These four walls were going to drive him mad.
He tried another combination on the keypad, but it blinked red again. He kicked the door—and the Valerio guard on the other side kicked back. Ana could be dying right now for all he knew. By Erik’s knuckle-ringed hand.
And here he was, locked up in Lady Valerio’s private chambers like a pet! Oh, if his father was alive, he would’ve had a field day with Jax’s predicament now.
This is what happens when you try to defy your stars, he would say.
The doorknob rattled, and he quickly retreated, raising his hands to fight.
But it was the lady herself, followed by three of her private guards. “I hear you’ve been trying to escape,” she chided, taking a seat on the floral fainting couch. “Is my hospitality not good enough for you?”
One of the Valerio guards waved a small remote beside Jax’s collar, and the incessant humming quieted.
Jax rubbed his throat above the collar. “I don’t like being locked places,” he replied, his voice brittle and hoarse. It hurt to talk.
“I doubt many do,” she replied, and dismissed the guards. They left him alone in the room with this madwoman.
Jax shifted his weight from one foot to the other, growing anxious because there was only one reason why she’d come back from the gala.
“So, you want me to read your stars?” Jax asked, trying to keep his voice level.
The woman surveyed Jax. “I do not believe in magic, or superstitions, or some ‘Great Dark.’ I believe in what I can see. But my sons mean a great deal to me, and I aim to give them the best life I can. So, yes. Use whatever unholy power you have to read my future. To read my son’s legacy.”
Singular or plural? It was hard to tell.
He hesitated, clenching his fists, feeling the way his leather gloves tightened around his knuckles.
“That was our agreement, C’zar Taizu,” Lady Valerio reminded him.
“It was half of our agreement,” he said. “My half.”
The woman looked tired. “Of course. And that’s truly what you ask? That my son doesn’t come to harm? Do you think me a fool?”
“I think I want you to keep your end of the bargain.”
“Fine. I promise I will not let anyone harm Robbert—”
“No, the unbreakable way.”
Her lips pursed. “I promise on iron and stars, Solani.”
An unbreakable oath. He felt the pull of it, the sway of the stars at the promise, her words knotting together.
He took a deep breath and nodded. “All right.”
Kneeling in front of her, he peeled off his gloves and folded them neatly in front of him. His hands were pale in the dim light of the room. They were normal hands, long fingers and short nails. There was nothing special about them, but there didn’t need to be. It didn’t have to be his hands—a brush of an elbow, a bump of knees, a kiss—they all worked the same. But in his hands he could control his gift, feeling his way through the stars.
He asked her to lean forward.
She did, and closed her eyes.
He hadn’t purposely used his gift in ten years—Robb’s small tryst aside—not since he’d left his home on Iliad. Not since his father had forced him to read his stars—for the future of the Solani, his father had said. That same night, he kissed his mother good-bye because he refused to be used as a weapon. He would not flare and burn out.
But as his father said, one could not defy one’s stars.
He reached out and pressed his thumbs against the middle of Lady Valerio’s forehead. The contact sent a jolt through him. Searing. He concentrated as his father had taught him, focusing on the star-stuff inside this horrid Ironblood—the same star-stuff inside every person—his senses already spiraling up to the pinions of lights above them, past and futures stretching far, far, farther than eternity. He was one of the last Solani who could read them.
The very last, perhaps.
He sensed the glow, the warmth, of Lady Valerio’s stars.
And then he pressed the rest of his fingers against the Ironblood’s temples and drank in the sky. Whispers, mutterings, images so sharp they felt visceral—
A coronation, a thousand candles lighting the shrine, panic, a grating and horrid noise, a bloody crown, the muzzle of a pistol—
He gasped, wrenching his hands away from her.
Lady Valerio opened her eyes. She studied him.
“I am going to die,” she inferred calmly.
“Yes,” he gasped, shaking. He had seen before how someone was going to die, but he’d never seen it so close. So thoroughly. The emotions leaked into his head, filling him to the brink. “Soon.”
“Very well,” she said, but there was a flicker, finally, in her cold eyes. She touched the remote to his collar again, a warm buzz filling his ears, and left the room.
Jax sank to his knees and pressed the palms of his bare hands against his eyes, the sting of tears fresh and scathing. Because of the promise they’d made. Because it was unbreakable.
A promise on iron and stars.