My focus cut to Luther. He gazed at me with one of his heavy, burning looks, his eyes glowing with enough devotion to steal the breath from my lungs.
He dipped his chin. “You already know how I feel.”
I quickly looked away.
I tried to find the right words to express how much their support meant to me, but when I reached down to pull them to my lips, too many other words tried to fight their way to the top. Desperate, heartbroken words, angry words, words that would crack me wide open and leave me in pieces on the floor.
I couldn’t have been more grateful for Eleanor’s keen talent at reading a room as she nudged Taran and Alixe toward the door. “I know you’re not ready to talk yet. Whenever you are, just say the word, and we’ll be there.”
As they said their goodbyes, I found myself in the one situation I had been dreading even more than facing House Hanoverre—being alone with Luther.
I had spent so much of the last four days thinking about the man who stood before me. In those dark moments when I couldn’t take one more second of picturing my father’s mutilated corpse or my brother’s devastated reaction, I had turned my thoughts to Luther.
At first, he had been my refuge. I’d soothed myself with memories of how he had looked at me as the armory roof began to collapse, the words he’d whispered as we danced at the ball, how he’d held me while I burned—all the times he’d made me feel cherished in a way no one else ever had.
But in its fractured state, my anger over my father’s murder spilled over into my feelings toward the Prince. I’d fixated on the secrets he kept and the questions he still refused to answer, his role in my mother’s disappearance, the seeds of doubt Aemonn had planted.
And his promises—one broken promise in particular.
“We’ll find a solution,” Luther said, shattering the silence. “There must be something House Hanoverre cares about more than the mortals. A prime parcel of land perhaps, or an appointment to the Crown Council.”
“Were you not listening?” I snapped. Luther’s brows drew inward at my severe tone. “I’m not going to sell off the realm piece by piece. My life is not worth so great a price.”
His lips parted, the muscles along his throat tensing as if he badly wanted to dispute that statement.
I moved to leave, and he reached out and clutched my hand. “I will find his killer,” he swore. “I will not stop until they are brought to justice. I promise.”
“Like you promised me you would keep him safe?”
Luther did not flinch. He didn’t even react.
He didn’t have to.
The shame, the regret—it was already on his face. It had been there from the moment I’d found him standing at the door of my family home, bloody and shaking. There was no blame I could aim at Luther that he had not already turned on himself.
“You can’t keep my family safe. You can’t keep me from dying in the Challenging. You can’t guarantee my mother will return home. In fact, the only promise you’ve kept is the one you made to her to keep secrets from me.” I snatched my hand from his grasp. “And that’s only because she knows your secrets, too.”
I waited for him to deny it, apologize, beg forgiveness, yell at me, renew his vow—do something, anything. But he just watched me, not saying a word, with that same anguished expression.
And it was that silence that set my mace swinging.
“I’m sick of begging you for answers, Luther. I’m done with your secrets, and I’m done giving you my trust. Your promises mean nothing to me. And neither do you.”
We stared at each other in silence, his heart breaking in his eyes, mine shredding in my chest. I couldn’t take one more second of looking at the despair on his face, because it was far too much like a mirror of my own.
I pushed past him, my shoulder slamming into his and finding little resistance as he dipped his chin and yielded a step.
Something—some small spark of feeling, buried deep under a mountain of hurt—stopped me at the door.
“You make so many promises, but the only thing I ever really wanted was honesty. And it’s the one thing you still refuse to give.”
Chapter
Thirty-Two
Maura clutched my hand as I pressed my dagger into the freshly turned soil beside the matching blade Teller had set down moments ago. We stepped back, and two of my father’s friends began to shovel dirt onto the knives.
With no body to bury and none of his possessions surviving my blast of magic, the only piece of my father I had left were the twin daggers I’d stolen from him as a young girl. So, in a makeshift grave where our home had once stood, we’d yielded the blades to the earth in his memory.
A formidable man and an extraordinary legacy, reduced to two dull, scratched-up hunks of metal and wood.
I had carried the daggers every day of my life until the night I arrived at the palace as Queen, when I’d cast them aside for being useless against the Descended. Burying them now felt poignant in all the worst ways.
I slipped my free hand into Teller’s while Maura murmured the Rite of Endings. Old instincts flared with warning as she read the sacred words of the Old Gods, forbidden under the late King’s laws, in earshot of the small cluster of Descended that had joined us. It took me a moment to remember—first, that these Descended were loyal to me, and second, that as the Crown, I was exempt from Ulther’s decrees.
And third—that I no longer gave a damn about anyone else’s rules but my own.
Teller and I had arranged the funeral to give ourselves some measure of closure and the chance to say goodbye. Maura and the healers had come, as well as a few of my father’s army friends. Henri’s father was there, though Henri was not—an absence I didn’t have the nerve to question.
The usual Corbois had come, too—Luther, Eleanor, Taran, Alixe, and Lily—as well as a few of the younger cousins Teller had befriended. Eleanor had assured me they would take Teller in as one of their own, but to see it happening in earnest, especially with the Challenging only two weeks away, filled me with grateful relief.
They kept their distance, standing across the clearing, just inside the now-flattened tree line of the surrounding forest. I hadn’t asked them to do so, but I guessed they’d been taught to keep themselves segregated from mortals, and I didn’t have the emotional strength today to shepherd them through a cultural revolution.
Luther watched me, as always. He wore his usual indifferent expression, though I saw the agony bleeding through it, and I wondered if I might look the same to him—dying, drop by drop, as my crimson grief stained all my flimsy attempts to pretend that I was healing.
The mortal guests and I took turns sharing stories of my father. Teller and I spoke of the wise lessons he had passed on. Maura offered sweet recollections of our mother and father growing into their roles as newlyweds and young parents. My father’s friends alternated between hilarious stories of a young soldier bumbling through missions to prove himself and tales of glory of the great mortal Commander and his renowned leadership.
There was hardly a dry eye to be found… except mine.
My tears had dried up. These days, my grief was numb or it was angry—any other emotion had been stomped on and flattened.