Page 8 of The Stolen Crown

With more clarity, I scanned my body. My dress was askew, bodice shredded and bloody, slightly baring my breasts through the low-cut diaphanous shift I wore beneath my gowns. Nearby, two deep voices were arguing.

“What a fool you are for coming here, Filib.”

Gods, his tone rumbled through my veins with the same passion as a storm churned the sea. He was here, truly this time. Likely grousing about it, of course. But he was here.

I was safe.

“I cannot help my nature, Heartwalker. Once we have had a taste, I cannot resist another. She calls for my voice. Her heart should be mine.”

“Your hands should never have touched her. Certainly not a second time.”

“Please. Please, no…”

I blinked. Shadows, hazy and made of mist, crept into the edges of my gaze.

But through the darkness was a pair of bright eyes. Not as red as the Ever King’s, but not so gold he looked innocent.

My chest swelled with a raucous heat. I felt the corners of my lips lift into a grin when I met the true gaze of my surly sea fae escort. “Couldn’t keep away from me, I see.”

“Seems impossible since you keep taking such drastic measures to get my attention.”

I thought I might’ve chuckled, but soon the world fell away into a cold, fitful night.

3

The Heartwalker

A tremble rolled from my shoulders to the ends of my fingers. An urge, almost insatiable, to reach out and shield her limp form from the sight of others. One of my palms twitched, but I curled it into a tight fist.

The warmth of her skin would only bring disquiet and jagged knots that tightened in my throat. Perhaps a part of me did not want to confirm it, my unspoken fear that Mira Sekundär was like all the rest—painful, nauseating, jagged glass on the skin.

Filib was on his knees, hands out like a pitiful supplicant. “I cannot be helping myself, Heartwalker.”

I could not touch the softness of the princess, but I held no qualms about bruising the rotted flesh of the sea singer. “If I recall, you said much the same when you touched the princess in the House of Bones not so long ago.”

When my queen was taken from the Ever, we’d hunted her across the kingdom, including the House of Bones where Gavyn Bonerotter held the lord’s seat. While there, Filib took to Mira straightaway and entranced her to the point of madness.

She’d clung to me that day, leaned against me, filled my lungs with the golden scent of her wretchedly beautiful hair. Her skin pressed to mine had unleashed such a torrent of chaos in my thoughts, my lungs, my body, I’d made quick work of stacking even more barbed walls between us.

The grudge I’d held for this particular sea singer was long overdue to be paid.

I curled my fingers around the fleshy sinews of his face and drew his pustule-ridden brow toward mine. “Why the glamour fae? Why did it have to be her?”

Only a whimper slipped over his peeling lips. The sea singer’s eyes were yellow, like a boil ready to split open. But fear was there. I basked in it, craved it. I yearned to have a place to unleash every drop of restrained violence in my veins.

My cousin shouldered the weight of being a brutal, ruthless king. Erik revealed his cruelty in the sunlight. I’d always unleashed mine in the shadows.

Filib winced when I slammed one palm against his rotted chest and started to hum. Low, controlled, and deep.

The surge of brine coated my tongue, like a wash of the sea that flooded my mind with Filib’s desires. Gods, the depraved way he wanted to take her heart, the way he wanted to devour it slowly, slurping and savoring. Unbidden, my teeth clamped until my jaw throbbed and my fingernails dug into the acrid flesh of the sea singer, drawing blood.

True intentions, fierce desires, the honest nature of a heart, all of it could be revealed by my voice.

Filib winced when I tightened my grip on his pulpy jaw. “I—I—I had…had her, Heartwalker. I had her.” His voice roughened. “You know once the scent of a heart settles inside a singer, it cannot be undone.”

Sea singers were amongst the more monstrous creatures of the Ever Seas. When a scent filled their lungs, it never left. That was the reason Erik slaughtered the singer who’d once ensnared Livia.

The king hadn’t offered the same fate to the glamour fae princess. I could oblige now well enough.