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I nodded. “Hell yes.” My head was throbbing, too. I looked down at my leg to check it wasn’t actually on fire. It wasn’t, but it felt like it.
The healer mixed up a drink and offered it to me. I managed to lift my head long enough to gulp down something that tasted like pond water, then lay down again.
“What the hell happened?” I gasped out.
King Damon was sitting on his bed, but everyone else was standing around the bedroom, staring at me. How embarrassing. The medicine began to work and my body started to relax, the raging fire dying down to a slow burn.
I managed to roll onto my back and half sit up against the head board.
Everyone was there. Marienne. Damon. Anthony. My father and Veronica. Even Cass.
Two kings, Two queens and their offspring.
“This is an impressive audience,” I managed. “For a prince who will never be king. It’s a bit much, don’t you think?”
Veronica glared at me, not liking my joke, obviously.
“Hey, dragon daughter, lighten up.” I smiled at her. “You should leave. I’m not worth the royal procession.”
If she’d been in her shifter form, I think I may have seen smoke blow from her nostrils. “You ungrateful turd.”
I gaped at her, then laughed. Oh God. This is what I came back to life for? To get more shit from my mate? Just as I had for the past decade?
“Seriously?” I growled at her. “I’m ungrateful? I crawled back from death itself, and this is the shit I have to deal with? But what’s changed, right? You still hate me. Obviously, you always will.”
Her mouth dropped open and her eyes shifted, the irises transforming into the shape of her dragon.
Then she turned and ran out of the room.
I felt nothing, watching her go. Actually, that wasn’t quite right. I did feel something. I was glad. She should go. She didn’t love me. She didn’t want me.
King Damon shifted further onto the bed, his bed, and shook his head at me. “Oh, mate. You screwed that one up.”
I wanted to get up. To leave. I didn’t want to be there. But even the slightest movement hurt, so I just lay there and grumbled.
“I don’t care,” I said truthfully, rolling into the fetal position and closing my eyes. “Nothing’s ever going to change with Veronica. I should have stayed dead.”
Then she could have married someone else. Been happy. Without me.
“Iain!” My father’s shocked disapproval was clear in his tone, but I couldn’t shake the black cloud descending over me. I didn’t bother to open my eyes or respond when he added, “Don’t say things like that.”
I should be dead.
I wish I was dead.
The voices around me changed, becoming muffled. I couldn’t make them out. They were murmuring about me. About where to put me. How to deal with me. I didn’t care.
The depression swallowed me up and I burrowed under the covers. They should have just left me in that abandoned house and let me die.
VERONICA.
I was fuming. He’d rather be dead than be with me? I ran straight back to my bedroom, picked up the nearest thing, which happened to be a vase by the door, and hurled it across the room.
It hit the wall hard, shattering into a million pieces. Just like my heart.
“Gah!” I clenched my hands into tight fists and screamed out loud. “You fucking bastard! I knew it... I knew I couldn’t trust you.”
I was too angry to cry, so I stomped around the room, throwing anything I could find. Until finally, finally, there was nothing left to break, and I fell to the ground in a pile of sorrow.
