped quell the hunger, but guilt made her writhe with sudden nausea. Ace slid back into her seat at the same tree she’d watched the stars from last night. She had to tell Rehan she couldn’t marry him. But she needed the right time.
“I know how to get ahold of King Osiris. So, I’ll finish my meal and contact him. Hopefully, he can have troops here rather quickly.”
Ace hummed her approval, though she hardly heard what he just said. She was too busy trying to think up the right words to tell him she didn’t love him.
Idalia
There was no time to waste. Idalia would have known that even without the prompting of the god that whispered in the back of her mind. Even her staff screamed at her to make her final moves now.
She left her sitting room, not feeling any more hopeful about her sisters reuniting than she had the night before. However, Queen Idalia didn’t need hope. Not when she had a plan, one devised with the help of a god no less. There was a great future ahead for the Havlock family and soon to be many great rewards for their service to Invictus.
Without speaking another word to her sister or Burke, Idalia left the room and made her way through the halls that twisted and turned with no particular order that anyone other than herself might understand. Life prior to the sacrifices and great magic that Idalia had gotten for them had been hard and often boring. So she made her castle anything but dull.
The full skirt of her gown pressed into her legs with the momentum that carried her forward. A strap from the bag she slipped The Book of Invictus into dug into her shoulder. Idalia ignored the dull pain.
She passed a room that looked, sounded, and felt as if she’d stepped out onto a beach. Then another that was made of sweets—lollipops, gumdrops, hard candies, chocolates—everything was edible. The next room was like swimming through stars, no floor or ceiling, only liquid black and twinkling sparks of white.
Past all of those rooms, there was the queen’s absolute favorite room.
And it was locked thoroughly.
Fingers tightened on the wood staff as the heat of magic took its course through her veins, and a small golden key appeared in her empty palm. She closed her hand around it, the metal somehow cold. To anyone else passing, it was possibly the most average of doors, nothing exciting that made you want to enter—at least not like other doors that had been handcrafted or purposefully made by warlocks under strict instructions.
Idalia could feel the thrumming of heavy magic behind the door. Could others feel it too as they passed? She hoped not after all the spells she had cast over this room to make it look and feel astonishingly ordinary.
The key slid into its lock. Without any sound at all, it turned and released the first lock that kept the room sealed. Trying to shake the tenseness from her back and shoulders, she placed her palm on the door. More magic was pulled from her staff, the flames dimming to hardly embers within its globe. A river of power flowed from her fingertips up her arm, pooling in her chest and then coursing through her body, before it found its way out her opposite hand, taking with it the smallest bit of her life force.
