Nectar of the Wicked (Deadly Divine, #1) (108)
I didn’t turn to take one last look at the home I’d always longed for—nor the parent I’d been so eager to meet.
I walked on as the gates closed behind me with a blood-chilling creak.
Left with no choice, I followed the guard across the slow arching bridge.
On the other side, more people in the streets ceased their afternoon activity.
They began to flock to the river’s edge as I stumbled down the crest of the bridge and into the city encircling the palace in the shape of a sun-bright horseshoe.
I expected to be paraded through the streets naked and bearing the sign of a traitor before I was beaten by my own people and left for dead. I hadn’t expected the guard to spit at my feet before turning on his heel to cross back to the palace.
There was no relief. I would still need to walk through the city naked and bloody and marked. A mark I would forever wear due to the wounds being iron-infused.
The brand of a traitor. A traitor to the people surrounding me.
Vultures to a carcass, they glared and murmured. Some turned their younglings’ curious gazes away. Others studied me with a mixture of disgust, awe, and horror.
The world became too bright. Too loud.
There would be no horses to save me from a humiliation that somehow felt worse than any encounter with death.
Eyes were akin to needles upon my exposed skin—hundreds of prodding iron pokers.
Iron.
As the voices of the gathering crowds grew louder, my thoughts quietened. I looked at my bound hands but didn’t dare look back to the palace gates. Beyond them was my father’s loyal adviser who’d chained my wrists in iron.
The golden-eyed male who’d told me this was all he could do.
For although my hands were shackled, the heavy manacles were not locked.
Perhaps Avrin had saved me. If that were true, then I shouldn’t have felt as if I’d indeed been damned instead. As if flames fell from my scorched back to lick at my feet, and I would feel their burn for all eternity.
The warmth of the sun was too hot. Sweat misted my raw skin. I stopped when my feet met cobblestone, then closed my eyes over a fresh wave of tears when someone shouted, “She bears the mark!”
Behind my closed eyelids, midnight-blue eyes found me again.
Distance and energy are no match for desperation.
Something hard, perhaps a stone, slammed into my shoulder. It forced my eyes open as I stumbled back a step. Tears were now free to stream down my face.
Murmurings of “Florian’s whore” and “winter king’s wife” reached my ears.
Birds screeched overhead. Gasps mingled with laughter and insults. Horses whinnied and hounds barked while I just stood there, surrounded by hatred and frozen with fear and unending pain and unable to make it stop. Unable to do anything.
Someone lobbed another object at me. It splattered over my chest, the scent of a tomato following.
I barely felt it.
I barely felt anything as the crowds grew into something monstrous, and I began surrendering to the helplessness I’d been forced to face. Deep within me, that dark pit of despair and heartbreak opened.
Distance and energy are no match for desperation.
I pushed the darkness wider. Shook and shoved the iron cuffs from my wrists.
They clanked to the cobblestone as I welcomed the rapid fleeing of my breath. As I begged the rifts, the mother—whoever was responsible for such an ability’s existence—to take me the fuck away from this nightmare-ridden land I never should have stepped foot in.
Butterflies circled and tickled my cheeks. The breeze stirred granules of dirt around my feet and ankles.
“She’s materializing,” someone yelled.
“Return to your wretched husband,” another hollered and laughed. “Not even he will have you now.”
Laughter echoed and then faded.
A blue butterfly followed me into the rifts that stole me from the encroaching civilians with a soft violence I’d never felt from materializing before. That all-consuming and swirling darkness encompassed, an iced and gentle caress.
And it set me upon the dusty floor of an uninhabited apartment.
The wood floor blurred.
In the sudden quiet, my heart was a drum beating in my ears. Survival a song now screaming through my veins.
Move.
Everything ached as though it were as fresh as the moment I’d been branded, but I had to move. I couldn’t stay in this apartment. Not when every faerie who wished me ill would begin the search for me here.
A brief glance around showed no sign of breaking and entering. No sign of new residents or that Madam Morin had been here at all. Everything was still just as I’d left it. Just as Rolina had wanted it.
I had no time to be puzzled over that.
I opened the door and hurried to the stairs. Too fast—I stumbled and winced, slapping a bloodstained hand to the wall. Drawing a breath through my nose as pain spiraled up my back, I slowed my pace.
But there was no slowing the beat of my heart when I saw the familiar door in the wall. I shoved it hard. So hard I fell through in a bloodied, tangled pile that made Gane shriek like a crow.
“Mother of murderous skies, Flea.”
I blinked up at the mildew-dotted rafters in the ceiling, so relieved to see them again that more tears left my eyes.
Then I rolled to my side as Gane scuttled from his desk and came close to shouting, “You’re naked. Why are you...” His voice trailed into an odd-sounding gasp. “The mark.”