What Lurks Between the Fates (Of Flesh & Bone, #3)(65)

Victims of Mab’s conquest and thirst for power.

Countless eyes peered down at me, gazing at my only half-hidden skin. The sear of Malachi’s palm against the space between my neck and shoulder felt like a brand, a stain upon my soul. Caldris’s rage thrummed down the thread between us; the reaction delayed.

I’d felt him go away, felt his end of our thread of fate get farther and farther from me with the passage of time the day before. My only comfort came when I’d finally risen from a night of tossing and turning, my sense of him growing closer once again.

“I can walk on my own,” I snapped, attempting to shrug off his hold.

Nila trailed behind us, summoned to join the impromptu journey. I’d barely risen out of bed at the crack of dawn, tossing my robe over my thin, silken nightgown, when Malachi barged through the door and demanded I come immediately.

“Then hurry it up, or I will carry you. I think I’ll enjoy your ass in my face far more than you will,” he returned.

I turned to glare at him, a brutal growl rumbling through my throat.

“Such a feral little mouse,” he said, a grin lighting his face as he shoved me forward once more.

That hand would make a beautiful trophy, and I almost wished he hadn’t smelled the blood of the other male’s tongue and heart tucked under my bed days prior.

I could have had a nice collection by the time Caldris and I killed everyone on our list. I’d already decided that he needed to die, but I debated which parts of him I would keep and which parts I would feed to the cwn annwn when given the chance.

The doors he stopped me in front of were different. The light shone through the carved metal without any wood to ground it. Snakes wound themselves through them, inky tendrils of darkness blending alongside them. Malachi reached over my head and pushed them open.

We stepped into an anteroom. Light poured in through the sole window that occupied most of a wall. It glinted off the muted red and gold tones spread throughout. Malachi stepped around me and grasped the knocker for the inner door.

“Come in,” Mab called, her voice muffled behind the door.

Malachi pushed it open, stepping into the room first before he looked back at me and waited expectantly. I took a single step forward, pausing when I laid eyes upon the ornate bedframe carved from solid gold on the back wall. A thin veil of fabric hung in a circle around it, forming a canopy of shimmering gray.

Mab’s bath was a massive square set into the floor itself. It was filled with water, the entire surface covered in rose petals as she lounged against the wall of it. Sunlight streamed in the windows, half-blocked by that same curling metal, casting shadows throughout the room and keeping it dimly lit. Pillars of curled metal arched throughout the room, curving toward the ceiling to separate the designated spaces: bedroom, bath, dining, and sitting areas. Her rooms were easily three to four times the size of mine, and far larger than the cottage I’d called home in Mistfell.

Mab’s arms draped along the edge of the bath, the water covering up to the base of her neck. Nila walked into the room behind me, making herself as small as possible against the wall. It wasn’t typical that my handmaid was dragged along with me whenever Mab summoned me to torment.

“Good morning, Estrella,” Mab said, trailing a black nail along the stone. The sound echoed through me, the high pitch making me shudder.

“Good morning,” I said, grimacing through the sound. It was faint, barely even there. As a human, it might not have registered at all, but as a Fae, it was agonizing.

“I’m sure you’ve realized by now that your mate has left,” she said, leveling me with that dark, empty stare. There was a challenge in the words as she probed me for weakness, testing me to see how easily I could be swayed to believe whatever illusion she tried to paint with her half-truths.

“He would never have left me willingly,” I said, lifting my chin.

Malachi walked to the sitting room to the left. He lowered himself into a chair, kicking his feet out in front of him as he made himself at home. He’d clearly spent far too much time in this space, in Mab’s personal quarters, to be anything but intimately familiar with her.

I swallowed down the surge of nausea that rose within me.

“I’ve sent him to greet the coming royals for the Winter Solstice,” Mab said, her mouth twitching with annoyance at my assurance in our mate bond—at my confidence in his love for me. Over and over again, he would have sacrificed himself to save me if he had the barest hint that it would do any good.

He never would have left me here unless she made him.

“And when will he return?” I asked, trying not to think about the fact that she was naked in the water. I didn’t want to see beneath her dress, didn’t want to see the fair skin that I knew wouldn’t show a hint of any of the suffering she’d inflicted upon others.

I wanted her body to be mangled. I wanted it to be scarred in the ways she had scarred my mate.

I wanted to taste her suffering on my tongue and see the signs that she, too, had known pain—anything less was an injustice I blamed the Fates for. I sent a silent curse to haunt them.

“Tomorrow, I suspect,” she answered.

She moved forward in the bath, her body shifting as she stood from what I presumed was a seat. Her hands swirled absently through the roses on the surface of the water.

“Has anyone told you what to expect of the Solstice?”