Page 35 of Bros Come Before Hordes
The pain. The pain had started in my gut...like poison.
Writhing on the floor, I curled my fingers and tried to shred the dress off of me. Thirty seconds, Tavis had said. Thirty seconds of misery while my dragon fire destroyed the poison. But that was for poison I put inside of me. Not poison I wore.
I couldn't get the dress off. I hurt too much, burned too much. I ripped and tore and flung myself about like a woman possessed. I screamed. Oh, how I screamed, but no one who cared could hear me. Not my harem. Not Asa who'd put on his earphones before I'd left.
Finally, finally, I ripped the last of the dress loose. I lay there naked, panting, in the middle of my bedroom floor, still not daring to look down at myself to see the damage. The dress sat in a tattered pile next to my head, and I wondered if we had a camera shot of who had brought it to my room. Not the fae. They wanted me alive to continue this distracting Civil War while they waged the real one. Petra? Rio? They had their hands full with my harem, but that didn't mean they weren't behind it.
It was fury alone that brought me to my feet. Somewhere behind it, my body still hurt, the dragon fire inside me taking a lot longer than thirty seconds to attack something on the outside of my skin. But it didn't matter. I was still alive.
I marched to my closet and found the same dress I'd worn to the full-moon ritual—the strapless royal blue one. Carefully, I put it on, not trusting it, but also hating the feel of the silky fabric sliding over my burning flesh. I had to look down at my skin in order to put the dress on, and it was an ugly, mottled red. If it hadn't been for the dragon fire battling it, I hated to think what might have happened. Death, certainly. And maybe nothing more of my body than a skeleton wearing a poisoned dress.
So far so good with the full-moon ritual dress, even though the feel of it ravaged my sore skin, so I taped my supplies to my legs, a process that just about made me pass out from the pain. But this dress didn’t have pockets. Once I was done, I hurried back to the art room and Asa.
Standing behind him, I took the headphones off his head. "Can you find me another camera shot?"
He turned suddenly at the raspiness of my voice from all my screaming, then gasped at the sight of my arms and neck. "Yara?"
"Nothing for you to worry about."
"I don't believe you. You look like you're hurting." His eyes flooded with tears as if the very idea of me hurting rebounded back into him, and I hated it. Hated the fact that he was seeing me like this when I was supposed to be the one who had my shit together for the both of us. Far from it.
I shook my head, willing the seams on my emotions to stay strong just a little bit longer. "I'll be fine. Listen, Asa. I need your help. With two things, actually. One is I need to find a camera shot of someone carrying a fancy dress up to my room."
He scanned my arms and neckline, likely visualizing said dress from the burns on my skin and snapping the details together. He was too bright for his own good sometimes.
Turning back to the screen, he fiercely rubbed at the tears on his cheeks. "The person with the dress hurt you."
"Yes."
"Why?" He started clicking around the screen, his movements angry.
I smoothed my hand—one of the only parts of my body that didn't hurt—down his back to iron out the wrinkles there. "I know this may come as a shock, but some people really don't like me."
He gazed at me for a moment. "The idiots?"
I nodded. "The idiots."
"They're irrelevant, then."
"Such a big word for a nine-year-old."
"I'm almost ten," he reminded me with a sniff, and then pointed to the screen. "Here. That lady is carrying a dress."
She sure was. A redhead, one of the shifters with a feather duster I'd seen in the hallway across from my room. A little bit more searching through the videos, and she was also the one who’d let the rappellers with chains into the castle through a side door. I bit down hard on the inside of my cheek as I glared at her. Karma would be an absolute bitch to her. I would make sure.
"Okay. Can you make a copy of the one with the dress, too, and add it to the others?" I asked, crossing over to the window.
"Yeah," he said, watching me carefully as I slid it open. "What are you doing?"
Trying not to throw up at the moment. On this side of the castle, the ground bustled with activity as swarms of shifters took their seats for the coronation. Thousands of them, all here to see me. Most to watch me fail or see me dead.
"The second thing..." I tore my gaze away from that horrific scene and turned to Asa. "I mean the third thing I would love for you to do for me is listen to my voice once I'm outside and show the clips on the side of the castle wall that I tell you. With sound if there is any. There are speakers on stage already. Is that possible? Like soon-ish?"
"Anything is possible." He smiled and cocked his head. "Guess who taught me that?"
All my love for this kid lodged in my throat. I blew him a wobbly kiss on my way out the door.
"Where are you going?"
With my hand on the doorknob, I stopped to compose myself, to look down at my jacked-up skin, to feel the empty space inside me where my harem belonged, and then burned it all down with rage so I could do something about it. "I'm going to go get my fucking crown."
