Chapter 68: Where is She

Karina??!!

Her name tore out of him, and in the dream she was already falling, blood blooming across the front of her gown as Dorian withdrew his hand from her chest with the same grin he had worn back at the palace.

She hit the ground and didn’t move, and Leonidas was screaming before he even understood what he was screaming, clawing his way toward her across a floor that kept stretching further away no matter how hard he ran—

"Karina?! Where is she— WHERE IS SHE—"

Leonidas jolted upright with a gasp, chest heaving, sweat soaking through the bandages wrapped tight around his side. His vision swam back into focus far too slowly for his liking.

A hand cracked across his face.

Uh?!

Zarek stood over him, hand still raised from the slap, unbothered by the murder currently flashing in Leonidas’s eyes.

"Calm down, would you?"

"You—" Leonidas blinked, the fog of the dream still clinging stubbornly to the edges of his mind. "You hit me."

"You were screaming like a man being murdered." Zarek lowered his hand. "It was the fastest solution available."

Leonidas stared at him, several very slow seconds passing before the rest of the room swam into focus around Zarek’s face. Stone walls. A healer’s chamber, somewhere in the palace. The Empress’s palace.

"Oh." He exhaled. "I’m here."

"Astute observation."

"Hmm." Leonidas pressed the heel of his hand against his eyes, willing the last of the nightmare to loosen its grip. "Where’s the Empress. Is she safe?"

"Safe. Currently pacing a hole into the floor two rooms down, but safe."

"Rafael?"

"Also alive, also currently sleeping off a concussion that would have killed a lesser man." Zarek crossed his arms. "What happened?"

Leonidas’s mouth went dry.

"A man," he said slowly. He’s...."

Leonidas swallowed hard, the words lodging somewhere behind his ribs. "He’s coming to kill Karina. And—" A pit formed in his stomach. "Valen."

He was moving already, ignoring the way his side screamed in protest, shoving the blankets off and trying to force his legs to hold his weight.

"I need to move. I need to get to them, I need to—"

"Sit down, you fool."

A groan sounded from the corner of the room, and Leonidas belatedly noticed a second figure seated there, watching this entire display with an exasperated expression.

"Why," the man muttered, "are they always so foolish."

Leonidas paused. "You’re talking to me that way?"

The man looked him dead in the eye. "It’s good to see you too, Leonidas."

Leonidas blinked, memory finally catching up. "...Oh. Corvin."

Leonidas remembered Corvin, Zarek’s right hand man who had zero tolerance for displays of foolishness. He was one of the people who could insult a king, and get away with it.

"In the flesh.." Corvin sighed. "Sit down before you tear your stitches and force innocent people to redo three hours of work."

"Where is my son?" Leonidas ignored him, still trying to swing his legs off the bed despite Zarek’s hand shoving him firmly back down by the shoulder. "My son. The Empress. I need to see them—"

"You’ll see them when you’re better," Zarek said, in a tone that left no room for argument. "You can’t see them like this. You’ll frighten them."

"I don’t care if I—"

"Yes, you do." Zarek’s voice dropped. "Your son already watched them carry you inside covered in blood once today. Do you really want him seeing you like this too, still half out of your mind, ranting about a man trying to kill his mother?"

That landed harder than the slap had.

Leonidas sank back against the pillows quietly.

Corvin returned to whatever he had been doing before, muttering something under his breath about beast kings and their lack of self-preservation instincts. Zarek settled into the chair beside the bed without another word, his gaze fixed on the panther king.

Leonidas closed his eyes.

Dorian’s face swam up behind his eyelids anyway, the same cruelty in his voice as he had talked about the old King’s experiments, about the murders, about all of it.

Your father experimented on us.

His father had been a monster. Leonidas had spent years telling himself otherwise, telling himself the man had simply been strict, demanding, difficult, anything softer than the truth. But he had seen the truth now, up close, buried wrist-deep in his own side.

But another thought nagged at him.

What was he, then? What had he become, all those years he had ignored Valen, all those years he had let his own son flinch away from him rather than run toward him?

He had become a mirror of his own father, just a less murderous one.

Damn it.

~

Daerys had noticed the moment Valen stopped talking.

It wasn’t unusual, exactly, for Valen to go quiet, he did that sometimes, curling into himself like a book snapping shut. But this was different. And Daerys knew why. It had started after his father had come, blood all over him.

He shuffled closer, dragging his favorite wooden block along the floor, and held it out like an offering.

"Wanna play?"

Valen didn’t answer. He sat curled on the window seat, knees drawn up to his chest, staring out at nothing in particular.

"Valen." Daerys tried again, poking his arm with one small finger. "We could pretend the dragons are attacking the castle. You always like being the dragon."

Nothing.

Daerys frowned. He sat down heavily beside Valen instead, giving up on the game entirely, and simply leaned his small head against his shoulder.

His favorite person in the whole palace looked like hurt, and Daerys didn’t like it one bit.

Valen didn’t move when Daerys leaned against him. He didn’t tell him to go away, either.

He wasn’t entirely sure why his chest felt so tight, why he kept replaying the image of his father lying there on the steps, gray and still and covered in blood. He didn’t even like his father, not really. His father had ignored him for years, had let him grow up thinking Papa simply didn’t want him around.

But.

But he also kept remembering the sound his mother had made when she had seen him in the courtyard. And he kept thinking, somewhere underneath all the old hurt, that he didn’t actually want his father to die.

He just wanted, very badly, for someone to tell him he wouldn’t.

Down the hall, a door creaked open, and Valen’s head snapped toward the sound before he could stop himself.