Her moment of fear quickly turned to anger. This, whatever this was, was not part of her plan. Those who wished to destroy her chance to make allies of these fierce people, who’d been ready to embrace her as their leader, would pay with their lives.
Amara bolted up from her hiding spot, her fists clenched, just as someone approached the stage from behind her. She could hear heavy footsteps stomping across the wooden surface.
She spun on her heels to see two of her bodyguards fall, their throats slashed. Behind them, a shockingly familiar face.
“Well, princess, I would bet a great many gold coins that you didn’t expect to see me again.”
Felix Gaebras held the tip of his sword only a couple of inches away from her face.
His was a face from her nightmares. Or perhaps they’d been premonitions. In these dreams, he’d been trying to kill her.
“Felix . . . you did this, all of this, just to get to me,” she began, taking a shaky step back from the young man she thought was long dead.
He smirked. “Honestly? I was simply observing from a safe distance. This was a happy coincidence. I guess there are many other rebels who want to watch your blood spill. But it looks like I’m the one who gets the honor.”
Her gaze whipped to her left to see three bodyguards racing toward Felix, but they were cut down by another young man with dark hair and an annoyed expression.
“This wasn’t the plan, Felix,” the young man shouted. “You’re going to get us both killed.”
“Quiet, Taran,” Felix replied. “I’m reconnecting with an old girlfriend.”
At the touch of his blade against her cheek, Amara looked right at his black eye patch. “Your eye . . .”
“Gone. Thanks to you.”
She flinched. “I know you must hate me for what I did.”
“Hate you?” His dark brows raised, shifting his eye patch a little. “Hate is such a tiny word, isn’t it?”
Amara tried to see if any guards were coming to her aid, but Felix’s friend Taran held them off with both the sword and the crossbow he was armed with.
Amara raised her eyes to meet Felix’s and filled her voice with as much regret as she could muster. “Whatever you’ve endured, my beast, I promise I can make it up to you.”
“Don’t call me that. You lost the right to call me that when you left me behind to die.” He touched the blade to her face again, nudging her gaze to turn to the crowd. “See what you did? This is your fault. Everything you touch ends in death.”
Her tense gaze moved across the crowd that had gathered from miles around to hear her speak. Many Paelsians lay dead amongst the fighting, trampled by others, killed by the blades of guards or their own countrymen.
He was right: This was her fault. A moment of vanity, the desire to feel the love of her new subjects after so much pain and disappointment, and it ended with death.
Everything ended in death.
The same hawk she’d seen earlier circling above the crowd squawked loud enough for Amara to hear it. Beneath the bird, someone trapped in the middle of the chaos caught her eye, a young man with unusually bright red hair who’d been making his way toward the stage.
She recognized him as Cleo’s friend—Nic. The one Ashur had become fixated upon.
Amara watched with horror as two Paelsians grabbed Nic, ripping his coin pouch off of the loop on his trousers. Nic grabbed for it, and one of the men’s knives flashed in the sunlight before he sank it into Nic’s chest.
She gasped.
Nic’s body dropped to the ground, her sight of it quickly lost in the crowd.
This was her fault, all her fault.
She frowned at the thought. No—this had been bad luck for Nic, unfortunate circumstances. But she had not murdered Cleo’s friend with her own hands. She refused to take the blame for other people’s misfortune.
While she’d hated her father and equally despised her brothers, the Cortas family was not weak in any way. That included her.
And beyond the Cortas family, women weren’t weak. They were leaders. Champions. Warriors. Queens.
Amara had faced far greater foes in her life than Felix Gaebras.
She forced her voice to shake as she spoke her next words to him. “You’re better than this, Felix. Killing an unarmed girl? This isn’t you.”
“Not me? I’m an assassin by trade, love. Killing’s what I do best.”
Out of the corner of her eye, she watched his friend single-handedly fight off two more of her men. “I now rule a full third of the world and control all that fortune. Do you want to be a very wealthy man?”
He shrugged a shoulder. “Not really.”
She’d forgotten that he’d been different from other men she’d known—an asset in the beginning, but a problem now. “Women, then. Ten, twenty, fifty girls who desire only you.”
He fixed her with the coldest smile she’d ever seen. “And how would I know they were not cold, deceptive bitches like you? No deal, empress.”