The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

11

Geneva

I haven’t seen my daughter in seven days. Seven .

Every hour with no known update on her is pure torture. Never in my life has a person’s absence plagued me as much as Pandora’s disappearance has. Not the loss of my parents, not Venus’s separation back when Jericho first seized her, not even Kurt’s death. For all I know, Pandora could’ve stolen a carriage, gone on a joyride through the continent, and gotten lost, gotten hurt, or worse—

I drop my face into my hands, unable to fathom a fate for my daughter that doesn’t involve her being whisked back to Broadcove in one piece. Because that’s the worst part of my pain—the waiting. The not knowing.

No fragments of Pandora were left behind for us to retrace her steps. All her jewelry stayed on her person, and she didn’t shed her dress and change into something more mobile. Hundreds of eyes had ogled over her hours before someone realized she was gone, and like smoke on a wind, she simply vanished.

Each day with no sign of uncovering her whereabouts is worse than the last, and the most crippling part about it is that no one properly understands the magnitude of my sorrow, and that’s what cuts the deepest. I’m her mother . I saw Pandora at every stage of her beautiful, cherished life. Hell, I created and carried that girl inside of me. And now, what? Am I just supposed to sit idly by and wait to see if Venus and Jericho can figure out if she’s even still alive ? Am I supposed to go on watching Calliope hold her three children tighter while the only one I had to spare awaits uncertain death—

“Aunt Genny?” A timid voice drifts over to me from down the hall.

My head turns in time to meet my younger nephew’s gaze, and Dorian pouts his lip at me. It’s a habit I’ve picked up on over the years, one that typically translates to guilt and his precious inability to keep a secret.

“Hey, kiddo. Something on your mind?”

“Have they found Pandora yet?”

I tell myself that those aren’t tears in his wide, brown eyes, but rather that the light from one of the chandeliers is playing tricks on me. “Not yet,” I answer.

The welling tears I can make excuses for—the light in the room, the sun outside. Maybe I was the one on the verge of crying, not Dorian. The quiver of my nephew’s lip, however, is an entirely different beast. “I’m so . . . scared for her.”

The feeling is mutual, but I see no point in frightening the boy further. “They’ll find her.”

“Not if he took her away.”

My pulse stops beating within my veins, my head slowly inclining towards him. “He?”

Dorian whimpers like a kicked animal, and while I never enjoy seeing any of the Deragon children upset—least of all at my prompting—I have a horrible feeling that everything Venus and Jericho have been sending out spies to garner could’ve been solved by a ten-year-old’s testimony.

“Sweetie,” I say, my hands shaky as I extend them in his direction. “If you saw something, I need to know.”

“But Uncle Jericho—”

“Don’t you worry about him, love,” I interject. “It’ll be our little secret.”

Dorian stuffs his small hands into the front pockets along his pants, unable to steady them. “I saw Pan leave the ballroom . . .” he whispers, as if the walls have ears to eavesdrop and mouths to tattle with. “With a boy.”

“A boy?” I repeat.

“A guard ,” Flora cuts in, her voice at a normal volume and her tone hinting at gossip. “A decently handsome one, too.”

I stutter over my initial response, a sudden surge of anger coming over me. Once I find the means to restart, I say to Flora slowly, “And you only care to mention this now ?”

“I didn’t think it mattered much,” she returns flatly, picking at her nails like this conversation has become taxing. Saints above, she’s just like Calliope was at this age. “I waited a few minutes to see if they were up to anything juicy, but I caught the guy retreating from her rooms holding his jacket. Pan probably told him to hit the road.”

I try not to let my face reveal anything about what Pandora had opened up to me about. It’s perfectly normal for a girl like her to idolize and hope for a romantic encounter. Truthfully, it is a scenario I expected to face with her at an earlier age. But with the demanding role that Venus and Jericho placed her in—I, too, having played a part in it after agreeing to the arrangement—she’s never seemed to have the opportunity. And while I know she will not come right out and say it herself, I know she thinks of it often. That it may not be an issue of someone wanting her, but rather not wanting to stand in her predecessor’s warpath.

As dear as Venus and Jericho are to me, the thought makes me resent them on Pandora’s behalf.

“Do you know anything about the guard?”

Flora looks at me like my line of questioning ticks her off, and even Dorian seems put off by the sour look on her face. “He’s typically stationed along this wing of the castle, but I’ve seen him stationed in her hallway more times than I can count on two hands.”

“Did anything happen afterwards? Do you think he circled back for her? Attempted to apologize for what might have transpired?”

“No,” Flora recounts. “The man was out of commission the moment she dismissed him from her room. Rumor has it he downed two goblets of wine and abandoned his post for the remainder of the night.”

His post outside my daughter’s room —the last known location anyone in this Saints-forsaken castle accounted her for.

I want to tear the guard to ribbons, and I don’t even know his name.

Suddenly, pounding footsteps tear through the hallway—two sets of them—and I know better than to act surprise when Venus and Jericho emerge. Their hair is askew, like they haven’t actually been tearing the kingdom apart to find their heir but doing something else together instead. If that’s the case, I try not to begrudge them for it. Grief and fear affect people in different ways. Because my sister and her husband can confide —but how do those emotions manifest themselves in my case?

Insomnia. That’s how.

“Why don’t you and Flora see if Samuel is around here somewhere?” I say to Dorian before his aunt and uncle read the look on his face. He nods over and over, darting back the way he came and kicking his feet as he runs off, Flora slinking off after him. Before either of them has the space to make a comment, I bound towards them. Venus, at the very least, has the brains to brace for impact.

“ Tell me you have an update.”

“We do,” Venus says stiffly.

“But you won’t like it,” Jericho finishes.

I steady my breathing, even as I feel fury heat beneath my skin. “I don’t care. Out with it.”

Venus looks to Jericho, guilt written all over her face, and I realize then just how bad this might be. Because all of Broadcove’s security had been focused on protecting Venus that night, ensuring that no harm would come to her . But as for everyone else . . .

Jericho’s eyes darken as he tells me, “Ardian is dead.”

Holy Saints.

Ardian Asticova was perhaps single-handedly responsible for keeping Jericho morally sane enough not to kill Venus when they first met. He was a better father figure to Jericho than his real father, Ronan Morgan, ever was. I can only imagine how devastating this loss is for him. For Venus, too.

“How?” I ask.

Sure, the man was old, but the fact that his death is a precursor for Pandora’s whereabouts . . . foul play must be a variable. A shiver courses through my spine, and I don’t realize how deep I’ve bitten into the inside of my cheek until I taste blood.

“Bullet wound,” he finally says. Then, he opens the palm of his hand, revealing a silver, metallic shelling that’s no bigger than the size of my thumb. “Guns have never been permitted for civilian use in Urovia, and when we conquered Mosacia, guns and their ammunition became strictly enforced contraband. We seized them by the thousands —”

“What does his death have to do with my daughter?” I say through my teeth, praying to the Saints that Jericho isn’t seconds away from revealing a second shell—one that took the life of my favorite person on earth.

“One of the guards found his body out on perimeter rotation. It seems that Ardian witnessed something suspicious down at Honeycomb Harbor— someone —and whoever it was, did not want to get caught.”

I close the distance between him and me when he stops short of a full explanation, grabbing him by the collar of his shirt.

“Caught. Doing. What ?”

Jericho’s stare is grave and unrelenting, his jaded way of telling me, mind to mind, that he’s here for me.

And then, he hands me a piece of parchment. “Stealing Pandora from Broadcove.”

I snatch the parchment from his grasp, anxious sweat beading along my eyebrows.

Queen Venus,

While all of Urovia’s protective forces were focused on you, it was all too easy for Princess Pandora to be apprehended the night of your celebratory Feast. Knowing she volunteered herself as our captive to keep you from harm, however, is almost as delicious as what this note requires of you.

I won’t bother insulting you or dear Jericho by assuming you both are faint of intellect, so if you have any care in the world for your daughter, you’ll show face before Pandora’s tribunal is sealed on the first of August. I know it seems far away, but all good things come to those who wait, and I am a patient man. Tell your husband to think long and hard about where we’ll be waiting, for if he’s wrong, no one will be there to dispute the certain death sentence Pandora faces.

No direct statement is made, but the dark smear of what must be Pandora’s dried blood certainly says enough, and I drop the letter onto the floor.

Dread fills up my stomach. “We have to save her.”

“Genny, calm down. Let’s think about this for a minute,” my sister says, her tone stagnant.

“ Think ? What’s there to think about aside from how fast we can board a damn boat for the eastern continent?” I rage, shoving my sister with all my bodily strength. “My daughter’s life is on the line!”

“They didn’t assign a rendezvous point,” she argues, staggering back towards me.

“I’m not an idiot, Venus. Everyone who called Jericho crazy because they didn’t buy into his visions were the ones holding their tongues while you two played couple’s conquerors. Two people your age don’t just dismantle an entire empire and its royal family from sheer luck. This person knows his visions can see into the present and the future.”

“I can’t dream on a deadline,” Jericho tells me softly. “That’s not how it works. The Saints show me things on their timetable.”

“Well then tell them to get it together and show you something !” I nearly scream. I try not to descend into madness. “That’s my daughter out there.”

Ever since half of the Holymen Committee was eradicated and Calliope and I invaded the U. Herald alongside Nadine Tolcher, the press has dutifully continued the narrative of Pandora being their legitimate-by-birth heir. And I’ve always complied with Venus and Jericho’s request to publicly refer to Pandora as their daughter—but when it comes down to saving her skin or their own, I’m starting to really see how much of a “daughter” Pandora is to Venus.

“I just need some time for the vision to come through,” Jericho says, his tone soft as if I’m a horse prone to be spooked. “Time, that it looks like, we’re being offered, mind you. We have two months—”

“What will they do to her in those two months?” I start to spiral, eyes pinning Jericho to the spot knowing he may hear my desperation more than Venus will. “Pandora is afraid of the dark. What if they lock her in an underground jail cell? What if they torture her? Worse, what if they try and—”

“They wouldn’t,” Jericho cuts in before I can say the damning image aloud, tears springing in my eyes faster than I anticipate. My face is wet with them as they streak down my cheeks, and I dare not wipe them away. Let them both see my anguish.

“Yet this person mentioned a tribunal. A certain death sentence —”

“They’re just trying to ruffle our feathers,” Venus says.

But Jericho shakes his head. “Their threat isn’t empty. Tribunals are Mosacian court customs,” he rasps, his tone foreboding. “And they are typically reserved for their most infamous offenders, which means that while there are numerous places Pandora could be right now, the tribunal takes place in a singular, undisclosed location. We’ll send scouts and spies to scope out the continent and find out where it is, so that, worst case scenario, we’ll liberate Pandora on the day of her tribunal.”

It’s not enough.

My daughter could be suffering, starving, shivering in the cold, or anticipating death for wanting to protect rulers— family members —that don’t seem too inspired to take action against her captors.

“I just need you to know,” Jericho resumes, “that I will try my best to find Pandora in a timely manner . . .”

He means to go on, to calm me with the guarantee of her safety despite the ransom note and the markings of her blood. But I refuse to hear another word, refuse to let Jericho console me while his wife—my sister —has said nothing close to what could resemble any condolences.

“She gave herself up for you,” I say. “Have you nothing to say about that?”

I’m on the verge of lunging for her when she finally breaks her silence to say, “Pandora was trained to protect the crown. Our forces should’ve been watching everyone, but—”

“Oh, this is rich,” I say with a morbid laugh. “I know you’re not being serious, Venus. I know you’re not about to look me in my face and tell me that my daughter is disposable .”

“Not at all!” Jericho tries to offer kindly. “It’s only that—”

“We don’t negotiate with people who think threatening us earns them anything.”

“Yes, we do,” I bite back. “Especially when they have my daughter—not yours—in their custody.”

“Pandora is not mine by birth,” Venus shouts. “But she is my blood . And while my husband and I didn’t train you for this sort of instance, we trained Pandora. All we can do now is wait on the Saints and hope Pandora has enough of a spine to endure whatever they put her through and keep her mouth shut.”

Fiery wrath consumes my senses. “You’re a monster ,” I tell her through tears of rage. “You’re nothing like the sister I once knew.”

“That’s because while you were becoming a mother, I was becoming a monarch,” Venus seethes, and Jericho’s grip tugs her backwards in a silent warning when she prepares to get in my face. “Don’t act like our roles are even on the same planet, Geneva. I slaughtered the old me to get to where I am, and all you did was lie on your back—”

I strike Venus across the face with all my strength.

The stinging sensation along my palm and the underside of my fingers feels like freedom and divine retribution. It tingles in a way that makes me want to do it again, but Jericho steps between us, his eyebrows diving towards the bridge of his nose and his eyes crazed.

“Venus, you crossed a line. Don’t ever speak to your sister like that again after all she and Pandora have done for us.”

Deep satisfaction simmers in my stomach at his words, and I watch as embers crackle beneath the darkness in Venus’s eyes. She won’t apologize, but seeing her own husband scold her reminds me of all the petty fights our father would settle between us girls when we were younger—most of which he’d side with me on.

“And Genny.” Jericho turns towards me, his voice low and hauntingly severe. “If you lay your hands on my wife again, I will not be held responsible for what happens next. This is your one warning.”

Venus’s vainglorious smirk destroys the last of my decency, and so I see myself out of the hallway . . . and out of Broadcove entirely.