Total pages in book: 401
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 390373 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 1952(@200wpm)___ 1561(@250wpm)___ 1301(@300wpm)
“How did you get yours?”
“Craven,” I answered. “I was a child when my father and…when the people I was with were attacked.”
“Your father?”
“The man I believed was my father.” The smell was getting stronger. It smelled rotten. “Leopold and—” Attes’s loud cough drew my gaze. “You okay?”
Attes coughed loudly, drawing my gaze, then blinked rapidly.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” he croaked. “Inhaled wrong.”
“Primal gods can inhale wrong?”
He cleared his throat, blinking rapidly. “You still can, right?”
I wisely kept my mouth shut because, knowing my luck, I was seconds away from choking on a gnat.
“What did you say his name was?” he asked.
“Leopold.” I frowned at him. “Why?”
“Just wasn’t sure if I heard the name right.”
Something about his response didn’t sit right with me. Primals couldn’t tell outright lies, but I more than anyone, knew one could omit the truth. “You didn’t answer my question about the scar.”
“I’ll tell you about it after.”
My eyes narrowed. “That’s bullshit. I told you how I got mine.”
A grin tugged at his lips. “I know.”
“Glad we’re on the same page,” I grumbled, turning my attention back to the manor. “You going to tell me the real reason you choked…” I trailed off as we rounded a slight bend, and the dead trees thinned out enough for me to see the sweeping colonnade.
My steps faltered, and my stomach dropped as I stared at the things hanging between the ivory pillars. Swaying.
I now knew for sure what the smell was.
Rot. Decay.
I also knew where the Blood Crown had gotten their penchant for displaying bodies.
“I warned you,” Attes said quietly.
He had.
He had said I would see worse. My gaze crawled over the colonnade. There had to be dozens of them hanging there. Likely mortals. Servants? Most of their clothing was stained and torn, but I could make out the black uniforms of Rise Guards on some of them. Had they resisted? Or had this been done out of cruelty?
“Kolis’s taste in décor leaves much to be desired,” Attes remarked.
My gaze lifted to their heads. Bile rose. Their faces were obscured by white veils or shrouds. Eather thrummed as I picked up my pace.
This wasn’t just Kolis making himself feel at home with his morbid decorating choices. The white veils were a message.
The eather hummed violently in my chest, causing the tips of my fingers to tingle. Anger and disgust churned as the breeze lifted the edges of the veils. Why? That was the question that kept repeating itself. Why do this? What purpose did this serve? Why did life mean so little? The eather in my blood heated.
“You need to calm,” Attes stated.
“I am.” I headed for the steps.
The sudden contact of Attes’s hand around my forearm as he stopped me sent a jolt of energy coursing through me that was quickly followed by an odd sense of familiarity. My gaze flew to the fingers wrapped around my forearm and then slowly rose to his. “You’re going to want to let go.”
Tension gathered at the corners of his mouth. “I would love to.”
My fingers twitched. “Then what’s stopping you?”
He moved his stare to the colonnade. I followed his gaze, my breath catching as I saw thin cracks forming at the bottoms of the pillars and spreading across the steps. I felt the faint tremor in the ground beneath us then.
“You’re calm?” he asked, his voice low.
Clearly, I wasn’t.
“I can only imagine what’s going through your head right now, what you’re feeling,” Attes said, keeping his voice barely audible.
What I was feeling? I was furious, disturbed, and a hundred other things as my gaze returned to the swaying bodies. My lungs burned as I pressed my lips together. I tugged on my arm.
His grip tightened on my arm. “You’ve seen worse, Poppy.”
My entire body jerked as my head snapped in his direction. “When I was Sotoria…?”
A muscle flexed along his jaw. He nodded curtly. “And you’ve seen worse in this lifetime.”
A wave of tiny bumps broke out over my skin. I had thought exactly that minutes ago, but I knew he couldn’t have known that. “How would you know?” Something occurred to me. “Seraphena?”
The muscle by his temple ticked now, and his silence was the answer. It hadn’t been Seraphena.
“How?” I repeated.
Attes remained silent, and for some reason, possibly the vadentia, the image of a large bird of prey flashed in my mind.
I sucked in a short breath. “Have you been watching me—watching us—while in stasis? Like Seraphena did?”
His nostrils flared. “We really don’t have the time to go into this, especially when you make it sound like that. Like it’s something disturbing.”
“How else is it supposed to sound?” I demanded.
“Not like that,” he muttered. I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “He can feel your essence, Poppy. He knows you’re here. He’s known from the moment we got here. And now he knows you’re angry.” His chest rose, even though I didn’t hear him inhale. “You’re already fucking up.”