I’m in so much shock that I’m just standing there uselessly, wondering how the hell all of this happened so fast.
My father moves his power effortlessly, unbreaking a single portion of the floor’s fissure so he can walk across until he stands right in front of me. “This is why females cannot be trusted, Slade.”
My hands curl into fists, and I feel the spikes above my brows pierce through my skin. A single drop of blood slips past my eye. He looks at me coolly, unimpressed. “Lack of control. Now we know where you get it from,” he says with distaste.
Anger pours like a flood from my chest, and I feel the spikes in my back straining, ready to—
“Mother?”
I whip my head to the left and see the servants parting, and then my brother is standing there. He looks pale and scared, so young in his pajamas with a blanket clutched in one hand.
“Ryatt...” my mother cries.
He hesitates, eyes bouncing from the break down the middle of the house to my mother’s crumpled face. But then, his eyes land on Jak’s unmoving body.
“Father!” The word yanks out of his little voice, and he rushes forward, pushing past the servants that try to protect him. My heart leaps into my throat, but he skids to a stop in front of the crack when my mother manages to snag his shirt, stopping him before he can try to leap. He collapses into a fit of sobs against her shoulder.
And my father… I see his thoughts churn. See them clot and thicken.
“It cannot be.”
If my mother was angry before, she looks terrified now. Especially when my father takes a threatening step forward. “No,” she heaves out. “You will not touch him,” she says, gripping onto Ryatt even harder.
And I stand there in shock, looking from Jak to my little brother, disbelief grappling me.
And yet…fae have a hard time conceiving. It’s common knowledge. It’s why our long life is so important for our species. But my father was able to have not only one heir but two, and fairly close in age. He always put it down to the fact that my mother is Orean, but that’s not it.
Eleven years, my mother said. She’s been having this affair for eleven years. My brother is ten.
Ryatt isn’t my father’s heir.
My mother looks wild. Her black hair is disheveled, scraps of ceiling caught in its dusty strands, an angry scratch dragged down her cheek. When he broke Jak’s neck, he broke my mother’s heart, but she’s not going to let him hurt Ryatt too. I can see it in her red-rimmed eyes.
My father staggers, the back of his heel hitting the broken crack behind him as he realizes that Ryatt isn’t his.
My heartbeat feels like it wants to rupture through my veins and explode out my ears. Ryatt is still crying, clutching our mother’s nightdress, while she tries to drag him behind her.
“You dared to sire that bastard’s whelp?” The dark tone in my father’s voice seems to suck away the dawning light in the room.
My mother’s bottom lip trembles as she tries to block Ryatt. The other servants look like they want to intervene, but they’re too afraid to face my father, and they’re right to have that fear.
“I should’ve known I couldn’t trust an Orean.”
With another snap of his finger, the ground shakes again and there’s a violent snap, and I realize that my father has trapped us all in this room, a circle of cracks surrounding us, keeping us all in this entry.
By the time I steady my feet beneath me again, my father has walked up behind me, and I flinch when his hand slams down onto the back of my neck, squeezing slightly. “You gave me a powerful heir,” he says to my mother, that voice of his still booming, still edged with impossible rage. “So I have no further need of you or the false spare.”
Cold terror solidifies in my gut.
I know my father. I have been training with him for seven years. I have seen exactly how ruthless he can be. I have seen him break houses and streets. Mountains and trees. Tendons and bones.
But I will not let him break my mother and brother.
He may be as loud as thunder, but I’m as quick as lightning.
Faster than a blink, my spikes have burst from my skin and rot explodes from my veins.
I whirl on my feet and shove him back with all my strength. He cracks into the wall where some of the servants scramble, another group of them surrounding my mother and brother, trying to pull them away.
Good.
Because now that I’ve openly attacked my father, I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I either have to kill him...or watch everyone I love be killed.
I’ve let him lord over us for fifteen years. Let his cruelty dictate our lives. I have watched my mother sink further inside of herself, watched Ryatt’s wary eyes lose their glint every time my father treated him just as badly as he treated me.
But I haven’t put up with his training and his cruelty for nothing. I did it because I think I knew that one day, we would be here. On two sides of the line. I knew it was going to be him or us.
And I choose us.
So when my rot explodes out of me, it’s seven years’ worth of pent-up retribution.
The tile floor cracks, the earth between us crumbling with decay. Lines of poison leach from my skin and spread through the floor, slithering toward him like serpents ready to attack.
My father is straightening up, cruel eyes locked on me, acting as if that hit into the wall didn’t faze him in the least. “You think you can fight me?” he hollers. “I made you!”
He shoves his hands forward and sends out a burst of power toward me. I feel it, like the moving air of a thrown punch. On pure instinct, I throw my own magic at it, and the very air seems to detonate in on itself.
My father and I both go flying back from the force, my head cracking against the broken tile as rot continues to seep from my pores. I hear crashes and screams, but that’s all secondary. My sole focus is on him. I don’t know how I was able to block his magic like that, or how exactly I wielded my own in that way, but now that I know I can, hopeful determination bolsters my bones.
“You are done breaking,” I tell him, my chest heaving, lines writhing up and down my skin. From the corner of my eye, I can see some of the servants cowering, not just from my father, but from me. And I know what I must look like—this fae packed with spikes and rot, and I feel like I am every inch a wicked fae, from scaled cheeks to flashing canines.
But I don’t care. I will be a monster if it means I can destroy one.
He snaps his finger, but instead of trying to break me, my father breaks the floor right from under me. I hear my mother scream my name as I start to fall, but I jump up as the ground crumbles, barely managing to catch myself and roll. I don’t even get fully on my feet before I send rot streaming toward him, rotting the ground in putrid corruption as it coils around his legs. I see him grit his teeth, and I know I’m molding his muscles, breaking down his blood, decaying his bones.
And I realize with startling clarity that I can kill him. Right here, right now, I can rot him on his feet. But for some stupid reason, one I hate myself for, I hesitate.
That hesitation is all he needs, making my rot falter and pull back. With ruthless speed, he snaps his fingers, and even though I ready myself to block, his magic doesn’t come for me.
Behind me, I hear my mother scream.
I whirl around, seeing her nearly fainting backwards, arm broken in the same exact spot Jak’s arm was. Ryatt is crying, the sound of the two of them pounding my ears.
I feel a prickle in the back of my neck, only barely managing to spin around before a fist is suddenly thrown into my face. I go sprawling, the skin of my palms slicing open when I land on the broken tile. I roll over, finding my father looming over me. All over my arms, my spikes pulse erratically. I push myself to my feet, refusing to show fear, refusing to back down, no matter how much my mother calls my name.
“You are such a disappointment, Slade,” he tsks.
“Believe me,” I pant. “The feeling’s mutual.”
Something flashes in his eyes, and I know. I know that this is it.