Forbidden Honor (Dragon Royals #1)(116)

It was Henrick, and yet… when I squeezed my eyes shut against the constant blaze of pain, I could’ve sworn I’d left the sunlight-soaked conservatory. I could’ve sworn I was back in a dungeon.

And Henrick’s calm voice blurred with the past, with relentless questions, always the same questions, no matter how much I pleaded and sobbed and shook.

“Such a terrible thing to hurt a child so brutally,” Henrick mused, though he didn’t seem like he found it so terrible. “Luckily, she’s far older now. Far more deserving.”

“She always needed it,” Alis said dryly.

Wait, Henrick had been there when I was a little girl?

Who the hell was I, really?

I didn’t want Henrick and Alis to know I remembered anything about the past, even though I was desperate for the pain to stop. “If I was really tortured like this, I was just a child.” The desperate pleading in my voice made me sick, but I forged on. “I would’ve told them anything.”

“I doubt that very much, Honor.” Henrick said, “because the treasure has never surfaced. Some of those relics would surely have been put into play. Some of those relics could have helped us fight the Scourge.”

He shook his head mockingly. “Your family could have saved thousands of lives if they hadn’t been so greedy, hoarding their treasure.”

No, my parents hadn’t lied to me about my birth family. They couldn’t have. They’d loved me. I clung to the memory desperately, trying to ignore the other memories that swirled around me, dark and vague and full of throbbing pain.

Henrick and Alis were monsters—but what if they were right?

If my father had sealed away memories of being tortured, it must have been to protect me. Not to keep the treasure for himself.

But then I couldn’t think anymore, because fresh pain lanced across my back over and over. There were drops of blood on my mother’s fine carpet, almost hidden in the rose print; it must have splattered all the way in front of me. My flesh was shredded.

I couldn’t think straight.

“Why did you wait this long?” I sobbed. “If you knew all along who I was…”

Maybe Henrick and Alis had married for this exact moment in time, for the chance to use my sister and me to make them wealthy beyond belief.

“This is perhaps a marriage of convenience,” Alis admitted. “It’s not as if my marriage to your father was a love match either.”

“Quiet,” Henrick told her. “She’s trying to distract herself. Trying to remain in control, trying to outsmart us.”

He sounded amused by the notion. He was close behind me, then something leathery looped around my throat. I tried desperately to shake him away, but there was no escaping as he pulled back. I choked, then I couldn’t breathe, couldn’t make a sound. The world faded black at the edges, then suddenly the pressure at my throat relaxed. I drew a ragged, gasping breath.

“You passed out so quickly as a child.” He said into my ear. “I always thought the guard had a tender spot for you that he made you pass out. That’s why we hung him too when you went missing.”

My voice was ragged. “You were there.”

“You remember me.” He sounded delighted.

A man with his hard blue eyes and a pointed, dark beard. He was just a flash in my memory, just one of a crowd. There’d been half a dozen men lining my cell, listening to me scream with disinterested faces.

He laughed in delight. “Progress. And here I thought you were never going to make any, stubborn child.”

“She’s very bright when she chooses to be,” Alis said. “She just generally chooses not to be.”

As the torture continued, I kept having more flickers of my past. But all I remembered was the past, was being hurt; the past and the present seemed to blur together as if all my life had been just these moments of misery.

I didn’t remember my first parents, and I didn’t remember this treasure. I couldn’t even imagine what it was. Gold? Maps? Relics?

“What do you want from me?” I begged.

But all Henrick asked, in his bored voice, was: “How did you reach your parent’s hoard?”





Caldren



I sat at my usual table in the Twisted Pines, drumming my fingers on the table, ignoring my sweating tankard of beer.

Honor hadn’t come. It wasn’t late yet, and I was being irrational, but every minute that ticked by felt like a year.

Nora slid into the seat opposite me, flashed me her usual smirk.

Her smile irritated me at the moment. As much as I appreciated Nora’s friendship, I wanted Honor sitting across from me. “What are you doing here?”

The bird shifter frowned at me. Her bones were narrow and delicate, her cheekbones sharp under her pale skin. “You need to work on your manners, Caldren.”

I drummed my fingertips on the tabletop again. I’d never apologized much as a royal, and it took me a moment to realize I could apologize to her now. By the time it occurred to me, she’d snorted and helped herself to my beer.

She set it down with a clunk, wiping the foam mustache off her upper lip with the back of her hand. “What’s up your ass now? Prince Jaik?”

She only called him Prince Jaik when she was pissed at me.

“Honor’s supposed to come to the pub.”