I sat in the back row of the supercar. Sadie’s younger sister, Lucinda, was next to me, squished against my side.
Jax sat in the middle row with his arms tucked around his three sisters, while Cobra, Ascher, and Xerxes sat in the first row.
Even though it was night, our driver wore a black suit and dark sunglasses. He had an enchanted wire glowing in his ear, and every so often, he whispered into it.
The car was long and sleek, with a low roof. All the men, including myself, were hunched over with our necks contorted to the side.
I didn’t mind the discomfort.
I welcomed the pain.
Outside, glowing neon skyscrapers stabbed through heavy clouds and extended endlessly into the dark night sky.
In another life, under different circumstances, I would have marveled at the massive metal structures. They were like nothing I’d ever seen.
Nothing I could have imagined.
What my tutors had taught me about the beast realm didn’t hold a candle to the reality of the glimmering world, the sheer awe-inspiring heights of the glowing glass-and-steel buildings, and the sleek lines of the supercars. An enchanted engine purred softly beneath me as we sped impossibly fast through the new realm.
But I couldn’t make myself care about the engineering marvels.
All I knew was pain.
Rain poured in a dark haze of depression. Droplets streaked across the window, as if the weather mimicked my turbulent thoughts.
I was beyond all transient feelings. Sadness, heartbreak, and melancholy were delightful compared to the ache in my soul.
Because deep down, in the marrow of my bones, I hurt. Because under the dual suns of the fae realm, I’d discovered that something horrible lived inside me.
A monster crawled beneath my flesh, begging to be let free.
Even now, I could feel it. Sense it. Rattling against the steel cage that I’d trapped it within.
It wanted to kill. To maim. To hurt.
My back burned unbearably, and my sternum ached like someone had punched me. I scratched at my shoulders and imagined nails stabbing through my skin.
The memory of what I’d done crushed me against the buttery leather of my seat.
Chills shook me, and my vision blurred.
The skyscrapers distorted into something different: beasts. Large, glowing creatures growled down at me from high above.
They chased our car in a haze of neon vitriol.
I scratched harder at my back.
Red flakes were still crusted beneath my fingernails, and they made the monsters outside the window so much worse.
I hated being dirty.
Ever since I was a girl, I preferred to be clean. If there was no dirt on my skin, no mess in my room, then the constant buzz of anxiety couldn’t overwhelm me.
Now I was filthy.
But it didn’t really matter anyway.
Nothing did.
My nails scraped with increased fervor.
“Are you okay?” Lucinda asked softly, her brow furrowed with concern.
I gave her my practiced court smile and pumped my voice with sunshine and rainbows. “I’m fine.”
My face hurt from the weight of pretending.
I’d learned how to appear happy, long before I’d learned how to actually be happy.
I gave Lucinda the smile I gave the elite fae when they told me I was a powerless scum. When they asked my mother how much it cost to breed me. When my mother set me on fire for the billionth time.
The fake smile that had fallen from my face when the woman who’d birthed me had done the unthinkable.
What had happened was too fucked up to process, but I’d somehow relived it a thousand times in two days.
Blue flames.
Everywhere.
Writhing facedown on the marble palace floor as my mother ordered the guards to hold me there.
This part was normal. Expected. It was practically our routine. They held me down while she set me on fire, and I screamed.
What came next was anything but.
Mother’s voice dripped with the condescension she only reserved for me. “You dirty little whore. You really think I’d just let you sully our name one more time? After you ran away like a coward?”
Gone was the ruthless fae queen.
In her place was a terrifying creature—an angry mother.
A woman who had everything to lose and nothing to gain. Who’d been forged into a deadly weapon in the five centuries she’d ruled over the fae realm from the seat of death.
She was the longest ruler in fae history.
There was always someone younger, brighter, more powerful, ready to usurp a monarch.
Except they couldn’t best her.
She didn’t maintain her position through luck or sheer power.
No.
Every single move Mother made was calculated to keep maximum control over her massive kingdom, including her daughter.
With hushed whispers and stolen glances, they called her the mad queen.
She liked the name.
The worst part was she wasn’t wrong about me. I had run from the realm, and I had gone to the sex clinic, knowing “purity” was prized above all else in the realm.
I hadn’t even lost my virginity, and still the half warriors had dragged me to her.
Back to my reckoning.
A shiver racked my frame and brought me back to the present.
What would have happened if I’d never gone? Would I have been angry enough to do the unthinkable? Would she still be alive?
I fought the urge to slam my forehead against the glass of the car. Bash it until blood dripped down my face. Until a shard speared through my skull and put me out of my misery.
“Coward,” Mother whispered.
She’s dead, I reminded myself, for the millionth time.
If only she’d stay there.
The words from that fateful night pounded into my psyche.
Mother laughed, a harsh sound, like glass shattering across stone. “I gave you what I’ve never given anyone else. I forgave you. Your little stint in the shifter realm—I blamed it on teenage hormones.”
She’d burned me alive with her flames every night since I’d returned to the fae realm.
But Mother had never paused our little sessions for a monologue before. A guard had never had to hold me down after the initial burn; I’d always collapsed onto the ground and taken her punishment silently.
Such a gift she possessed, burning a person alive without leaving a single mark upon their flesh. No one ever knew what I had endured.
It had always been that way.
It was our routine.
The guard’s harsh grip across my shoulders had been a reminder I was in uncharted territory.
I begged softly, “Please, Mother.”
“Don’t call me that.”
I’d pushed her too far. With one trip to the clinic, she’d been dangerously close to losing something for the first time in five centuries. Sure, it was my virginity. But “purity” was a way of life among the elite fae. Or whatever other bullshit they called it. I was my mother’s pawn to form a political alliance of her choosing.
If I wasn’t pure, then I was nothing.
“Hold her tighter,” she’d ordered the guards as her voice cracked like a whip.
“Please, nothing happened. I’m still a virgin.” I tried desperately to reason with her.
“No,” she said softly with the finality of death. “All you are is a disgrace.”
Then she’d begun.
“You don’t look fine,” Lucinda said softly, and I turned away from the rain-streaked window, letting the memory die inside me.
For a long moment, we stared at each other.
Lucinda’s white hair, red eyes, and golden skin were just like Sadie’s. But while Sadie was lean with high cheekbones and sharp features, Lucinda was curvy and soft.
They were so similar, but so different at the same time.
I didn’t even pretend to smile, just stared at her blankly as my back burned and the car traveled impossibly fast. The dark world outside glowed.
Eventually, Lucinda shrugged and looked away.
I kept scratching, clawing at my back, like ripping the flesh from my bones would somehow make it all better.
The neon beasts outside the window roared and contorted. Steel beams transformed into jagged teeth as they snapped at my soul.
I shoved my cheek against the cool glass of the car’s window.
My too-clammy skin was desperate for a reprieve.
It wasn’t enough.
I pressed my left eye forward until the world blurred around me, and it took everything inside me not to slam my head down and bludgeon myself to death.
Mother’s voice was sharp and cold. “Coward.”
“Uh, I don’t think she, I mean he, is okay,” Lucinda whispered to Sadie with concern.
At least I was disguised as a boy, my masculine glamour a small comfort.
“Hmm, what?” Sadie’s voice was rough and scratchy, a sharp contrast to Lucinda’s.
It highlighted the abuse she’d suffered.
My stomach hurt for my best friend. There was too much tragedy in the world. It seemed wrong that we’d both suffered so much.
Lucinda whispered to her sister, “I have to tell you something.”
Sadie whipped her head down, concern shining brightly in her eyes. Fear contorted her face. “What is it?”
Lucinda opened her mouth, then closed it as she studied her sister’s worried face.
There was a long pause.
“I think Aran’s having a mental breakdown.”
Sadie’s shoulders slumped with relief. She hadn’t picked up on the fact that her sister had lied.
It was obvious from Lucinda’s posture, the catch in her voice, and the way her eyes shifted when she spoke. The sixteen-year-old slumped lower, burdened by something it scared her to share.
I said nothing.
Who was I to pry into others’ secrets? When my own were killing me.
Sadie shook her head and wrapped her arms around her little sister. “It’s rude to point out when someone’s having a mental breakdown. We all have them.” She looked over at me.
Sadie’s ruby eyes were full of concern as she mouthed, “It will be okay. You saved us all.”
It wouldn’t be okay.
Because I’d eaten my mother’s beating heart.
Yes I, Arabella Egan, the crown princess of the fae monarchy, had ripped my mother’s beating heart out of her cold chest and eaten it.
Consumed it.
Consumed her.
Raw, beating, bloody heart. In my mouth. Down my throat. The only way to kill a fae monarch.
The only way to ascend to the seat of death—hundreds of fae skulls covered in gold foil. The remains of a lost race of blood fae, people who had rebelled against the monarchy’s oppression and lost.
In my peripheral vision, Sadie whispered something to Lucinda. From what had happened in the arena sands, the race wasn’t lost anymore.
Sadie was a blood fae. A race so rare and ancient that they were more myth than real, which meant Lucinda was most likely one too.
Their ancestors were the skulls that made up the seat of death. Slaughtered by a power-hungry monarch.
I was now that monarch.
My vision kaleidoscoped until the car spun around me, and my head floated into a different dimension.
I was now the queen of a realm I loathed.
Ruler.
Obligated to the people.
The powerless princess who’d had no predilection for a fae element. My back hurt unmercifully, and I wanted to crawl out of my skin.
I was more comfortable masquerading as a boy. It was the only time people didn’t ask to breed me, didn’t look at me like I was an object.
Royalty was intense in the fae realm.
They revered rulers like gods.
Since it was extremely rare for an immortal fae to give birth. My status as the first fae princess in eons was no exception. I was an object of veneration: more than a fae, but less than a person.
And yet I’d never developed a predilection for a fae element. In all recorded history, every fae had shown signs of their abilities as a young child.
There were no exceptions.
I was a dud.
Instead, I housed a monster.
Sun god, Sadie was an alpha shifter, and even she was part blood fae. She was more fae than I was.
Yet I was supposed to rule on the throne of death, for all my immortality? I’d be slaughtered by a challenger immediately.
Brutally.
I should have just turned myself over and let them end me. But I was a coward, and I’d fled, too afraid to accept the escape of death.
The worst part about everything that had transpired was I didn’t regret it. If I could turn back time, I would do it again.
Did it make me a bad person, that I wasn’t mad about destroying my mother’s immortal life by consuming her beating heart like a savage animal? Of course it did.
I smushed my face harder against the window.
The worst part wasn’t my lack of regret.
It wasn’t the why.
It was the how.
It was the steel cage that slammed against my soul and the monster that bellowed to be released.
When Sadie had knelt in front of Lothaire and infected my mother with her blood, the icy darkness inside my soul had become an inferno of malice.
It had overwhelmed me until my vision had become tinged with darkness and the entire world had been dipped in sepia tones: dark yellow, burnt orange, blood red.
The colors of rage.
The colors of my monster.
Even as I gnawed on my lower lip and pressed my face against the cool glass, I could taste my mother’s anguish, her gore still on my lips.
I liked it now.
I’d liked it then.
Under the scorching suns, the darkness in my soul had swelled, and for the first time in my life, I’d willingly let my monster out of its cage.
My clean, neatly trimmed fingernails had elongated into razor-sharp claws. A sheen of ice had formed around them and hardened into serrated edges.
I didn’t know how I knew, but there was certainty in my bones that there was nothing sharper in the universe.
Without hesitation, I’d stabbed through my mother’s back and ripped out her beating heart.
As I’d consumed her, a swell of satisfaction had burned through my veins.
Nothing had ever felt so right.
Like extinguishing her darkness was the best thing I’d ever done.
Euphoria.
For a moment, a male had spoken like he was standing behind me. “I approve.”
His praise had been a shot of euphoria straight into my blackened soul. But when I’d turned around, no one was there. I’d had to swallow the urge to laugh from the sheer bliss of it all.
I’d been hallucinating.
Ironically, the situation was heinous for so many reasons.
One of them being that no fae had claws. Ever.
But I did.
Until this moment, I’d never thought about my lack of a father. Who or what he was hadn’t mattered. Some fae male who’d had the terrible judgment of procreating with my mother.
All I’d known was her abuse. She’d provided enough of a parental experience for me to know that I didn’t need another one.
Now I wondered just what the hell he was. What was I?
My back burned unbearably.
As I contorted and dug my nails across my skin, a part of me hoped the claws would erupt again and that I would score my flesh.
I couldn’t be queen. I fucking refused.
A wet, sticky substance trickled across my fingers, and I looked down at my hand. I’d scratched so hard with my blunted nails that blood dripped off them.
My vision blurred.
Suddenly, my mother’s heart was in my mouth, and a million fae fell to their knees.
The echo of fae prostrating themselves before me would haunt my nightmares for the rest of my life.
They bowed to me because, under fae law, I was their ruler.
The seat of death was my throne to defend.
The longer I stared at my bloody hand, the more the neon steel beasts outside growled. The more my monster rattled against its cage.
Rain slashed against the window as the wind shrieked.
For the first time in my life, I passed out.
