Chapter 30
Serenity
It’s worse than we imagined.
The Beast and the royal physician aren’t the only traitors amongst us. There’s a whole ring of them, and most Montes meets with on a daily basis.
His advisors betrayed him.
He’d been right all along to begin that witch hunt amongst his councilors. At the time I’d been horrified at the thought of him killing one of them. I’d even saved one from death, an advisor whose guilt the Beast admitted to several hours ago.
I saved the man who helped plot my assassination. Who facilitated the death of my child.
I have to work to keep my features expressionless.
The advisors trickle in, all but Alexei. The king’s newest advisor will never again take his seat, or walk, or eat, or conspire.
He’s now nothing more than a lump of cooling flesh, and my only regret is that he didn’t die slow enough. Those women he raped and tortured, they deserved better justice than I gave them.
I pick out a bit of glass from underneath a fingernail. My eyes flick to the king’s remaining advisors. These fuckers, however, we haven’t dealt with. They sit down in their expensive suits and chat idly as they wait for the king.
Next to me, Montes lounges in his chair, watching them all, a small smile on his face. He’s utterly still—no bouncing legs, no drumming fingers. Whatever fuels my husband, he doesn’t waste it on tells. Not even that vein in his temple throbs at the moment.
Suddenly, Montes’s chair screeches as he slides it back. He stands, bracing his hands against the table.
The room falls silent.
“For the longest time I believed the Resistance was behind the attacks on Serenity’s life,” he begins. “But a king has many enemies.” His gaze moves over his advisors, and the men eye one another uneasily.
The door to the conference room opens, and the king’s soldiers storm inside. They head up either side of the conference table, boxing the advisors in.
It’s a nice show of force; the soldiers even have their guns out.
“Half of you have committed high treason. Traitors do not get the benefit of a fair trial. I am your judge, jury, and executioner.”
I glance over at Montes.
Executioner?
I’m about to stand when the officers aim their guns. It all happens so quickly. I only have a second to take in everyone’s shock before half a dozen guns go off at the same time.
I jerk back at the deafening sound. Blood sprays across the room and mists in the air.
Foreheads and eyes are missing from a handful of the world’s evilest men. The smell of meat and gun smoke fills the room as their bodies slump over. The rest of the councilors stare at their dead comrades with horror.
I draw in one shallow breath, then another.
Slowly I turn my head to Montes. He meets my gaze, and I see rather than hear him say, “I did what I had to do to keep you safe.” And then he leads me out of the room.
He’s holding my upper arm, and I realize it’s because I’m weaving. I’m so goddamn tired.
I shrug his hand off me and walk ahead of him.
He grabs my arm again. “I did that for you—and for our … child.” He can barely even say it, now that it’s gone. For once we actually created someone rather than destroyed them. In a sea of old experiences, this is a new, intimate one, and it binds us together in a way that nothing else can.
“I’m not mad,” I say, weary. “I wanted them to die. Horribly.” That’s the problem. “I don’t want to be that ruler, Montes. I don’t want to be what you’ve become.”
Not twenty-four hours later we get wind that the rest of Montes’s advisors—as well as several of his staff, including Dr. Goldstein—have fled the king’s palace. The next day, the king’s intel alert us to their whereabouts.
South America.
The land of Luca Estes and now over a dozen more traitors.
The king’s council has dissolved. I’ll never have to attend another ridiculous dinner party with his men because they’re either dead, or they’ve absconded to the wilds of the West.
Montes and I are all that’s left of his inner circle: two enemies brought together by war and bound by peace. I was wrong when I believed that the king and the Resistance were two sides of the same coin; in reality, it’s the king and I who are. The East and the West, the conqueror and the conquered. We complement each other nicely in all things, even ruling.
Montes and I sit next to each other in his cavernous map room. He hasn’t taken down the assassinated men or his intricate war strategies plotted out across the map. I eye the web of thread and the crossed out faces with unconcealed disgust.
“It still bothers you?” Montes asks, not looking up from the paper he’s reading.
“It will always bother me.” But tearing down distasteful wallpaper is a battle for another day.
Our thighs brush as I return my attention to the latest reports, and concentrating on work becomes a task in itself.
“All seven of your advisors have been spotted in South America,” I say, once we’ve gone through the documents.
They hadn’t just been spotted in South America, they’d been spotted near the former city of Salvador. It’s awfully close to a Resistance stronghold and the city of Morro de São Paulo, where the king and I nearly lost our lives.
Too close.
The vein in Montes’s temple throbs, and one of his hands is curled into a fist so tightly his knuckles are white.
“Alexei gave us the wrong names.” The Beast’s final bit of treason.
The last laugh is on Montes—or us, rather, since I’m involved in this feud as well. Alexei tricked the king into killing his honest advisors.
“Do you think they were aligned with Estes? With the Resistance?” I ask.
“It doesn’t matter.” The king’s quiet voice raises the hairs on my forearms. “They’ll all die, along with every single person they have ever loved.”
The King is slipping into violence.
Whether it’s the personal cost this war is finally having on him, or that he just can’t bear to lose what he worked so ruthlessly hard for, he’s falling deeper into that abyss.
“Leave the innocents out of this, Montes.”
He turns his head to me slowly. “You are my equal in many ways,” he says quietly, “but I am the man who conquered the world, and you will not tell me how to carry out my will.”
What he is proposing is abominable. I know he’s done this before, leveraged loved ones to force a person’s cooperation—hell, he’s done it to me—but even bad men have a code, and targeting innocents goes against that code.
I push up from my chair. “Yeah? Well you better make damn sure you kill those innocents. Because the survivors, they’ll turn out just like me.”
I walk away from him, my boots clicking against the floor. As far as I’m concerned, this meeting is over.
“In that case,” he calls out to my back, “I have no need to worry at all.”
His meaning is clear: I, and anyone like me, are fickle with our vendettas.
He is so wrong.
Swiveling back to him, I pull out my gun, cock it, and fire. The bullet buries itself into his right shoulder. It all happens so fast he doesn’t have time to react until blood is blooming onto his expensive suit.
Shock and pain mingle in his eyes as he clutches the wound. Blood drips over and in between his fingers. “You shot me,” he gasps out.
Normally I’m not this stupid. To draw blood from the king but refuse to kill him—that sort of thing doesn’t go unpunished. With all that I’ve endured, I’ve just guaranteed myself more pain. But these days, pain is the only thing I really feel. Without it, I might as well not exist.
I holster my weapon. “Look into my eyes, Montes.”
He’s clenching his teeth, his breath coming in quick pants, but he makes eye contact.
“This monster, the one you created, the one you love so much, this is what I can do.”
I can hurt those I love.
Montes doesn’t need to know that my windpipes are tightening up at the sight of his agony. That even now I have to steel myself from running to his side and soothing the very hurt I caused.
But I don’t do that. I need him to know the extent of my depravity.
Soldiers burst into the room right before I say my final piece.
“You don’t want more of me around,” I say, “and you should never, ever forget exactly what I am.”