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“Oh my Goddess, you scared me,” I gasped, spinning to face her, clutching my chest and sucking down a breath. My magic dissipated like smoke in the wind, revealing my friend.
“Sorry,” she said, looking sheepish. “Didn’t want to disturb your moment.” She flicked her chocolate brown hair over her shoulder, then looped her arm through mine. “Now, what are we going to do until the sword competition?”
I laughed, glancing down the hall one last time, then said loud enough for Ruslan’s keen Dragon hearing to pick up, “Cause trouble.”
15
Béke Day Four
“Rares.” My tone was clipped as the old Mage hobbled into my study. The male responsible for the creation of the Félvér settled into a high-backed chair across from me with a piercing glare. The two of us held no affection for each other, and Rares was especially dangerous for me since I’d shut down his breeding program and his experiments to please Izidora. Her distaste for it matched my own, but it gave me the perfect excuse to do something I’d wanted for a long time, something that had not been possible while my father was king. Which was why this conversation needed to happen. Rares’s oath may have been to the Iron Crown, but that did not mean he was loyal to me.
He tapped a gnarled finger on the wooden arm of the chair, waiting to hear the reason I’d called him to my study. A smirk played across my lips as I leaned back in my plush chair, kicking my boots up on the polished mahogany desk that once belonged to my father and sipping from a glass of amber liquor. “I need you to swear another oath.”
The wizened Mage snorted. “Absolutely not.”
Tipping the last of the whisky into my mouth, I dropped my feet to the floor, leaning my elbows on the desk as I scowled at the male who had been directly involved in my parentage. “If you do not willingly comply, I will be forced to compel you.”
“The only way you can compel me to do anything is if your life is on the line. And even then, I’d fight the compulsion rather than save your life, Ruslan,” he hissed.
I raised a sharp brow. “Do you think I am above taking myself to the brink of death to force you to surrender? After all, you’ve taken me there so many times already, death is almost like an old friend.”
Flashes of Rares’s torture from my childhood surfaced, haunting me with twinges of mental and physical pain. I cracked my neck from side to side, banishing those images as I waited for the Mage to respond. “That was not a rhetorical question, Rares.”
“No, I do not think you are above it,” he gritted out through yellowed teeth, his fingers curling like knobby tree limbs.
“Good. Then you know where we stand. You will swear an oath to me, right now, to never harm Izidora and to protect her life with yours, as you do mine.”
Rares’s lips pressed together as if he were trying to hide a sliver of amusement. “So she accepted your mate bond then?”
Heat billowed across my body, and I was on my feet in an instant, glass shattering under my fist. “She does not need to accept the mate bond to receive that kind of protection.”
“And if she chooses Kazimir? You won’t go to war to fight for her?” Rares scoffed, leaning back in his chair and crossing his arms.
I threw my head back and released a manic laugh into the space, the wildness in the tone filling the air with a crackling energy. “She will not choose him, Rares, and not because of thatenchanted ring I had you make. She will choose me because I am the right choice. But if we go to war, it will be Kazimir’s fault.”
The Mage’s wrinkled face lost all signs of amusement at my abrupt change in mood. “So you didn’t give it to her then.”
“No. And now that I know you can make such an object, I want to prevent you from using that power on anyone else. So you will swear this oath to me, right now, or I will force you to, and you won’t like the consequences after I am brought back from the brink of death.”
Rares’s lips and knuckles were white from his restrained fury, and with a string of curses, he pushed to his feet, using the desk to brace himself as he kneeled before me.
“Repeat after me, Rares,” I commanded, then spoke his oath not to harm Izidora and to protect her with his life, adding in a clause about using enchanted jewelry at the sole discretion of the ruler of the Iron Realm. Once he finished his oath, the tendril of magic that stretched between us snapped and thickened with his new directives. Then, I dismissed him. “You may go, Rares. See to it that the entertainment portion of Béke is handled.”
The “fuck you” he muttered under his breath on his way out the door was audible to my Dragon senses, but I let it slide when I noticed Drazen perched on the threshold of the door. “What is it, Drazen?”
The male sauntered in with a dark smile, resting his armored forearms on the back of the chair Rares had just occupied. “I got the last one.”
Fuck, yes.
Drazen had been searching for every male who’d had a shift in the cave where Izidora had been chained since the moment we returned to the Iron Realm, slowly gathering them for me to carve up and kill as vengeance for my mate. I wanted it to be a group execution, so each male watched his comrades die slowly around him, heightening the delicious scent of fear when eachknew his end was near. Their pleas for mercy would be my music as I peeled the flesh from their skin and watched the life fade from their eyes.
It would be my greatest gift to Izidora yet.
“Have you taken them all to Vasvain?” I asked, leaning back in my chair and drumming my fingers together.
Drazen shook his head. “Not yet. They all remain in the dungeon. With Béke going on, I didn’t want to risk moving them without your permission.”
I weighed my options. With Drazen and me participating in each competition, we couldn’t move them while everyone was preoccupied. And since only the two of us knew of this plan, I couldn’t ask anyone else to do it. We’d have to wait until the dead of night to move them to the cave where Izidora had been chained. It would be poetic that we’d slaughter them there like the pigs they were. “Tonight, we’ll take them there,” I concluded, “and keep them alive enough for the next few days – I want to kill them myself.”
