The unseelie king vanished.
The dungeon was not in the depths of the castle as Deirdre would have expected. They were kept under the stairs leading up to the throne.
Stark found them easily, as though he’d known where they were the entire time. He walked to the shattered stairs, pressed his hand against the ice, and a door opened. It hadn’t been visible until that moment.
Vidya stepped out. She looked annoyed. “Where are they?” she asked, scanning the throne room with her wings flared. “Where are the guards who brought us here?”
Deirdre peered around her shoulder to see Niamh sitting under the stairs, still struggling to get to her feet. It wasn’t a very large room. They must not have intended to keep many prisoners there.
“Get her out of there,” Stark said.
Deirdre had been operating on her own for so long that it took time to register the fact that he was ordering her. And when she did, she didn’t obey as automatically as she once would have. She just looked at him.
Stark looked back at her.
Something passed between them.
The Brotherhood
.
Deirdre had heard Stark’s darkest secret—the secret that even he didn’t know. Both of them knew it now, even if they had no idea what any of it meant.
He was unseelie. Not a shifter.
Deirdre didn’t obey him.
Vidya stepped back into the dungeon, extracting Niamh. “He’s dead?” she asked. “The king?”
“Something like that,” Deirdre said, at the same time that Stark said, “He’s gone.”
This time, she didn’t look at him. She didn’t need to.
He was in her head. He’d been in there for weeks. Now neither of them knew which one of them was Everton Stark.
“Rhiannon had quarters beside the king’s,” Stark said. “My daughters might be there. Find it.”
“Find them,” Deirdre told Vidya.
The sooner they found the kids, the sooner they could leave. Not just to return to Earth, but to get away from what was left of the unseelie king and his grief—the shattered ice, the crystals, the throne room.
“I’ll see what I can do,” Vidya said. She stepped up to the doorway leading to the hall, spreading her wings.
She stopped before taking flight.
The shock on Vidya’s face spoke volumes. She wasn’t a woman who was easily bothered. Deirdre had never seen her as anything but mechanical, numb to the world around her, as much a machine as her wings indicated.
Now she was bothered.
“What?” Deirdre asked. “Did the king collapse the whole place?”
Niamh peered over her shoulder. “Oh my gods. You need to see this, Dee.”
Deirdre stepped up to the doorway.
There was no hall beyond.
The king of the unseelie had done more than just collapse most of Niflheimr, though. He had dropped several of the towers into the ocean, leaving the throne room alone upon the spindle of a single icy pier. With the surface ice of the ocean cracked, Deirdre could see into the inky depths of the water below.
And every single sidhe who had been outside the walls was dead.
Every last one of them.
Deirdre didn’t have an enhanced sense of smell, like many shifters did, but even she could smell the death on the air. Even sidhe blood smelled somewhat coppery. And there was a sour bite to it that she didn’t recognize.
She grimaced, covering her nose from the cold wind. “What is that?”
“Intestine,” Vidya said. “They exploded. That’s what the inside of the intestines smell like.”
It wafted through the air, carried over the ocean to them at the top of the tower.
Deirdre swallowed hard. She assumed that the king and queen’s bedroom was in the same tower as the throne room, but what if it had been in one of the towers that plunged into the ocean? That would mean that Rhiannon’s quarters had gone, too. And if Stark’s daughters had been in there…
She glanced at Stark. He had scaled the broken stairs and stood by the throne now, as though contemplating what it might mean to have royal blood.
It didn’t look like happy contemplation.
He wouldn’t care that the sidhe were dead. Those thousands of extinguished lives would mean nothing to him.
“Search the rest of the tower,” Deirdre said quietly, trying to keep Stark from hearing her. “Rhiannon’s room has to be in here.” She wasn’t going to consider what it might have meant if it wasn’t.
Niamh jerked the harpy skin closed around her, assuming the swollen form of a bird. She looked even more ragged now that the king’s magic had snatched her out of the air. The wind lifted her feathers, ruffling her hair.
“Careful,” she said, jerking her chin toward Stark.
Vidya took off first, and Niamh followed a moment later. They swirled into the night together, graceful on wings of metal and magic.
Deirdre was alone with Stark.
She stepped away from the door, gathering her flame around her as protection from the wind that blasted through the husk of the throne room. Stark must have been freezing up there, so far away from Deirdre, but he seemed oblivious to the surrounding world.
When she put her foot on the first broken stair, he spoke.
“I’m not unseelie.”
“Who cares if you are?” Deirdre asked. “It’s a label. A word. You haven’t changed because the king stuck it to you.”
“You don’t understand why this matters.”
“It’s hard to understand anything with you. You’re not exactly an open book in which I can turn to any page and learn The History of Stark.”
“My daughters,” he said. “It matters because of them.”
“You think they won’t like you if you’re unseelie rather than a shifter?”
He circled the throne, prowling behind it, dragging the animal hides that they’d taken from dead sidhe behind him. “Rhiannon and I married in Bahrain, while I was deployed. She quickly became pregnant. Our first daughter came out…wrong.”
“Cold thing to say about your kid,” Deirdre said.
“Forget it.” He dismissed her with a wave of his hand. “Forget everything. I’ve almost found them. We’re almost together again.” He turned to survey Deirdre, as if searching her face for answers.
It made her uncomfortable, the way that he looked at her.
What was he seeing?
She rubbed a hand over the back of her neck, trying to smooth down the prickling flesh. “Did you really think hiding them was gonna do you any favors?”
“I thought it might be the only chance Rhiannon and I would have at piecing our relationship together,” Stark said. “She was hurting them—using them. I needed to shelter the girls without losing Rhiannon. I did it to save our family.” He said it with such desperation, like he wanted Deirdre to understand.
Needed
her to understand.
“That’s so screwed up,” she said.
Stark stood behind the throne, gripping its back in both of his hands, like a king waiting to sit.
He belonged up there, cold and strong.
Really cold, actually. He was shivering but didn’t seem to realize it.
“What do you want from me, Tombs?” Stark asked.
Deirdre mounted the stairs. She had to do it quickly to keep them from melting under her feet. “You know what I want.”
“I don’t think that I do.”
“If you want to get revenge against Rhiannon, you know the best way to do it. You just don’t want to face it yet. You’ve gotta go to Earth with me and claim the Alpha position from her. You built this empire to become Alpha. It’s what you wanted all along, it’s why I joined you, it’s why you’ve done such horrible things.”
“No, I did that for her,” Stark said. “And I gathered people around myself who would be ruthless enough to execute my every command. People who could destroy someone with soft parts. Someone like you.”
“Soft? I’m soft?” Deirdre laughed harshly. “I’m the one who killed Gage.”
“I pushed you,” he said.
“But I pulled the trigger. I’m not as soft as you think. I’m just as bad as you are in so many ways.” More ways than Deirdre was prepared to think about.
Alone in the darkness of her room at Chadwick Reynolds’s high-rise, taking hits of lethe while sending vampires out to raid blood banks…
Yeah. Deirdre was just as bad as Stark on every level.
“What have you done in my absence?” he asked.
“You haven’t been absent,” Deirdre said. “Everything’s gone on without you.”
“Because of you,” Stark said.
Her knees trembled as she finally reached the top of the throne room. Gods, Deirdre shouldn’t have had such a visceral reaction to the heat in his tone. Not now, not when they were in such a cold place. Not after everything he had done to her.
They were so alone in the throne room above the ocean of ice, surrounded by the ruins of Niflheimr.
“I thought Rhiannon died in Genesis,” Stark said. “I thought there was no hope for me after that. I thought that I would be…alone.” He circled the throne, stepping nearer to her warmth. The tint of her flame warmed his skin. “You came back for me.”
“I wouldn’t have done it if I didn’t have to.”
“Your dangerousness extends far beyond your potential abilities as a phoenix. It would be too easy to forget everything else and enjoy that danger.”
“You sure didn’t act like you wanted to enjoy me,” Deirdre said, lifting her chin in defiance. “All the times you’ve smacked me around—talk about mixed signals.”
“When I hurt you, Tombs, it was because nobody could see me show favoritism. It was to protect you from the likes of Jacek. Most importantly, it was to make sure everyone knows that I am the Alpha, and that nobody can defy me, or else they would die. And they would have.”
“Is that supposed to make me sympathize with you?” Deirdre asked. She poked a finger into his chest. “You had to beat women to make yourself look good. Poor baby. My heart bleeds.”
He walked into her finger, forcing her to drop her hand. They stood chest to chest in front of the throne of ice.
But there was no passion in his eyes.
The expression drained out of his face, leaving nothing but stone behind. “It was for her, for the girls. And now…”
Deirdre was losing his attention. She grabbed the hem of the hides, tugging him back. “Hey. Focus, Stark. Rhiannon’s not dead. You’re not alone. We’re on the brink of finding your daughters. What do you want to do when you have them back?”
“I want my family,” Stark said.
“And if you want them, you’re going to have to live in the same world as the rest of us. The world that’s been screwed up by Rylie Gresham. Remember that? How screwed up the system is? The schools I had to live in—the schools your daughters attended? That hasn’t gone away, and it’s going to be waiting for you when you take your daughters back to Earth.
“What could you do for them as Alpha?” Deirdre asked, tugging him closer still. “Make the world a better place for them, Stark. Take down Rhiannon. Become Alpha. Have your family, have your power. Have every damn thing you’ve ever wanted!”
Stark’s fingers curled around hers. He lifted her hand and its flickering flames, as though savoring its warmth. “Will I have you?”
Her heart dropped into her stomach.
It shouldn’t have sounded like an appealing idea.
Alpha mates ruling the country together.
He wouldn’t want her once he realized that she could disobey him. As soon as they got back to Earth, he was going to find out that she had put him in the running for Alpha against his wishes, and he was going to hate her.
Stark would kill her.
He must have seen her drawing back internally. He clasped her hand tighter. “Look at me, Tombs.”
She stared fixedly at the throne. “What are you going to compel me with this time? Tell me to go brain-dead if I mention your least favorite musicians where you can hear it?”
“Tombs.”
“We don’t have anything to talk about unless it’s making you Alpha. All right?”
“Deirdre, look at me,” he said. Surprised, her eyes lifted to his. His voice deepened. “I release the last compulsion I gave you. You won’t die if you disobey me.”
The corner of her mouth twitched in something that might have been the beginning of a smile. “You’ve never called me Deirdre before.”
His brow creased with annoyance, but not anger. There was no sign of anger in him. “That’s what you took away from that? I just released you from my compulsion. I don’t want you to die.”
She waved him off. “Yeah, thanks. I saved your life and you’ve saved mine. Whatever. So are we on a first-name basis now? Do I get to call you Everton?”
“I wouldn’t like that.”
“It doesn’t suit you anyway,” Deirdre said. “Everton sounds like a guy who goes to Yale and wears sweater vests and throws boat parties.”
“Princeton.”
“Excuse me?”
“I went to Princeton,” he said. “Not Yale. I was an economics major.”
“I thought you were a Marine.”
“Yes, that too,” Stark said.
“How’d you have time to do all of that and teach horses how to dance all pretty?”
Now
he was angry. “How did you—?”
“I visited Stark Estates,” Deirdre said. She took the picture of him on horseback out of her pocket, lifting it so that he could see. “Your book wouldn’t open itself, so I went online and read spoilers. Gonna put the compulsion back now?”
He reached for the photo. She kept it away from him.
Stark gripped her waist, pulling her against his chest. His other hand clamped down on the hand that held the photo. “I don’t need compulsion to kill you. I could snap you in half.”
He lowered his lips to her clavicle, but she pushed his head back before he could make contact. “Stop it.”
“Because I’m unseelie?”
“Because I don’t kiss guys who think death threats drop my panties. I don’t care what you are or what we call you.”
His tone was feverish in the way that his skin was not. “What do you want from me, Tombs?”
“I want you to want to help people, even if your idea of how that needs to happen is messed up. I want you to think about the future. I want you to think about what the world needs, and then I want you to give it to them. I thought that we wanted the same thing, Stark.”
“Of course I want that,” he said, voice harsh.
“Then what’s the problem? I don’t understand.
Make
me understand.”