Field training: Day 16, hour 10
Lyla healed my dozens of wounds, but the heavy sensation crushing my shoulders remained.
She left the classroom, and Lothaire entered.
The crushing got worse.
Lothaire slapped an enchanted stone onto the large desk in the front of the room. The air shimmered, and a snowy mountainside was projected against the wall.
The stone got closer and closer.
Suddenly we were watching an ungodly charge at us. Malum ordered us to herd the villagers into one of the small huts, and we worked as a team, slashing and backing them up.
The stone had hovered a few feet above our heads, floating unnoticed and capturing every horrible moment.
I’d thought the battle was the worst thing I’d ever experienced.
I’d been wrong.
Viewing it all again from a bird’s eye position? That was true torture.
I watched as I pleaded desperately with a teenage girl. Watched as I failed her and an ungodly ripped from her flesh.
Hours of captured footage played, and it seemed to go on forever.
The more it played, the more confused I got.
I’d thought I’d been fighting alone in the corner of the hut, but John had never strayed more than a few feet away from me. Slashing and killing the hoard so only a few villagers got through to me.
But what happened next, I could have never expected.
An ungodly threw John across the room, and the three kings immediately took his place.
The three of them shielded me.
Hours passed, and they kept their position in front of me, making sure the worst of the attack never got to me.
Without the kings blocking, I would have been ripped to shreds.
In the classroom, I glanced over at Malum questioningly, but he refused to make eye contact.
More and more wounds covered me as my movements got slower. A villager slipped through and attacked me from the side.
It was the teenage girl.
And I stopped fighting altogether, holding her out with my arm and pleading with her.
When John pushed through the chaos to yell at me, I shook my head, and it was clear I wasn’t listening to him.
He was pulled back into a fight, and Malum kept glancing over at where the girl was gouging me with her teeth.
Flames leaped higher across his skin.
Suddenly, he whirled around and screamed at me to fight. He pinned me against the wall. His seven-feet stature dwarfed my six-feet height and made me look as small and pathetic as I felt.
But as he pressed me against the stone with his blade, his actions didn’t seem as insidious as they had felt in the throes of the carnage.
Malum yelled at me frantically. Like he was panicking with worry.
His shoulders visibly slumped with relief when I yanked away from him and threw myself into the chaos. My daggers obliterated villagers and then ungodly.
For the first time in hours, I was fighting.
What was most surprising was when I had my second standoff with Malum, Scorpius and Orion stopped fighting.
I watched myself point my blade at him and pretend to shoot. The promise of his death written on my face.
The other kings didn’t get angry like I expected.
Instead, Orion raised his eyebrows and smirked like he knew a secret as he whispered what was happening in Scorpius’ ear. The pale fae shook his head like he was exasperated.
For some reason, a weird sensation settled in my stomach as I watched, and I picked at a scab on my hand.
I refused to look over at the three men sitting only a desk away from me.
When the enchanted stone flicked off and the projection stopped, Lothaire turned around with a manic glint in his eye.
“Soldiers. Stand the fuck up,” he ordered softly.
This ought to be good.
Chairs creaked and desks groaned as the eight of us stood at attention.
CRACK. Lothaire slapped the baton against his palm and asked calmly, “So do you feel good about yourselves after watching that? Do you think it went well?”
No one spoke.
SMASH. Lothaire reared back and struck his baton against the wooden desktop with so much force that it snapped into pieces.
“Answer me! Do you think you did a fucking good job?”
The intrusive thoughts told me to answer yes.
“No, sir!” I chorused back with the men and feigned subservience.
Lothaire’s head snapped up.
“I expected Aran to be a fucking waste of space, but the rest of you have been training for years. You’re the most pathetic class of recruits I’ve ever had.” His upper lip pulled back as he sneered, “At this rate, you’ll never be assassins.”
Yay, I lived up to expectations. Awkward for everyone else.
Abruptly, Lothaire chucked his weapon across the room, and it shattered the stained-glass window.
Shards rained down.
Jagged fragments splattered across the side of my face. Glass sparkled everywhere. Blood dripped off us.
I bit my cheeks to stop from laughing.
There was something about a grown man acting like a homicidal maniac that tickled my funny bone. Like, was he for real?
Was this really what we were doing right now?
Lothaire took a deep breath, like seeing us covered in cuts calmed him. “You are lucky I am so forgiving,” he said calmly.
I bit my tongue to stop the giggle.
He continued addressing us peacefully, like he hadn’t just broken a desk and a window like a child. “As most of you know, the breaking period is over.”
He paused and let his words sink in.
“Now you’ll be moving into a room inside the fortress. You will have a shower and sleep schedule and will maintain your physical health.”
My teeth clicked as I fought the urge to ask if we were going to get shoes. Bruised bloody toes stared up at me mockingly.
It sounded too good to be true.
I’d slept and showered so little in the past weeks that delirium had set in. A few weeks ago, colors had stopped seeming as bright, and a cold, morose energy had settled around me.
Either a planet in this solar system was in retrograde, or I was suffering from depression. It was probably both.
“However.” Lothaire paused.
I knew a catch was coming, but it still didn’t stop the plummeting sensation in my gut.
“Before you move into your new dorms, we’re going to go outside.”
I couldn’t breathe.
One. Two. Three.
Counting didn’t help.
Lothaire slunk forward leisurely down the aisle.
Each step crunched loudly.
He stopped in front of me, but he didn’t look down, just stared forward at the space above my head. “Do you think you deserve comfort, Aran? Do you think you’ve earned it?”
I swallowed thickly as I picked harder at the scab on my hand and stood at attention. “No, sir.”
Lothaire’s eye snapped downward. “Do you want to die, Aran?”
Yes.
Malum and Scorpius whipped around in front of me, and Orion shifted like he was uncomfortable. John swore under his breath. Behind Lothaire’s back, Horace gave me a thumbs-up.
I grimaced. “Did I say that aloud?”
Malum growled, “Yeah, you fucking did.”
Lothaire slammed his fist down on the desk in front of me.
I jumped and giggled, then slapped a hand over my mouth when I realized what I’d done.
The vampyre flung his head back and laughed, the awful, scratchy sound like nails on a chalkboard.
Maybe he also thought it was funny?
“Oh, Aran,” Lothaire said between manic chuckles, “you think you’re the first broken man to come through this program?”
Abruptly, he stopped laughing and leaned over into my personal space.
For a split second, déjà vu made the hair on my arms stand up.
Like the timeline was collapsing.
My gut told me we’d done this before, either in the past or the future.
I couldn’t decide which one I preferred.
I needed a smoke.
“You’re not the first recruit that’s begged me for death,” Lothaire said calmly. ‘You’re not the first to seek out pain. Let me guess—you’re suffering? Horrible circumstances that none of us can understand?” He spread his arms wide and gestured to the room.
Yes. It took every ounce of control I possessed to not roll my eyes.
Just another man with no fucking clue.
My defiance must have shown on my face, because Lothaire erupted. “I can guarantee you that you’ve suffered less than every single fucking man in this room!”
Suffering—what a funny word.
Flames. Mother’s screams. Heart in my mouth. Monster inside me. Words on my flesh.
“You can’t imagine what I’ve done,” I whispered.
Lothaire fisted his hands like he wanted to pummel me, but he just pointed across the room at John.
My friend was still in his bad-tempered state.
Lothaire’s voice was cruel. “I found John at the bottom of a ravine. Every single bone in his body was broken.”
I stared at my friend with horror, but his face was expressionless.
Lothaire smiled meanly. “Isn’t it true, John, that at ten years old, your family beat you because they feared what you were? Then they threw your broken body off a cliff? They left you. They prayed you were dead?”
“Yes.” John was cold as granite.
Lothaire gestured dramatically. “But even then, death would not take you? Correct?”
“Yes.”
Lothaire nodded like he’d made a point. “You see, Aran, you don’t even know who the man is that you call a friend. You don’t know anything about what these other men have gone through. You can’t even imagine their suffering.”
Lothaire lunged down and wrapped his massive hand around my neck like a vise until all the air left my lungs.
His fingers tightened. “Lyla was right. You’re unbelievably selfish.”
The violence never ended; it was unrelenting. Unfathomable.
I bit my bottom lip to stop from laughing at his tantrum.
“Right now, choose!” Lothaire screamed into my face. “If you want to die, I’ll put you out of your misery. Otherwise, you agree to stop being a FUCKING COWARD and fight. That’s your only choice. There’s no in-between. CHOOSE.”
Fingers tightened into an iron noose. “There is no gray. We are the black. Either you’re an assassin or you’re a liability to the realms and I’ll exterminate you. So choose.”
His fingers kept tightening.
My vision dimmed, but I didn’t fight him.
I can’t die. You don’t get it.
I just wanted someone to understand that I didn’t want to end myself because of what had been done to me. It was what I’d done.
The lies.
The pain.
The legacy.
The throne of death.
The fucking depression.
I should tell Lothaire to eat my heart. He would do it. The thought was tempting.
My neck creaked.
But then he would know who you are, and he wouldn’t do it. Pretending there was an easy solution to my problems was a child’s fantasy.
Jinx’s sneering face flashed before my eyes.
Who was going to protect that crazy girl? She was too mean for Sadie or even her bear shifter mate, Jax. I recognized the edge in Jinx’s eyes.
I understood what it meant to be mean.
Mother had always said I was a bitch.
Well, technically she said, “You’re a pathetic, weak, useless bitch and you will suffer every night until you stop embarrassing me.”
The gist was that I was a bad bitch. Obviously.
“I’ll fight,” I mouthed on empty air. For her.
Lothaire dropped me like I burned and walked away, ignoring me as I bent over heaving. He’d gotten what he wanted.
“Outside, recruits. You’ll run for sixty miles, and I want you to think about your shitty performance the entire time.”
The next few hours dragged on as we ran along the island’s edge.
The only sounds were harsh breaths.
Our tattered clothes, glass-sparkling skin that bled, and crushed spirits were the only remnants of the horrors we’d faced.
After the run, which felt more like a death march, Lothaire shoved us into the Black Ocean and shouted, “Now try not to drown, you pathetic fucks!”
He was supportive like that.
After twelve hours in the Black Ocean, John broke the silence.
“What made you choose life?” he asked quietly, his bicep tight around mine as we struggled against the frozen waves.
Salt filled my mouth.
I slammed across the harsh rocks, and my abused feet struggled for purchase. “I didn’t choose life.” Water burned my sinuses and poured out my nose as I gasped.
There was something so tragic about floating away at sea.
John’s grip on my arm was so tight that my bones were probably fractured. It didn’t matter anyway; he wasn’t letting me go.
John was silent as another wave slammed against our frozen flesh.
The only sign he heard me was the pain that radiated down my arm. He clenched me tighter.
“It’s never been a choice for me,” I spat out salt water as I tried to explain it to my friend even though I couldn’t tell him explicitly. “I just remembered who I was fighting for.”
John nodded sharply like he got what I was saying.
Our elbows knocked against each other as we tightened our biceps.
Waves slashed.
“Why did they hurt you?” I asked, my voice trailing off in the shrieking wind.
John looked down at me, salt water dripping off his face. The red haze of the eclipse expanded around him until it swallowed him whole. “Because I’m an abomination.”
Salt stung my eyes.
His words were like a fist to the gut, and I nodded. “Me too.”
Next to John, Scorpius tilted his head to the side like he was studying us both.
For the first time, the blind king stayed silent.
Another wave dragged us under, and a new sound echoed through my skull. My monster didn’t whimper or scream; it sighed with relief.
A random smile curled my lips.
I was understood.
