Page 25 of Fearless

The boy’s honey eyes simply stare into mine. He doesn’t cry out, doesn’t beg for life. He only stares, preparing to meet his bloody end.

Honey.

Those eyes are like honey. So similar to her sweet gaze. Suddenly, it’s Adena dying before me all over again. And all over again, I cannot save her.

A tear slides down my dirty cheek. Blood oozes between my fingers, nausea swelling with every second the sticky liquid stains my skin. But I don’t dare move my hands. And just like I had with Adena, I tell this boy that he is going to be fine. I spew lies, spin a happy ending into existence even as tears slip from my burning eyes.

And when he takes his final breath—gaze trained on the sky—it’s as though I’m back in that Pit, cradling her dead body. Death steals the boy from my incapable hands, oddly gentle in the way he halts this straining heart. My mouth opens, a cry on the tip of my tongue—

But my arms are being yanked back, fingers sliding from his wound. I feel numb in the rough hands that wrap around me. My dress is soaked in blood, the drenched hem dripping a path behind my dragged body.

“Dammit, Pae. You never follow orders, do you?”

His voice is harsh, but I hear the tinge of sorrow lacing every word. I let the familiar arms cling to my waist, let Kai nearly carry me back to the coach. My unfocused gaze sweeps over the still-scrambling bodies tripping over those littering the ground.

Loot is in shambles.

Myhomeis in shambles.

And so is my heart.

Edric

For every end, there is always a beginning.

The king would come to realize, many years later and thousands of steps beyond the ones he currently takes, that this was the start to his impending demise.

Edric sets a formidable pace through the twisting gut of his pristine castle. As a child, the coiling corridors used to taunt him, trap the princeling in a confusing loop with every corner he rounded. Even now, it reminds him horribly of the maze that is his mind, and how any word that enters through the shifting gate—his gaze—will meet a stony wall before breaking into a series of jumbled syllables—or rather, what his father liked to call “a disgraceful lack of competency.”

But his father is no longer here, leaving behind only the memory of a sniffling boy who struggled to read.

Edric’s polished shoes tread swiftly past the servants who slave overthem every evening, the feet within navigating him confidently through the castle.

A distant memory indeed.

It was long after ridding his son of this “shameful illness” that Landan Azer finally met his end, though, it was regrettably far more pleasant than Edric’s cruel journey to literacy. His soul drifted peacefully from the frail body it had inhabited, which seemed entirely too gentle a death for such a harsh man. But with the kingdom now squirming in the palm of his hand, Edric thinks fondly of that fruitful time with his father, feeling a growing sort of gratitude for the man who pushed him along this path toward power.

Cruelty molded him into a king, where kindness would have only crippled him.

The crown curls atop his head, burrowing into the blond strands of hair like a drowsy mutt. Each gaping hallway drips with the honeyed rays of sunset, seemingly slowing his pace as if they were clinging to his shoes. But the king pushes past every oozing puddle of light. Because there is little in this life that Edric loves more than power—and he is heading right for it.

The queen is rarely seen outside her quarters this late into the pregnancy. Even still, Iris was hidden away long before the growing of a spare in her womb. Love and paranoia are quite fond of each other, habitually mingling into a suffocating protection.

Edric pauses before the familiar slab of wood that separates them. He often finds this moment to feel like the end of a maze he’s been stumbling through since he was a boy. Here, there is no taunting castle or befuddled mind. It all falls away at her feet.

It takes four beats of the king’s fluttering heart for the door to swing open.

Iris has always been the type of beautiful that can only beinarticulately described as breathtaking. As a descendant of an Izrami queen, she bears their tanned, freckled skin and bright eyes. And yet, Iris Moyra had never set foot on the seaside kingdom’s rocky soil.

Over a century ago, a family feud had divided the royals of Izram, forcing several of Iris’s ancestors—whose claim to the throne was nearly as weak as their relationship with the woman who sat upon it—to settle in Ilya. A handful of years had passed before the Plague swept through, isolated the kingdom, and gifted the descendants of those bickering royals more power than they could have ever earned with a crown on their head.

Edric, with his lust for power, married the woman before him nearly a decade after the Purging. With every Elite being contained to Ilya, no powerless princess beyond the border would be allowed to taint the king’s line further. But the pairing of Iris’s royal blood and rare ability was shocking enough to finally entice him into settling down.

Iris was stunning like the sea, as though her skin were seeped in saltwater until it shimmered. Edric tells her as much, smiling when the words draw out a warm flush atop her cheekbones. That golden hair cascades down her body and over the large swelling of her belly, like water carving a trickling path around a stone. She gently tugs the king toward her, pressing soft lips against his with a lingering sigh.

Once released from his wife’s captivating clutches, Edric begrudgingly glances around the room. “Did you dismiss the servants again?”

Iris rests a delicate hand atop her stomach. “I’m fine, Ed. They don’t need to be swarming me every waking moment.”

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