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I still couldn’t get past the fact that Draven was so much more than I had ever expected him to be.
Was he a bad man? I’d be lying to myself if I denied there was some good in him.
“Tabar marched into the birthing room. I had left for a moment and he knew that. He slaughtered them. And he thought he’d get away with it, too. He thought he would take what I had. Kill my wife and my daughter and live to tell about it. He really thought he would still become emperor one day. That somehow, we would get past it. That I’d stay loyal. Fight by his side.” Draven laughed mirthlessly. “That should tell you a great deal about how we were raised, right there.”
It did. I felt sick.
“Maybe if my mother had lived... Things might have been different. But she had died giving birth to me. My father raised us in his image. Tabar ate up everything he was taught. All of the foulness. All of the cruelty. Me? I played along. Until the day I killed him, I think they’d both always believed me to be rather weak. But that day... That day, for the first time, my father told me he was proud of me.”
He lifted his head and looked at me.
I cringed. “No.”
“Oh, yes.” Draven nodded. “My father—my emperor—said he’d never thought I had anything close to Tabar’s strength. But I had proved him wrong. He told me I’d sire more children. Stronger ones. That Nodori and our baby would soon be forgotten.”
I shook my head mutely.
“He was a monster,” Draven said flatly. “When I told him I refused, that I would never sit on the Umbral Throne and would never sire a child for him, never extend his pitiful lineage, he had a fit of some sort. I watched him die. I did not call for a healer.” He breathed deeply. “Not until I knew it was too late.”
He looked at me. “Even fae die eventually, Morgan. He was hundreds of years old and yet in the end, what did he have to show for it? You know the rest. Sephone banished me. In truth, I think she was relieved he was gone, though of course she could never have said so. He had ruled far longer than any man—fae or mortal—should have. Far longer than he deserved to. But as for me? I deserved worse.”
“No, you didn’t,” I said harshly. “You deserved far better than this shitty, toxic court.”
He grimaced. “I don’t know about that. Maybe I did when I was a boy. But then? Now?”
I shouldn’t have asked the question, I realized, my heart beginning to plummet.
I could almost hear Merlin’s voice echoing in my head. Don’t ask a question until you’re sure you want the answer.
Well, I had asked and been answered.
And now?
Now I couldn’t leave.
CHAPTER 16
