The King

FORTY-EIGHT

It was in fact possible, if you ran long enough and hard enough, to make the body feel as if you had been in a fist fight.

As Wrath continued to pound his Nikes into the treadmill, he thought about his last sparring session with Payne.

He had lied to her. Back when he’d finally assumed the throne in a serious way, the brothers and Beth had confronted him with a set of “guidelines” intended to chill him out on the ol’ physical-risk profile. Not exactly a happy convo, and he’d broken the rules at least once that everyone knew about, and a number of times that nobody had caught him at. And after he’d been discovered fighting downtown, he’d agreed anew to put up the daggers but for ceremonial work—and since then, the scent of his shellan’s disappointment had been enough to keep him in line.

Well, that and the fact that he’d lost his remaining eyesight entirely at about that time.

The bunch of them hadn’t been wrong. The King needed to be breathing most of all; taking down slayers in the back of an alley in Caldwell could not be the primary directive anymore.

And no sparring with the brothers, either.

None of them wanted to roll the dice with possibly hurting him.

Except then Payne had presented herself, and though he’d first assumed she was a male, when her true identity had been discovered, he’d been given a pass … precisely because she was a female.

He thought of her sneaking into the males’ locker room and putting that knife to his throat.

He supposed now … he could fight with anyone he liked. And that he owed her an apology.

Reaching down, he increased the treadmill’s speed. This one machine had been retrofitted with hooks on the console and a padded belt that had been made for him. With bungee cords strung between the two, he could go hands off and still keep on the machine, the subtle pulls on his waist telling him where he was in relation to the running surface.

Handy on a night like tonight. Oh, wait … it was daytime, now.

Falling into a faster rhythm, he found that as always, his head had a way of floating above the exertion, as if with his body engaged and working, it was free to drift. Unfortunately, like a helicopter with faulty gauges, it kept ramming into rocky cliffs: his parents, his shellan, the possibility of a future young, all the empty years stretching out before him.

If he only had his eyesight. At least then he could credibly go out and engage with the enemy. But now he was trapped—by his blindness, by his Beth, by the chance that she was with young.

Of course, if she hadn’t been in his life? He would have gone on a killing bender until he died honorably in the field. Although, hell, without her, he probably wouldn’t have bothered doing anything about ascending in the first place.

He knew he should never have tried that fucking crown on his head.

After everything his father had done in such a tragically short time, he should have followed his first instincts and walked the fuck away. The race had been fine going rudderless for a couple of centuries; probably could have kept that shit up indefinitely.

He thought of Ichan. Maybe that SOB was going to discover that modern populations didn’t need kings.

Or more to the point, maybe Xcor and the Bastards were going to learn that lesson.

Whatever.

Wrath went to increase the speed again—and found that he’d tapped the machine out on velocity. Cursing, he resettled into his already breakneck pace, and thought of his father, sitting behind the very desk that he himself could no longer see or use, parchment rolls and ink pots, quill pens and leather-bound volumes covering the carved surface.

He could just picture that male behind it all, sporting a half smile of contentment as he melted wax himself and pressed the royal crested ring into it—

“Wrath!”

“Wha—” Cue the squealing of rubber as he yanked out the safety key and jumped to the side rails. “Beth—?”

“Wrath, oh, my God—”

“Are you okay—”

“Wrath, I’ve got the solution—”

He could not fucking breathe. “About … what?”

“I know what we have to do!”

Wrath frowned as he panted and braced his hands on the rails in the event his jelly legs gave up the ghost and he torpedoed. And yet even through the hypoxia, his female’s scent was strong with purpose and conviction, her natural undertones sharpened so they got through to him clearly.

Grabbing the towel he’d slung over the console, he mopped his face. “Beth, for the love of Christ. Will you please stop—”

“Divorce me.”

In spite of all the exercise-induced suffocation, he stopped breathing. “I’m sorry,” he said roughly. “But I did not hear that.”

“Dissolve our mating. Effective yesterday—when for all intents and purposes you were still King.”

Wrath started shaking his head, all kinds of thoughts jamming up his brain. “I’m not hearing you say that—”

“If you get rid of me, you get rid of the grounds they used. No grounds, no removal. You have the throne and—”

“Are you out of your fucking mind!” he bellowed. “What the fuck are you talking about!”

There was a slight pause. Like she was surprised he wasn’t all into her bright idea.

“Wrath, seriously. This is the way to get the throne back.”

As the bonded male in him started screaming at the top of its lungs, he was an inch from exploding—but he’d already trashed one whole room in the compound. And the brothers would kill him if he smashed up their weight room.

Attempting to keep his voice level, he failed miserably: “No fucking way!”

“It’s just a piece of paper!” she hollered back. “What the hell does it matter?”

“You’re my shellan!”

“It’s all about carrots!”

Annnnnnnnnnd that stopped him dead. Shaking his head to clear it some, he said, “I’m sorry—what?”

Little hard to transition from ending their relationship to root frickin’ vegetables.

“Look, you and I are together because we love each other. A piece of paper one way or another is not going to change us—”

“No, absolutely not—I’m not going to give those assholes the satisfaction of fucking you over—”

“Listen to me.” She grabbed onto his forearm and squeezed. “I want you to calm down and listen to me.”

It was the weirdest thing. As wound up as he was, when she gave him a direct order like that? He followed like a foot soldier.

“Predate the dissolution of marriage—mating—whatever. Don’t give them any rationale, you don’t want to look like it’s reactionary. Then decide whether or not you want to stay King. But that way? It’s not my fault. Right now, like it or not, I’m the reason you’re losing the throne, and I can’t go through the rest of our lives feeling responsible for something like that. It’ll kill me.”

“Sacrificing you is not the way—”

“We’re not sacrificing me in the slightest. I don’t care about being queen. I care about being by your side—and no crown or edict or whatever is going to change that.”

“You could be carrying our offspring right now. Are you saying you want to bring that young into the world a bastard?”

“They wouldn’t be to me. They wouldn’t be to you.”

“But to others…”

“Like who? You telling me Vishous would think the kid’s something less? Tohr? Rhage? Any of the Brothers—their shellans? What about Qhuinn and Blay—Qhuinn’s not mated to Layla. Does that mean you’d look down on that child?”

“This household’s not the ‘others’ I was talking about.”

“So who is, precisely? We never see the glymera—thank God—and I don’t believe I’ve ever met what you guys call a commoner. Well, except for Ehlena and Xhex, I guess. I mean, all these citizens of the race—they never come here, and is that going to change? I don’t think so.” She squeezed his arm again. “Besides, you were worried about putting our kid on the throne? This takes care of that problem, too.”

Wrath broke off from her hold on him and wanted to pace—except he didn’t know the weight room layout well enough not to land on his ass.

He settled for wiping his face again. “I don’t want the throne enough to divorce you. I just don’t. It’s the principle, Beth.”

“Well, if it makes you feel better, I’ll divorce you.”

He blinked behind his wraparounds. “Not going to happen. I’m sorry, but I will not do this.”

His leelan’s voice cracked. “I can’t spend the rest of my life thinking it’s my fault. I just can’t.”

“But it isn’t. It honestly isn’t. Look, I just … I gotta let the past go, you know? I can’t hold on to my parents this way. That shit isn’t healthy.” He let his head fall back. “Goddamn, I mean, you’d figure I’d be over it by now. Losing them, that is.”

“I don’t think people ever get past that kind of thing—especially the way it happened to you.”

Flashes came back of his scrawny pretrans self locked in that crawl space, watching through a knothole in the wood as his parents were cut into pieces. It was always the same film reel, the same glints of sword blades and screams of pain and terror … and it always ended the same, with the two most important people in his life up to that point gone, gone, gone.

He wasn’t going to lose Beth. Not even in a figurative way.

“No,” he said with utter finality.

Reaching over, he put his hand on her womb. “I’ve lost my past and there’s nothing I can do to change that. I will not lose my future—even for the throne.”