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The king’s gaze still had a hint of lingering madness as it fixed on me, a mosaic of joy, grief, guilt, rage, and something else brewing in his eyes like a morning storm. He swallowed to compose himself, then swept his now calmer gaze over my mates. “Princes, I see you’ve brought my granddaughter back and are now cozy with her.”
“You should have told us the Furies were Daisy, King Daghda,” Blaze grated. “We almost killed her!”
At the reminder, my joy at the sight of my grandfather receded, rage replacing it.
King Daghda arched a golden eyebrow at Blaze before fixing his attention on me again. “We can discuss that another day, Princes. Now, if you’ll excuse us, I need to speak to my heir alone.”
I swallowed a choke and pushed out the air from my tight throat.
“Where I stay, my mates stay,” I said, keeping my face blank, though I could feel muscles twisting across my face at the burst of anger. “If you have any explanation, my mates are here to listen as well.”
He narrowed his eyes at my defiance. The old king was still intimidating, but we stood our ground and stared back at him, not friendly.
“We stay where Princess Daisy stays,” Rai said simply. “We won’t go anywhere without our mate.”
King Daghda snorted. “Already mated, I see. And to three? When was the wedding? Why wasn’t I invited?”
This was how he welcomed me back—giving me attitude after his hunters had failed to take my heads? Well, I wouldn’t have the stomach to take his head, no matter what he’d done to me, unless he came to harm my mates. However, that didn’t mean I wouldn’t take the crown from him. He no longer deserved it. Not only had he tried to eliminate me when I hadn’t done anything to deserve it, but he’d abandoned the realm and his people.
“We’ll have the ceremony when our mate is truly safe,” Iokul said coldly. He’d just hinted that I wasn’t safe with my grandfather.
All my mates were as tense as whips ready to snap and attack. Their eyes never left the king, their hands close to their swords.
KingDaghda snorted at our defensive poses.
Adrian chose the moment to push through the guards. I wondered if his loyalty would lie with the old king or with me, but I knew he would never harm me, no matter what.
Daghda gave all of us another sweeping, thoughtful glance and suddenly laughed. “This is exactly what I wished for,” he said.
CHAPTER 15
“Wished for what,Grandfather, my head?” I asked, my voice bitingly cold.
“You came back with your three true loves,”KingDaghda said.
“You achieved that by sending three ships of hunters to take my head,” I said.
“Two ships,” he said. “I came up with the brilliant idea as soon as the Archangel delivered your message and gave me the coordinates. You have no idea what it meant to me to finally know you were alive.” He paused to recollect himself.KingDaghda hadn’t been one who had needed to compose himself. He’d been an ancient mountain that couldn’t be touched or moved. Or that was what I’d thought.
The next second, the storm left his burning amber eyes.
“We have ancient enemies, very powerful ones,” he said, “and they aren’t just dark Fae.”
I knew Fae and dragons had been in war for eons, but the war had stopped when I was born. A veil had been put up to separate the two realms where no Fae could cross over to the Dragon Realm, and the dragons couldn’t trespass on the Fae territory, either.
KingDaghda stepped into the room, and his guard immediately brought him a chair, which meant this wouldn’t be a short visit.
The king sat and gestured for us to take a seat. I perched on the edge of the hard chair across from him, Rai, Iokul, and Blaze stood behind me, just like the royal guards lined up behind my grandfather.
“I was being watched,”KingDaghda said. “There are spies all over the realm, and I couldn’t purge them. I hadn’t been the same since your father died defending your mother. I neglected my duties as the king, driven by grief. When you were born, and I learned about your curse . . . Not a day passed that I wasn’t terrified it would come to pass. I sent my most trusted men to the corner of the universe to find the cure for the curse, but most of them never returned. They perished. That was how far and deep our enemies—the Fae, the demons, and witch covens—could reach. Only a handful of my trusted council knew about the curse you carried, and I intended to keep it that way. I forbade any of them to let you know anything about it or your half-Fae heritage, hoping for the best that if you didn’t know it, then the curse wouldn’t be real.”
That was why my grandfather had forbidden so many things in the realm and limited where I could go or what I could do.
“You almost locked me up in the palace tower during my childhood,” I accused. “You were reluctant to let me roam free even inside the castle. After I constantly fought you, you let me only have freedom in the Dragon Realm. In my first fifteen years, you never permitted me to go to the six cities, even though the humans were my subjects, too.”
“The Fae, our most lethal enemies, couldn’t come to the Dragon Realm,” the king said. “But they infiltrated the human cities. I couldn’t risk you.”
The only Fae who were allowed to enter were Elvey and Rosalinda after I’d offered them the path to the Dragon Realm through my blood ritual.
