My curiosity overrides superstition. I take the steps one at a time. My gaze moves up to the domed ceiling that arcs high overhead. Embedded into it, seemingly at random are indigo and gold tiles. Our colors.
The pattern of tiles is not random, I realize after a moment. The fresco has been made to reflect the night sky, and each gold tile represents a star, every cluster a constellation.
The sight makes me press my lips together. He gave me the sky.
The columns that rise around me seem even larger the farther down I descend. They look luminescent under the dim glow of lights.
I can feel the king watching me, this man who attended to me while I was down here. Here he could control me, here he could have me to himself. Here I could be whatever he needed me to be, and I didn’t have the agency to defy him.
I glance back up at him.
Those eyes of his are wary, like I am the dangerous one.
I return my attention to the room as I reach the bottom of the stairs. I take in more marble and tile features. A small pool captures my attention. It gleams under the light of this place.
And then my eyes fall on the Sleeper.
Only, it doesn’t look like a Sleeper. It looks like a sarcophagus, something rich people used to be buried in long before my time or the king’s. Sheathed in gold, intricate flowering designs cover it. A marble bench rests before it, presumably where the king sat when he visited.
I’m drawn towards it, both horrified and mesmerized.
The place is an ode to me, to us. Even the pool of water and the way it dances along the walls reminds me of the first time Montes held me in his arms.
Montes did this all for me. My gaze sweeps over our opulent surroundings.
No, not for me. All of this is much too grand. He did this for himself.
“It’s a temple,” I say. A temple made to honor me.
But this place does me no honor, and I deserve none. I’m a soldier, a killer, a captive queen. But not a god.
His shoes begin to click as he walks down the stairs, the noise echoing throughout the chamber.
“Are you frightened?” he asks.
I don’t bother answering.
Instead I reach out a hand and run it along the surface of the Sleeper. This is where I stayed in a state of stasis for lifetime upon lifetime, years stacked one on top of the other. People were borne from the earth and drawn back into it, and still I remained.
Montes’s footfalls draw closer, and I’m so very aware of him. My muscles tense when he stops only a handful of feet away.
“Tell me something that makes this better,” I say.
“I love you.”
Now I rotate to face him.
I regret it immediately.
Montes’s eyes go soft.
Will I ever get used to that face wearing that expression when he looks at me? Your nightmares aren’t supposed to make you feel cherished.
His eyes rise above me to the room beyond. “This is the evidence of my love. I know you find it terrible, possibly even unethical, but I never saw it that way.”
What’s worse than not understanding the king is understanding him. Every time I do, I forgive him a little more.
His eyes return to me. “We’ve been here long enough. Come, my vicious little wife, there’s much to do.”
And together we return to the land of the living.
Chapter 20
Serenity
The next morning I’m set up in an office, three of the king’s officers surrounding me.
Montes left me at the room’s entrance, giving the door a parting glance. “The people you need to speak to are inside,” he said mysteriously. And then, without elaborating, he stalked away.
I stared at his retreating form, wondering if somehow this was a trick.
But now that I sit with the closest thing the king has to advisors on the dainty couches in the room, I get the impression that the only trick being played is on my archaic notions of the king.
Because by all appearances, he’s fully equipped me to see my war strategy through.
The three individuals that sit around me must’ve been soldiers at one point. That’s the only thing that can account for the hard twinkle in their eyes and the strong set of their shoulders. And now they wait for me to make demands of them.
I sit forward on the couch, arms braced against my legs, hands clasped between them. “I need to devise a plan to meet with our enemies, our allies, and anyone else in between who you consider important enough to speak with.” I say, getting right to business.
Across from me, one of the officers pulls a file from the briefcase she carries and drops it onto the coffee table resting between us. “We’ve already put together a list of leaders you’ll want to speak with,” she says, tapping on the folder. “We’ve also included a tentative schedule of meetings that can be immediately arranged with your approval.
“We can fly in some of these individuals as early as the end of the week, but there will be quite a few that you’ll have to visit yourself.”
I pick the folder up and begin thumbing through it. It’s dizzying, the amount of information inside. Schedules, names, titles. Most of them mean nothing to me. I’ve had a hundred years to lose all frame of reference.
I set the file down at my side. In most ways, I am utterly inadequate for this position. I have a century’s worth of complicated political history I need to catch up on, a century’s worth of knowledge that my allies and my enemies already know about. Ignorance is a great tool to be exploited.
My jaw hardens. I’ve already been exploited quite enough for one lifetime.
So I begin to look for one of the few names I do know. When I’ve skimmed through the entire file and don’t see it, I set the folder aside.
“What about the First Free Men?”
“What about them?” one of the male officers asks.
I meet his eyes. “Why are they not listed among the groups I’m to speak with?”
“With all due respect Your Majesty, this was the group that broke into this very palace and stole you. The king has issued a KOS—kill on sight—order for their leader.”
Montes hasn’t lost every last bit of his depravity after all.
I lean forward. “The First Free Men were powerful enough to find the resting place of a woman who was believed to be dead. And they were powerful enough to smuggle her out of the king’s palace.”
The three officers are quiet, and I’m sure they know what my intentions are.
“Set up a video call with their leader. I want to speak with him or her as soon as possible.”
“Your Majesty, Styx Garcia is in hiding,” the female officer says. “There’s no guarantee we will be able to get communication through to him. And even if we do, there’s no guarantee that he will agree to the call.”
I am the hundred year old queen he almost captured, the woman that slaughtered six of his men.
I look her square in the eye. “He’ll take the call.”
It takes five hours for Styx to agree to the call.
At 2:00 a.m. this evening—morning, technically—I’ll be on the phone with the man who failed to abduct me.
I considered telling the king about it as soon as the call was confirmed. Montes is perhaps the most ruthless strategist that I know, and I can’t help but want to pick his brain for advice.
The petty part of me also wants him to know I’ve openly defied his orders by arranging this.
But, in the end, I decided against it.
Someone else will likely tell him, and soon, but it won’t be me.
I lay in bed for a long time, my eyes peeled open. Montes’s arm is wrapped around my midsection, my backside pressed tightly to his front. He holds me like nothing short
of another apocalypse will tear us apart. It’s both comforting and confusing. I don’t know how to deal with all these conflicted emotions I feel.
I wait until his arm slips from around my waist and he flips over before I slip out of bed.
I dress quietly, and then, ever so softly, I head out of the room. Even doing this is a risk. Montes used to have a habit of waking up in the middle of the night. He might still.
I can only hope his sleeping habits have changed since we’ve been apart.
I make my way through the empty corridors of the palace, towards the office I was given.
I flick the lights on and sit down behind my desk. I begin to flip through some of the documents I requested on the First Free Men. There isn’t much on them. It makes me think they’re even more powerful than everyone believes.
Their leader is Styx Garcia, a thirty-six-year-old combat veteran who fought for the West before being honorably discharged. A photo of him is paper-clipped to the documents.
I pull it out and frown. He would be handsome except that his face is a patchwork of scars. They slice down his eyebrows and cheeks, drag across his nose, and claw upwards along the edge of his jaw.
The sight of all that mottled tissue has me touching my own scar.
And in the midst of it all, he’s got a pair of dark, soulless eyes. Just like the king’s.
I set the picture aside and read his biography in the file. Like me, he was born and raised in the northern territory of the Western United Nations. He spent over ten years on active duty; far, far longer than the amount of time I had.
At some point after that, though the document doesn’t say exactly when, he established the First Free Men. He’s been building it ever since.
I close the folder. By all indications, this man is just as power-hungry as all the other corrupt men I’ve met throughout this war. What I don’t understand is why the West would work with him at all.
Somewhere inside the palace, a grandfather clock tolls twice, my cue to leave my office.
My footfalls echo throughout the cavernous halls. This place rubs me the wrong way. There is a hollowness to the corridors that only exaggerates just how empty the place is, and yet I swear I can feel the weight of unseen eyes on me as I head to the king’s study.
His room is one of the few in the palace that has absolute privacy—or so I was told. We’ll see soon enough.
The king was right yesterday. I am keeping something else from him, something he would rebel against if he knew.
When I reach the door to his office, I press my thumb to the fingerprint scanner. It blinks green like I knew it would, then I’m inside.
I slide behind the king’s desk and pull out the set of instructions on setting up a video call from one of the royal computers. It takes five minutes to execute, and then I dial the number Styx’s men gave to me.
Almost immediately the call goes through.
The large monitor in front of me flickers, and then I’m staring at Styx Garcia in the flesh.
I appraise this man with narrowed eyes. He has even more scars than his photo let on, none quite so gruesome as the one that’s split open one of his nostrils.
This is a very dangerous man. It makes my decision to escape his men that much wiser.
“Your Majesty,” he says, dipping his head. “It’s an honor.”
I nod back to him. “Styx.”
He peers up at me as he straightens. His fascination is plain. And on his face, it’s an unsettling look.
“Your men woke me,” I say. It’s as good enough conversation starter as any.
He inclines his head.
My gaze moves behind him, to a stark, dimly-lit cement room. “How did you find me?” I ask.
His eyes are too bright. “With difficulty.”
My lips thin. “It’s two a.m. here. I want to go to bed. Please give me the straight answer.”
He flashes me a distinctly unsettling smile. It has my trigger finger twitching.
“Perhaps if you visit me,” he says, “I will tell you in person.”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” I say.
This conversation won’t get anywhere if he keeps answering like this.
“Are you aware that there’s a bounty on my head?” he asks, straightening in his seat.
“I am.”
“And still you called,” he says.
“And you answered,” I reply.
“Why wouldn’t I?” He smiles pleasantly, the action contorting all his facial scars. “You’re the supposedly dead queen that’s come back to life. And you somehow managed to kill half a dozen of my best men when you escaped.” His gaze shifts subtly. I can tell he’s taking in the hair that spills over my shoulder. “I was very eager to speak with you.
“But,” he continues, “that doesn’t explain why you’re calling me.” He tilts his head, the gesture almost mocking. “Tell me, does the dear King of the East know you’re talking to me?”
I tighten my jaw. Styx is just another man that likes to toy with people.
“Tell me about your connection to the West,” I say instead.
Styx throws his hands out. “There it is,” he says. “Oh, you are transparent. You want my connection to the West.”
“I do.” I don’t bother denying it.
“Why?”
“I need to speak with the representatives,” I say. “Privately.”
Styx folds his hands over his chest. “You don’t want your king to know.” He says it with such satisfaction. “What makes you think I have the clearance to speak with the representatives?”
“You were going to hand me over to them. Your men said so themselves.”
“Hmmm …” He appraises me.
He sits forward suddenly. “You know, I always believed.” He stares at my scar with fascination. When his eyes meet mine again, an unnatural amount of fervor has entered them. “A woman like you can’t be killed so easily.”
“You have no idea who I am,” I say.
Even though a screen and countless miles separate us, my hand is itching for my gun. I don’t like the way he looks at me.
To be fair, I don’t like the way most people look at me, but the way Styx does it … In another situation it would’ve earned him a bullet. It might still, depending on the way the future unfolds.
“I expected you to be violent, Serenity Freeman.”
“Lazuli,” I correct.
“But to watch you gun my men down in seconds …” He continues on as though I hadn’t spoken. “That, that surprised me.”
When I don’t react, he raises his eyebrows. “You did realize there was someone watching on the other end of that camera, didn’t you?”
He’s asking the wrong questions and giving the wrong kind of answers to mine. I don’t know what I was expecting from him, or what the correct response to my call would be, but this isn’t it.
He wants to understand me, I can tell. Capturing me would’ve allowed him all the time in the world for that, but he’s trying to make up for it now.
“I never planned on handing you over to them—the West.” The look in his face as he says that … this man better tread carefully, he’s setting all sorts of violent tendencies in me.
He leans back in his seat, watching me, his eyes unblinking. “So, how are you faring?” he asks.
I have a sick, sick admirer in Garcia. I assumed he’d be angry that I killed off his men.
“I’m fine.” That was my last attempt at being civil. Entertaining this man’s version of small talk is almost more than I can bear.
“What does your husband think of your being awake?” A flash of something enters his eyes. I would say it was jealousy, but I’ve seen that emotion so rarely that I doubt my own intuitio
n. Not to mention that I don’t know this man. To be jealous of a stranger receiving attention from her husband …
He makes Montes seems normal, and that is an impressive feat.
“We are not friends, Garcia,” I say, my voice hard. “You are the leader of the terrorist group that attempted to capture me. Save the personal questions for men who must answer to you.”
His jaw tightens, and his gaze flicks off screen. He’s the only person I can see in the room, but I bet there are other people behind the camera, people that just overheard their leader get slighted by me.
“Do you know how much money and resources went into finding and retrieving you?” he hisses. This is the first glimpse I’ve gotten of the real Styx Garcia. “You wouldn’t be awake to sit here and insult me if it weren’t for me.”
The last of my patience evaporates.
I lean forward. “You are a fool if you think you’re going to get either my pity or my gratitude.” I’m just about done with this man. “You kidnapped me, I killed your men. I don’t regret it, and I imagine if our roles were reversed, a man like you would feel the same way.” Someone who collects scars the way Styx does has a taste for violence.
“Now,” I say, “we can continue with the slights, or we can discuss how we’re going to end this war.”
That has him straightening. I see the fist that he rests on his desk tighten and then release.
I take a deep breath. “I want to work with you, Garcia, but what I really need is someone who has an in with the West. Do you have that in?”
He folds his hands and taps his two pointer fingers against his chin as he studies me.
“Yes,” he finally says.
“I need to speak with them. Can you help me arrange that?”
Another pause. Then, “Yes—for a price.”
Chapter 21
Serenity