A Chill in the Flame (Villains #1)

Fourteen

Fourteen

That Night

Ophir remained numb as she stared at her bodyguard. Harland watched the dark-haired stranger depart from her chambers. The princess snuck lovers into her bed more times than he or any of her former guards could count. This was different. Dwyn had told him what she’d done.

“Firi…” His voice was thick and low as he struggled to choke out her name.

“Don’t” was her quiet reply. Bathwater dripped from her still-soaked hair onto her shoulders. She stared at the sandy footprints on the rug as she waited for him to speak.

He looked at her unflinchingly, though she did not return his gaze. “She said you tried to drown.”

The man looked as though his heart had cracked. Under normal circumstances, Harland would have taken off after an intruder and interrogated them as to why they’d been present in the princess’s room. Nothing had been normal about that morning.

“Caris is dead,” she said, her voice somewhere between numb and asleep as she spoke from beneath the oceans of disbelief. He shook his head as he rejected the statement. These were just words. They had no meaning.

“I know.”

“…It took me until now to understand what I saw. And once I let it sink in—once I truly felt it—I didn’t want to be here anymore.” Perhaps he felt like she had. This was a strange, awful joke. A mistake.

“Murder is unthinkable,” he said. “I can’t imagine what you’re going through. But this isn’t your fault.”

“It is.” She stared at the bathwater pooling on the rug near her feet. “I took her to a party, and it was like…it was as if they planned it. They separated us. They drugged us. The way it happened…” Her voice drifted. “You didn’t see the way they cut her open.”

He went rigid. “What do you mean, cut her open ? Healers? The people who prepared her for the funeral?”

“Her killers,” Ophir said, not feeling the words. “They cut her down the middle. They took out the very things that made her alive like they were pulling weeds from a garden.”

She saw the mechanisms of his mind whirring behind his eyes as he pieced her words together. She understood the delay. It had taken her days to process the horrors.

“Ophir, are you telling me they killed her to take things from her?” When she said nothing, he emphasized, “Are you saying they killed Caris for her organs?”

Ophir went silent as Harland moved for the door and closed it behind him. His voice dropped a register. He spoke low and urgently as he pressed his back into it, barricading her from the world beyond.

“Are you safe?”

She nearly pitied him. The poor, good guard had no way of knowing that the threat was there in the room with them. She had taken herself into the sea. She had dragged Caris, against her will, into a party and convinced her to have a drink. Ophir had told Caris to relax and have fun. She’d encouraged her sister to drink the poison. She’d murdered her sister. She was the danger.

Ophir closed her eyes in a long, slow blink. She hadn’t slept. She had scarcely breathed, save for the odd moments she’d relaxed enough in Dwyn’s presence to allow herself to think she might be dreaming.

Harland made her tell him everything, and in those numb, early hours, she obliged. She hid nothing. She recounted everything from the way her sister’s hands had been tied to keep her on her back, and the colors of the men’s masks, to the location of the party and the sickening feel of entrails against her fingers when she’d pulled Caris to her. She knew in no uncertain terms that August had come looking for her. The warrior had died trying to save his charge, and within the next few hours Harland would doubtlessly be hearing as much from the other staff. She was vaguely aware that someone had been there to help her, though she could not describe him. His voice had been musical, she said, though Harland more or less chalked more than one bit of information up to shock.

Ophir had killed Caris. She had killed August. She had killed so many by insisting they go to that party—a den of sin that her sweet sister would have never willingly entered. It had been her selfishness, her wanderlust, her need for excitement and thrill of disobedience that had urged her out of the castle that night with their dresses and masks. They’d slipped past the guards, evaded detection, and overlooked every possible opportunity to abort their foolish mission and turn back.

“Ophir, look at me.” He was kneeling before her where she sat on the bed staring despondently into the distance. “I know this is hard, but this is very important. Explain what you meant when you said they cut her open.”

She felt herself disappearing with every passing second. She blinked at him again, struggling to understand the relevance in any of it. She didn’t want to be here. She didn’t want to be anywhere.

“I’ve told you everything.”

“You haven’t,” he insisted. There was a stress and comfort coupled in his two words. Though she didn’t like what he was saying, he was right. She hadn’t. Some scabs were too painful to reopen. His expression softened as he said, “Please, Ophir.”

“Why?” She croaked the word.

“Because: it could be nothing. Or, it could be everything.”

Seconds ticked into a minute, but his gaze did not falter.

“She was nearly naked when I found her. Her dress was still on, but it had been shredded down the middle. The stranger kept shouting for me to stop and not to touch her before he carried me out. Maybe he didn’t want me to feel what it was like to truly feel horror. They’d cut open her belly.”

“Just her belly?”

Ophir came sharply into her body, veins flooding with something cold and angry all at once. “What do you mean, ‘ Just her belly’ ? Is that not enough?”

He reached out a comforting hand and she slapped it away. He struggled to look patient. “Please, I know it’s hard, but try to remember. What else did you see in the room? Was it just men and a bed and your sister?”

He had used that word again— just . As if those three things weren’t the single most horrifying combination in the goddess’s lighted kingdom. She used to find him so comforting. He’d been a friend to her. A source of companionship. A safety net. What was he now?

“Just?”

“Firi—”

“Stop.” Anger surged through her, and it comforted her. Fury was a beautiful emotion compared to the shock and horror that had consumed her. “What do you want from me? I don’t have the energy to play whatever game this is.”

He tightened his grip on her hand. “Think, Ophir. Was there anything else? Bowls? Books? Daggers? Metals? Was she missing any of her organs? Was she still wearing her…underthings?”

A high ringing sound filled her ears. She’d heard the sound before in the moments before she’d been sick. It filled her now as a new and terrible nausea gripped her, raking through her body. She ran to the bathing room to grip the edges of the chamber pot, releasing whatever remnants of acid and liquid had remained in her stomach. She would not be answering any more questions. Not now, or ever again.

“Go fuck yourself,” she snarled.

Harland would have his answers eventually. While the casket had been closed, it had been passed along from the medical examiner that she’d been missing her liver. There was no relief, no victory, no goodness in the world when a parent learned their child had died. The only small kindness was the knowledge that she had not been deflowered, though there was far more to sexual assault than the overly simplistic terms that they were disgustingly distilling the word into. Everyone had believed that Caris had been dragged into the room to be violated by the men in attendance who had been all too thrilled to get their evil, perverse hands on a princess.

Only a few people did not seem comforted by this information. For some sick, unknowable reason, Harland had seemed further disquieted at the knowledge that she’d died with her maidenhood intact. Perhaps crimes of a deviant sexual nature were easier to accept and understand than whatever unholy horrors had been attempted in the room that night.

The knowledge that they’d taken only her liver had bothered him deeply—he’d said as much. He didn’t understand why they’d chosen that piece of the princess, except that perhaps their process had been interrupted before they could access more. When Ophir had screamed at him and told him that she’d shove a fireball down his throat if he ever spoke of her sister like that again, he’d gone fully silent on the topic.

Harland would mention nothing more of his suspicions.

Ophir dropped into a living comatose state. Whatever pieces of her that were still capable of feeling were surprised every day that the sun continued to rise and birds continued to sing. Beautiful blue skies mocked her. The happy faces of laughing children were an affront too grotesque to face, so she refrained from leaving the castle. She would spend autumn, winter, and spring in her room, draining the winery of its reds and whites regardless of their year or finery. She didn’t want music. She didn’t want companionship. She didn’t want anything except for Caris to be alive. She wanted to be gone in her sister’s place.