The beginning: Shackles—Day 3, hour 6
“DICK!” I screamed as I slammed my fists into the glass artwork on display near the entrance of his office. The glass shattered into a million pieces. “How fucking dare you? You manipulative cunt!”
I threw one of his fancy guest chairs into the wall until it was a bent, useless hunk of metal.
I’d waited all day in the High Court’s headquarters to see Dick only to find out the blasted angel was working from his home realm.
After another day of waiting in the angel realm for him to open his office door, I was done trying to think rationally.
When Dick’s assistant had finally tapped her clipboard and said he would see me, I’d seen red.
She’d pushed open his office door, and all it had taken was one look.
One glance at the pretentious prick’s smirk and my mind had blanked out with rage.
I wanted his blood.
“You called?” Dick drawled casually from behind his desk as he watched me tear apart his office, like it was just another mundane workday. He was a heavy-set man with a barrel chest and beady dark eyes.
At first glance, he seemed overweight. He wasn’t. It was part of the reason he made such an excellent spy for the High Court. People misjudged him and weren’t prepared for his immense strength.
Now I wished he were weaker so I could beat the shit out of him like I’d always dreamed of.
Dick didn’t bother to reach for the ice sword positioned across his desk. It was impossibly wide and five feet long, and frost dissipated in the surrounding air.
Angels and devils and their stupid swords.
Sun god, I hated this realm.
I snarled at it with disgust, and Dick leaned back against the floor-to-ceiling windows behind his desk. Like he didn’t have a care in the world.
The office glittered in the bright sunlight, and I squinted. The angel side of the realm was cast in perpetual daylight, and I hated it; I preferred the darkness of the devil side.
My chest heaved as I pinned him with my gaze and said, “You’re done. Does your deceit know no end? Do the gods know the extent of your manipulations? How fucking cruel you are?”
Dick smirked like he knew something I didn’t. Like something was funny about what I’d said.
Raw power sparked around me.
He eyed me warily.
Dick thought he knew who I was, but ever since the massacre five centuries ago, I’d kept my true savagery restrained behind walls and fortresses of control.
All my walls had fallen.
There was nothing left but rage.
“How dare you? No god can save you now. You’ve lied to me for the last time,” I whispered as I reared back and picked up one of his stupid glass guest chairs. Unbridled vampyre strength coursed through me as I slammed it against the stupidly expensive tile floors.
Dick stared at me and said, “I’m confused.”
He dared to pretend he didn’t know what he’d done. Again.
That was it.
“You enslaved my daughter.” I chucked a fragment of the chair across the room.
Screaming because I’d lost my grasp on sanity, I reared back and chucked a shard of glass at him as hard as I could.
A hand shot forward, and Dick caught the glass in the air. He swung it lazily back and forth like he was getting ready to fight with it.
“Calm yourself,” Dick said casually as he arched his brow, like I was being irrational and he hadn’t obliterated my existence.
Click.
My fangs descended.
I got ready to rush him.
Dick’s eyes went pure black, and his blue crystal wings flared across his back. Feathers clattered together as he spread his wings wide and rose to his full height.
He was a monster.
As I stalked toward his desk, my feet crunched over the glass, and I imagined it was his bones beneath me.
“You enslaved my daughter,” I repeated softly.
Dick arched his brow. “No, you did. You were the one who wanted her protected. The tattoo accomplishes that. The title of the bond is of no consequence. It makes no difference; I told you everything that mattered. I never lied.”
“You bastard,” I spat. “What do you mean, of course you lied.” I paused then asked with confusion. “Why would you do this?”
He shrugged casually. “Because you asked me to.”
“No,” I snarled. “Answer me honestly.” I pressed my knuckles into the glass top of his desk and leaned forward.
“I did.” He shrugged.
Typical. Dick refused to take responsibility and was putting it all on me.
“Coward!” I whirled and grabbed the second guest chair, and crystal wings clattered as Dick casually stepped to the side and avoided it. “All you do is hide behind your precious gods.”
He chuckled and murmured, “If only you knew.”
The crash echoed loudly in the large office as it exploded against the window.
I picked up a large glass shard from the first chair and chucked it.
Again, he dodged it.
I threw another one.
He caught it.
I threw everything I could get my hands on as I screamed like a lunatic and fantasized about wearing Dick’s flesh as a coat. Mounting his head on my wall. Drinking his blood until he was silent.
He kept dodging glass casually.
When my hand was slick with red like I was wearing gloves, I staggered backward with exhaustion. Heaving breaths shook my chest as I took in my ruined surroundings.
Carnage all around.
“Are you done yet?” Dick’s voice was monotone.
“No.” I spat onto the mangled tile floor.
Dick put his hands on his hips. “Would you like to throw something else? Perhaps break off a chunk of the wall and chuck it at me.”
I walked over to the wall, punched a circle with my fist, ripped out the wood paneling, then flung it at Dick with all my might. He waved his arm lazily, and wood slammed against the floor.
He rolled his eyes. “Feel better?”
“Never.”
Dick stared at me for a long moment, then dropped into his fancy leather chair that was curved at the back to allow room for his wings. He sat at his desk like this was an ordinary meeting and said, “If you’re done acting like a petulant child, I have a matter I want to discuss with you.”
Manic laughter exploded from my throat, and I almost fell to my knees from the weight of emotions coursing through me. “A matter to discuss? You enslaved my daughter with that tattoo, and now she can’t leave the kings without pain.”
Dick waved his hand like he wasn’t listening. “That has nothing to do with the tattoo.”
How quickly he dismissed everything as trivial.
He’d ruined my daughter’s life with his games, in so many different ways. She was going to be devastated when she discovered how far his deceit reached.
I already was.
Would the lies ever stop?
Dick leaned back in his ostentatious leather chair and placed his hands behind his head. He put his boots on his desk and stared at me impassively.
He was so sure I’d just keep playing his games.
Not this time.
He’d gone too far.
I smiled. “I’m done. Turn me over to the sun god, I don’t care what you do. I’m finished being your pawn.”
Silence stretched between us.
“Perfect. I’ll alert the entire High Court network that Arabella Alis Egan is enemy number one and should be exterminated immediately.”
My fangs dug deeper into my gums. “You made a vow.”
Dick’s pale skin glowed under the bright lights of his office, like he was a god addressing a subject. “I vowed to leave your child alone once they took on the mantle of ruling the fae realm and sided with the sun god. Your child has not yet done so. There is no vow binding me.”
My jaw trembled. “Stop with the games. You know what she is. Why would you want her to rule?”
“Because that is her destiny.” His lips thinned. “Because I’ve decided that is her fate and she will fulfill her role.”
My fangs dug deeper into my gums as I spat, “I hate you.”
“I know.” Dick spun a fountain pen between his fingers and said calmly, “Emotions aside, the matter to discuss is important. At the direction of the gods, the High Court is instituting the Legionnaire Games at Elite Academy.”
My temples throbbed with pain.
Dick said casually, “We’ve both known for decades that war is coming. Now it’s here. It is crucial to the war effort that the gods establish this generation’s legion leadership structure. They’ve already identified the six strongest groups in all the realms. All that’s left is to test them and evaluate how they interact with one another. The gods need to see how they suffer.”
I’d been monitoring the ungodly for years, and I’d seen firsthand how dire the situation was becoming. How they were spreading.
There was an infection in the galaxy.
But some things were more important than the threats to civilization, so I shook my head and said, “I don’t care.”
Dick continued like I hadn’t spoken, “Your current training group is among the strongest we have. So the gods have evaluated that they have enough ties among them to make up a single legion.”
I narrowed my eyes.
Foreboding skittered down my spine.
A legion was a group of elite warriors, people whose lives were bound by more than circumstances or blood. It was about devotion and loyalty. Legions were the building blocks of war.
You couldn’t fight a multirealm war unless you had the best from all the species on your side.
My recruits fought well together, and there was no doubt they were powerful, but some days, they barely tolerated one another. From what I’d seen, they had nothing in common.
Legions were thrown into the trenches of suffering, and they usually only survived because they had one another. My recruits did not have those types of connections with each other.
I didn’t like it.
“What ties them together?” I asked slowly.
Dick arched his brow like he knew something I didn’t. “That’s above your clearance level.”
I bared my fangs at him.
“All you need to know about them”—Dick’s feathers clattered as he leaned back in his chair—“is that their connection is strong. The gods are excited to watch them perform.”
Working my jaw up and down, I stabbed my fangs into my gums until copper flooded my mouth.
I rolled it around my mouth.
Dick nodded. “I’m telling you this because the gods have ordered you to host the games. You will work beside me and the other representatives. Centuries ago, you were involved in the last Legionnaire Games, so you know how it works.”
“No,” I said harshly as I took a step back because I knew exactly how it worked.
I could see what they were doing.
They wanted to put distance between me and Arabella.
If I hosted the games, then I wasn’t allowed to interact with the competitors or assist them.
They wanted to remove her from my protection.
They wanted to tie my hands so they could make her suffer without repercussions.
Dick shook his head and smiled like my existence amused him.
He grabbed a stack of folders off his desk and said, “Glad we could have this talk. The paperwork regarding your duties will be sent to your office. The High Court is constructing the stadium on the west side of the island as we speak. The games will start in a week.”
“No,” I repeated with more force. “I will not do this.”
I might as well have been talking to the wall.
Dick kept talking. “Failure to take part in the Legionnaire Games will result in immediate extermination procedures for each person who disobeys. Disobey, interfere, or meddle in circumstances above your pay grade, and your daughter will be named enemy number one. Classification: kill on sight.”
We both knew what circumstances he was insinuating.
As he stared me down, his lips flattened into a straight line. Twenty-four years ago he’d positioned me neatly into his spiderweb of lies. Until recently, I’d had no idea just how entangled it all was.
“You’ve lied to me from the beginning,” I said. “No more.”
Dick twirled his fountain pen faster until it was nothing but a blur. His stare was hard. Uncompromising. “The truth changes nothing. Why do you care?”
“I care”—my jaw cracked as I narrowed my eyes, unsure which of the lies he was referring to—“because it’s my fucking daughter.”
He rested his head back on his fancy leather headrest. “Exactly. For now, your daughter is alive and healthy. What’s the problem?”
For now.
Nothing he said was ever an accident.
I didn’t like this.
Dick continued calmly, “I will send you the paperwork for the Legionnaire Games. Please read through the clause on page three about interactions with competitors. Familiarize yourself with it.”
“Stop.” I gritted my teeth. “Stop talking like I have no say.”
“But, Lothaire?” Dick furrowed his brows. “You have no choice.”
“Screw you.”
He leaned forward in his chair and said sharply, “We’re on the same side. Don’t forget what we’re fighting against. Do you want another massacre on your conscience? Because this one won’t have any survivors if we don’t act.”
He stared at me.
In the darkness of his eyes, I saw the ungodly ripping apart a realm.
“I hope,” I said quietly, “that you die painfully and get shanked up the ass.”
Dick beamed like I’d complimented him. “The gods appreciate your service. Such delightful wit. I’ll be seeing you soon.”
He stood up and lunged across his desk to pat my face condescendingly. His fingers were so cold the tips smoked with blue flames. Pain screamed along my nerve endings.
Wrenching away from him, I activated the RJE device, and the world exploded as I flung myself through the universe to escape his presence.
I was alone in my quarters at the academy.
Staring at the mirror on the wall, I pressed my fingers against my unmarked cheek. Ripping my gaze away, I staggered onto my knees and collapsed.
I was pinned by my thoughts: Arabella’s enslavement, the Legionnaire Games, Dick’s secrets, and the endless capacity of the gods to manipulate and ruin the lives of men.
I opened my mouth, and no sound came out.
Inside I screamed.
