Page 96 of Reign of Light
My father is gone.
The moment that I’ve simultaneously dreaded and waited for has finally arrived.
I am the queen.
This is my kingdom.
But only if we survive.
Dane rises and turns slowly, his attention no longer on the fallen king. I push through the horror that I feel seeping into my bones, and find my voice, no matter how shaky it is. Filled with rage, filled with fear, I don’t know. But I can’t stay silent any longer.
“So you mean to kill me too?” I ask, hardening my gaze at Dane through the tears pooling in my eyes.
He scoffs. “Did you finally just figure it out? Took you long enough.”
“Why? If all you want is my mother, why kill him? Why kill me?”
He gestures to the ceiling, and his obsessive expression returns instantly. “It’s not as if she can just walk out of here with me.”
Pain erupts in my tongue as I bite down on it.
He knows where she’s kept.
But does he know just because Brynne passed that information to him? Or is she actually still alive? Still holding on?
“If I’m going to have her,” he continues, “I have to have it all. This castle will be mine. This kingdom will be mine, all because she will be.”
“It won’t be yours. No one will believe you just took over the kingdom. No one will trust you!” I spit at him, but his lips just turn up into a slow smirk, and he shakes his head.
“Oh, Lennox. Sometimes I forget how naïve you were. You still are. You think you can see beneath the surface. Plans, motivations, the person hiding in plain sight, but you don’t. You only see what you want to see, you stupid, selfish, useless girl.”
“Don’t listen to him, Lennox,” Weston yells before there’s a thud, followed by Weston’s deep grunt.
“You’re wrong,” I say, trying to keep my voice firm, trying to block out the spite and cruelty in Dane’s words, as well as the sound of Weston being beaten next to me. But it’s too much. The feelings all of it evokes are too much to squash, and I can’t stop the quivering from the lump forming in my throat.
“I am not wrong. All that time spent in the library, you were too focused on the useless information in front of you, and distracted by your little crush on the first man that paid you any attention. You never once looked at what I was reading.”
My face burns as he descends from the dais, taking each step one at a time, his vile grin widening as he speaks.
“While you were searching for an answer in the books that I had already poured through and found nothing, I was reading other things. The laws of Blackwood, for instance. Did you know that if the king dies, and there is no heir, the throne passes to the closest living relative?”
I set my jaw, glaring at him as he takes another step, but don’t answer. Of course I know the law. Edmond made sure I knew every law in my kingdom. How else am I to be queen and know how to govern the people? But I never gave this one a second thought. I exist. I’m living and breathing and standing in the throne room,mythrone room, so the crown would go to me. There would be no need to enact the law.
Unless I didn’t exist any longer.
Dane has made it clear since the moment the doors to this room were chained shut that this is his ultimate goal.
Eliminate anything or anyone standing in his way.
“So you want the throne?”
He ignores my question and continues his rant. “I tried to take the easy way, trapping you there, removing one of the two people standing in my way. But you had to come back. That stupid place had to give you a way, didn’t it? Well, there’s no magic here, and it can’t help you any longer.”
“Even if you kill me,” I grind out, “you still don’t get what you want. You can’t just take the kingdom because you want it.”
He chuckles softly. “Oh, but I do. I geteverything. Even though she doesn’t wake, she’s stillalive. The last living relative.”
I suck in a gasp.
