The Queen of All that Lives
Page 83

Things appear to go back to normal. The king watches me, and I swear he sees everything. But if he does, he doesn’t stop me.
I can’t even ponder that possibility.
Each day is worse than the last because it brings me closer to the moment I’ve arranged to kill my husband. I talk with Marco most days, Marco and Heinrich. I plot and plan until every last detail is accounted far.
Tomorrow, at precisely 9:30 a.m., this place will burn, the king along with it.
It’s the king’s day of reckoning. And mine.
“Everything’s in place?” the representatives ask on the other side of the screen. I’m acutely aware that their thirty day timeframe is nearly up.
I nod, and Marco, who sits at my side, says, “It is.”
The two of us are holed up in my office, hopefully for the last time.
All those years ago I sat next to my father, and spoke to a different set of representatives.
This is the world gone wrong.
“Good. Our men will begin to move in at nine-twenty. A vessel will be waiting offshore. Marco, you’ll radio our men the moment Serenity takes out the king.”
I have to breathe through my nose to curb the nausea that rises at the prospect. I have killed countless people; this should be no different. But it’s a world apart. The man I love, the monster who’s found his conscience, the king who gave up a piece of his empire to hold me in his arms again. Who defied death to have me by his side.
I dread this more than anything I ever have.
“We’ll pick you both up from there,” the representatives continue. “We won’t consider the deed done unless you bring the body.”
They’re looking at me, even though Marco is just as much a part of this as I am.
I pull myself together. “I’ll get you your body.”
“Good. Then we’ll see you tomorrow. We have a peace agreement to negotiate in the coming days.”
Pretty words for ugly intentions. Knowing these men, it won’t be a peace agreement so much as terms of surrender. It doesn’t matter. I won’t be agreeing to anything.
“Get some sleep,” one of the representatives says, rousing me from my thoughts. “You’ll need it.”
Battle fatigue. It’s a very real thing. You’ve seen too much, done too much, and at the end of it all you are so, so weary.
I stare at myself in the bathroom mirror.
I thought I had lost everything.
And I had. I lost everything I loved, even things I didn’t realize I could lose—my memory, the past, my hate.
I’ve become something I loathe, and I don’t know how to get back to the girl I was, the one that easily divided the world into right and wrong.
And to be honest, I don’t know if I even want to be her anymore. I’d rather be the girl who was never touched by war. Who knew nothing of sleeping with the enemy, who’d never seen what flesh looks like when it was blown open. I want to be a girl who woke with a clear conscience each morning, whose demons didn’t plague her late at night.
But I can’t have that. Not short of injecting myself with that memory loss serum, and that was no solution. Forgetting doesn’t mean it never happened; it means not dealing with the consequences.
And oh, have the consequences stacked up.
I gaze into my reflection, my hands tightening around the edge of the counter.
I may have suffered, I may have changed, but I know who I am.
I am the girl from the WUN—the girl born a citizen of the United States of America. I am vengeance and I am salvation.
And tomorrow, the world will know it, once and for all.
Not long after my revelation, I hear Montes enter the bedroom, back from whatever business he was attending to. We’ve both been keeping late hours.
I hear his footsteps head directly for the bathroom. A moment later, Montes enters.
Our eyes meet in the mirror, and I see such bottomless sadness in his own.
He knows. He must.
He steps up behind me and wraps an arm around my middle. His other hand clasps my neck so that he has me shackled to his body.
My hands tighten along the rim of the counter, but I don’t fight his grip.
“I’ve never known my vicious little queen to be vain,” he says.
I pass him an annoyed glance through the mirror. We’re both aware that’s not what I was doing.
His lips brush the shell of my ear. “Come to bed,” he says, his voice husky.
My throat works. “I don’t want to fall asleep,” I admit.
The idea of what’s to come tomorrow has my stomach twisted in knots.
“Who said anything about sleep?” he breathes.
I turn my head to face him, and that’s all the opening he needs. He kisses me fervently, his hands moving so that I’m no longer his hostage. They cup either side of my jaw.
I’m gasping into the kiss, and I play it off like it’s passion, when all I’m really doing is choking back sobs.
I push against him, forcing him to back up. All the while I rip away at his clothing. I’ve never been like this, violent with the need to be close to him.
Montes welcomes it with a wolfish smile. He always was just as fucked-up as me.
He helps me shrug off the remnants of his shirt, and then his slacks. And then his large, sculpted body is completely on display. The sight of all that coiled power nearly brings me to my knees.
When my hands reach for the edge of my shirt, he captures them in his own.
“Ah-ah,” he says. He hooks his fingers around my shirt collar, and, pausing just long enough to make it dramatic, he rips the garment down the middle.