Blood of Two Crowns (Hallowed Fates #2)

Chapter 8

Chapter

Eight

NAKOA

M y patience wore as thin as the stone of the bedroom balcony I was pacing a hole into. The gnawing agony of the tether bonding me to Mareina had faded to a dull throb, and instead of being relieved, it had heightened my anxiety.

You’re losing her.

My anxiety had drowned out my Knowingness, and now I couldn’t even tell the difference between it and my paranoia.

A moonless night had fallen and everyone, as far as I knew, was sound asleep. There’d still been no sign of my father returning which had only served to enhance the tension winding through me.

In all my years, I never thought I’d ever be so desperate for Miroslav’s presence. I projected my thoughts and my intent into the aether, hoping that I might be heard.

Miroslav…

Silence.

Miroslav. Miroslav. Miroslav. Miroslav. Miroslav. Miroslav.

More silence.

“He’s ignoring you.”

I froze midstep at the sound of the gravelly voice and swept my gaze up the side of the palace wall. Above the balcony, I found my father perched on the balcony above like a gargoyle. Sinewy wingtips and horns pointed like spires above him. He looked more animal than fae. Or whatever he was. A question that had been chiselling away at my fraying sanity because I had never seen a fae who bared my physical traits nor my magical ones.

Dropping 20 feet from above, he lifted his wings at the last second to lighten his descent, sending a gust of air that blew my hair back. My father landed in front of me with the stealth of a feline. His scent, one that reminded me of burning wood and something faintly sweet like amber, was muddled with numerous others, punctuated by the metallic tang of blood. Lots of blood.

My eyes dipped to the black, blade-like claws, tipping his fingers.

They needed trimming.

Fae didn’t need blood to survive, and I certainly hadn’t either, but perhaps that was in thanks to Zurie.

“You’re able to read thoughts?”

He shook his head, making the long, overgrown sheet of his hair sway, catching a glint of moonlight that revealed a streak of white. “Emotion. Intent. Desire. Needs.”

“How did you know who I was directing my thoughts to?”

“You were deliberately projecting your thoughts. Loudly. My mind is already open to yours. Connected because we are of the same blood and ilk.”

My heart leapt in my throat as the question finally reached my lips.

“What are… we?”

“Your mother didn’t tell you?”

“I only met her yesterday.”

“I mean Leilani. She never told you who I was?”

“No.”

My father’s features tightened, lit only vaguely by the fae light touching the balcony. “Perhaps it was for the best. It would have made things too obvious if you had ever told anyone. We are Nephilim.”

The word settled on me like an affirmation, as though this was something I already distantly knew but had never deigned to acknowledge because I didn’t have the resources to piece the puzzle together. I had only ever seen them illustrated in historical tomes.

The fact I’d always believed him to be fae based solely on my mother’s word made me wonder if I even knew his real name.

“My mother told me your name was Tavian.”

The male’s brows pinched in disbelief before his head tipped back with laughter that sounded like tumbling boulders.

“Tavian?”

It was a relief to hear and feel my father’s laughter. It even had a smile blooming on my face for the first time in too many days since we had all been at Val’s chasing pixies. Mareina’s absence made the memory feel like a vice around my heart.

“Do you know a Tavian or something?”

My father’s claw-tipped hand clutches his broad chest as it continues to rumble with laughter. “Yes. Though I imagine the male is dead by now. He was Zurie’s Irae and a simpering fool. Miroslav and I had an ongoing game that involved him trying to woo Zurie with everything she hated. Leilani knew the male got under my skin.”

Zurie’s Irae.

The surprise that he was apparently close with my adoptive mother and Miroslav was stifled by the burning of mine and Mareina’s tether. My father winced as if it caused him pain. Thankfully, he doesn’t ask about it because the last thing I feel like explaining to him is the absolutely fucked state of mine and Mareina’s relationship. Or the fact that she left me for another male.

The moment the thought passed, his expression turned pained, and it really made me wonder if he also had a Knowingness.

“My name is Rumiel. Miroslav told me a lot about you over the years… I even chose your name.”

“My name? You knew about me? This whole time?”

He nodded, some unreadable emotion glittering in the twin black pools of his.

“But… If Miroslav knew you were down there, why couldn’t he have freed you?”

A corner of Rumiel’s mouth tilted up gently in a sad smile. “Do you mean other than face Zurie’s wrath and thus certain death because he vowed in blood not to harm her?”

At my silence, he continued.

“Zurie was the only one capable of opening my tomb. She made certain of that.”

I shook my head in disbelief. “But surely, there was some way to bargain with her… Something. You just spent 120 years in a fucking tomb! This whole time, you were right here! I could have had?—

Emotion clawed its way up my throat and I had to draw in a deep breath to ease it away. My father’s eyes began to glisten, and he reached out to grip my shoulder.

“You and your soulbound are destined to save Bellorum. In order for you both to become the only two people in this realm capable of doing so, there were certain things that needed to occur so that you could become who you are today… Just as a sculptor hammers and chisels away at slabs of marble to create their divinely inspired works, so are we all sculpted by fate…”

Indignance and anger were a buried blade in my chest.

Surely, not all of that fucking suffering was necessary.

“… Even if Miroslav had been able to free me, Zurie would have killed the both of us, and he would never have been there to save you when you were born, or in the future. And there will come a time when you need him to.”

“… He took me from her when I was born?”

Rumiel’s expression darkened. “Zurie ordered your death when he told her that you were destined to usurp her throne. And your fate, left in her hands, had you grown up with her...” Rumiel’s throat dipped as his features tightened further. “It would have destroyed you.”

My lips parted in shock… But I’m all too familiar with pain and betrayal. No matter how terrible. Hardening my heart to it is second nature. Something glittered in Rumiel’s gaze as he observed.

“I realize that technically she is your birth mother, but… perhaps you wouldn’t be too troubled if some heinous accident befell her? Unless you… would like to get to know her, of course.”

Laughter bubbles out of me, and the two of us share a dark grin.

Nothing like a little murder and vengeance for some father-son bonding.

My laughter died as realization washed over me.

“Did you know that this would happen? Did Miroslav know?”

A corner of Rumiel’s mouth faintly tipped up at one corner. “I have lived for millennia, Nakoa. And I will live for many millennia more. What is a hundred and twenty years in that span of time if it means that I get to share the rest of my life with my son?”

Ohhhhh fuck.

Hardening my heart to pain and betrayal was one thing...

But love?

Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck.

My jaw clenched furiously as I willed my tear ducts to stop producing saline. It seemed they were the one organ unsusceptible to my magic. Akash damn it.

Of all the revelations Rumiel had spoken, the most powerful was the fact that this male had willingly lived in a tomb for the last 120 years so that I could become who I am today.

Unable to stifle my emotion, I turned away from him to face the mountains looming in the distance. I squeezed my eyes shut, drawing in a deep breath.

Akash, please, please, please.

What I wanted even more than his comforting embrace was for him not to give it to me because if he did, I wouldn’t be able to wrestle back the sob desperate to escape me. The fact I could also feel his desire to hold me, to make me feel his love, only made it that much worse.

He sidled next to me to share the view and a great sigh of relief is punched out of me when he changed the subject, bless him.

“I’m from a realm called Ouranissa. Are you familiar with it?”

I’d only read about it in historical texts where it mentioned primals, gods, titans, archestratim, and nephilim resided to rule over the divine realms and guard the hell realms.

My voice was a croak of barely quelled emotion. “Vaguely.”

“In addition to protecting Ouranissa, the divine realm where I’m from, I served Azrael, the Vassileon realm’s God of Death, as courtier, or liaison, of sorts. Vassileo consists of one living divine realm and multiple ‘living’ and ‘after death’ hell realms. I originally came to Bellorum to bargain on Azrael’s behalf because the hell realms had grown restless and discontent. Both the dead and the living in Vassileo longed for freedom from hell. They had begun to revolt. And Bellorum and Avernus lie just on the other side of the barrier, diving into our own living and after- death realms. I was sent here to pave the way for their exile, essentially… Which is how I came to meet Zurie.”

My brain felt like it was clinging to a rickety rowboat amidst a turbulent sea in the middle of a thunderstorm, considering all the revelations Rumiel continued to flood me with. To imagine that if a realm hadn’t begun a revolt, Azrael would have never sent my father here, and I would never have been born, along with all the other infinite things that had to occur leading up to that… The fact that I had been the leader of the Uprising, a revolt against Zurie, made this all seem too bizarrely orchestrated to be a mere coincidence.

“There was only one ruler in Bellorum receptive towards Azrael’s advances. ”

Oh, let me guess.

Rumiel gave me a mirthless smile. “Surprisingly, Zurie refused.”

Oh.

“It wasn’t until King Hadriel attempted to exterminate them that Zurie opened Atratus to them.”

That sounds inconceivably benevolent of her.

My tears had stopped flowing so I was finally able to meet my father’s gaze. “King Hadriel? The old sanguinati king who started the drakonati genocide?”

Rumiel frowned at this, gaze pointing in the direction of Hades, the continent beyond the mountains we were now looking at. “The one and only... He allowed only Azrael’s drakonati to seek exile.”

I failed to recall what I’d only read in history books as to what had transpired so many years before I was born, but even my Knowingness remained silent. I waited for Rumiel to explain, but instead, he took me by surprise a gain.

“Where is Mareina?”

The sound of her name alone is like a fiery welding iron to my heart. “I’m not sure.”

It’s not actually a lie. I have no idea where Malekai lives if that’s where they even are.

Rumiel’s brows knit tightly together as his gaze returned to the distant mountain peaks. His words were gentle. Or at least as gentle as his scarred vocal cords could produce.

“She left?”

The gruffness of my voice belied just how much pain I was burying. “Something like that.”

“Perhaps she’s with her father?”

I huffed a sardonic laugh. The last place she would seek refuge is with her father at the house of nightmares that is Erosyan Temple.

“You couldn’t pay Mareina to go back to the Erosyan Temple.”

The disbelief in Rumiel’s expression twisted my stomach in knots.

“Mors is staying at the Erosyan Temple?”

I reared back. “Who said anything about?—

Memories flood me all threading themselves together to form a tapestry and yet another realization washes over me as my Knowingness deigns to speak with me.

Her father is the God of Death.