The Queen of All that Lives
Page 96

The voice that shattered my heart before he claimed it.
He shoes click against the cobblestone floor, his gun still smoking as he approaches us.
I release Styx, whose body slides out of my arms. The thirteenth representative groans as he hits the ground.
“For months I had to listen to you disrespect my queen.”
Shit. It had been months.
He stops at Styx’s feet. Using a booted foot, he forces the injured man onto his back. A line of blood trickles out of Styx’s mouth, and his breathing is labored.
Punctured lung. I’ve heard the sound enough times.
“And you thought you could just take her?” Montes continues. “From me?”
This is out of my hands. The king has few demons left, but the ones that survived his transformation—those, he’s about to feed.
Montes steps up to me. His face goes grim when he sees my wound. “Are you okay?”
I run my tongue over my teeth, then nod.
He pulls me to him and kisses my forehead. He doesn’t chastise me for running down here. I think Montes knows exactly how to fan the flames of my love.
When he lets me go, the atmosphere in the dungeon changes to something dark and violent.
The devil has come to feast.
Montes towers over Styx. “I was ready to torture you before, but now …” He crouches down. “I could hurt you, then heal you, then hurt you some more. On and on until I die.” He pauses. “I’ve lived for a century and a half. I could make you immortal, only so that you’d live lifetimes of torture.”
What Montes is suggesting is beyond horrific.
Styx’s gaze moves to me, and for once I actually see fear on his face. He never believed he was going to lose his power. And now he’s facing a man and a fate that might be worse than death.
The king aims his weapon. “We could start now.”
“Please—”
The gunshot cuts Styx’s plea short.
The representative’s body goes still, and I realize that sometimes Montes’s empty threats are not just lobbed at me. The fresh bullet hole carved between the Styx’s eyes is proof of that.
And that’s how the thirteenth and final representative falls.
We free the rest of the prisoners, and then there’s the gruesome task of carting Styx’s body topside, where twelve others are already laid out.
Only then do the West’s soldiers believe leadership has fallen. And only then does the military cease fire.
As soon as Montes and I are well out of range, Heinrich lights up the Iudicium.
Now, an hour later, the building the representatives reigned in is nothing more than a pile of stone and ash.
It probably wasn’t necessary, but I’d insisted on it. I didn’t want that monument, where so many evil men gathered, to remain standing.
I lean against one of the West’s military vehicles that’s long since been abandoned. Montes has fished out a first aid kit from inside it, and now he bends over my upper arm, bracing it with one hand and cleaning my wound with the other.
I keep jerking away from him every time he wipes the antiseptic over it.
“This would all be over with much sooner if you let a proper medic tend to you,” the king says conversationally.
I refused any other type of medical care. The bullet had just skimmed my skin; it was nothing more than a flesh wound.
“I don’t want a proper medic. I want you.” I won’t lie, I’m enjoying my husband taking care of me.
Montes dips his head back towards his work, but not before I catch the edge of a smile. I think he’s enjoying taking care of me too.
“You know,” he says, grabbing a roll of gauze, “it was all intentional.”
I furrow my brows, not understanding.
“How and when you woke up,” he clarifies.
Now he has my full attention.
“After Trinity died, Marco did want revenge.”
My eyes move to the king’s right-hand. He’s busy discussing something with the cameramen who are setting up a stage and a screen.
“He spent decades gaining the West’s trust, then decades more solidifying that trust. He leaked information approved by me. It benefitted me to have Marco feed them certain select pieces of classified information because in return, I learned of their plans.
“I created my double around that time,” Montes says, “thinking that ultimately I’d need to fake my death. That was also when I began making plans to wake you.
“I didn’t want to expose you to this world,” he says.
My mouth tightens.
“I was afraid that after all that waiting, you’d still just be killed like Trinity,” he continues. “I couldn’t bear that possibility. But you needed to wake up and the war needed to end and those two things were appearing more and more mutually inclusive.”
Montes finishes wrapping my wound, tying off the gauze.
“So eventually,” he continues, “I let Marco pass along information on your resting place. And thus set in motion all that has happened.”
He had woken me. It took him years to wait for the right moment, but that’s exactly what he did.
You know the thing about strategy? he said all those years ago. It takes knowing when to act and when to be patient.
What he’s saying reframes everything.
He’d been planning an end to war for a very long time. “How could you have possibly known what was to come?” I ask.
“I discovered what you did—that the key to winning the West was taking out the representatives. And only victory would do that.