Page 144 of A Song of Air
To Murder a King
Embarrassment washedover Bryson. Humiliation. Rage.
Prey.
Prey.
Prey.
Her mind whirled with far too many things and her body contained far too many feelings. Failure was a prominent one alongside the irrefutable sense of humiliation. She’d been degraded. She’d failed to do the one thing she was supposed to.Don’t eat anything,Weylyn had told her. The sensation nibbled away at her insides as her mind flashed back to the other Elementals. All the great things they’d done. Melting iron. Freezing and shattering it. Drowning entire cities with the force of their magic.
What had Bryson done other than get caught? Than be thrown into a pit, hurt and humiliated, forced to strip herself bare before a court that jeered at her from behind golden bars. She’d been reduced to little more than an animal in a zoo.
Humiliated all because she was Weylyn’s mate. But there was a deeper reason for their hatred. A death that lay between them all. It was the root of their ire, and they’d pulled her into it.
Bryson had a right to know why.
“Tell me,” she ordered viciously, her anger burning away the humiliation. Her palms slapped against his chest, nails raking across his skin like she could pull the truth out of him with violence.
His expression shuttered and he pulled away. Like he meant to hide. Wear that mask. Only, it wasn’t a mask. It was an innate part of him that he’d adapted to his very being. Unseelie. High Fae. He was both. And it was that Unseelie mask that fell into place right then between them. The intentionally cruel expression that she’d despised and craved in equal measure.
“Don’t,” Bryson warned, grasping for him. “Do not pull away from me. I deserve the truth. Look at what they did to me.”
Weylyn’s eyes closed.
“Look at me!”
His eyes opened to face the tears. The blood. The scars. The pain she wore like a raw wound.
And his own eyes reflected the same thing.
They were in his mindscape, surrounded by the privacy of his mind walls. They could speak freely here without the worry of someone dropping in or overhearing. Yet Weylyn almost looked... afraid.
“Weylyn.” Bryson grabbed his hands. “Please. Just tell me.”
He took a breath and when he opened his eyes next, the mask was gone and there were decades worth of pain haunting his every feature.
“It is a long and painful story. If I tell you, perhaps you will despise me as much as they do by the end of it.”
Bryson wouldn’t make him empty promises. The truth was, she didn’t even know what she would feel after she heard his story. But she needed to hear it regardless.
“Tell me,” she said.
Weylyn swallowed and took a deep breath.
“Do you know why there is no King of Unseelie?”
“Because your mother doesn’t suffer fools or men?”
