The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

42

Jericho

H enry Tolcher enters my room after performing our coded knock pattern on the door, conveniently as Venus finishes up her morning shower on the other side of the wall.

“Prisoners await you in the interrogation chamber,” he briefs me curtly before dismissing himself.

Prisoners . No mention of recovering Genny and her daughter, only that of multiple captives—whose fate now becomes contingent on the state that my family is in.

An old, electric feeling courses through my veins at the thought, the kind that kept me company before Venus entered my life. Even when she despised me, when her hate held me down to the earth more than my dreams ever did, she never outright asked me to change my ways. I did so as a token of my affections, just as Venus, too, had changed for love.

The darkness only made her more magnificent.

It’s no small thing to discover that a woman would live for me, but it was another to watch one take life for me, too—to see Venus coat her arms elbow-deep in blood just to intimately know my pain. Killing is different between her and I. I spill blood because the Saints impart orders to do so. But Venus doesn’t need a sign from above to know when to strike. Her tether to me is reason enough.

So when Venus strides out of the bathroom, silk dressing robe clinging to the wet skin along her arms and legs, she only arches a brow at me in interest. “Souvenirs from Mosacia?”

The causality of her tone gives her a fearsome edge. The years have certainly aged us, but it’s moments like these that play mind games with me. For a moment, it almost feels like I’m talking to the Venus Deragon I first married—the one who woke up on our wedding night and decided, with no prompting from me, to squash our rivals once and for all.

“It would seem so.”

“There’s nothing quite like a good interrogation to start the day,” she hums in approval.

I clasp her hand in mine, leading us down the necessary corridors. “It’s not every day we get to lay eyes on captives that managed to outsmart the King’s Guard,” I add, my tone turning bitter mid-sentence.

I worked hard to keep my temper in check after we laid waste to the Mosacian Empire and took claim of the Seagrave war spoils. I thought that returning to normalcy, or at least channeling my anger into the fervor of which I could love Venus with, would be a healthy endeavor. Truth is, though, my anger never left. It simply holed itself away for safekeeping.

For this—a failed extraction mission by my King’s Guard.

Pandora and Geneva both missing in action.

I consider it a mercy that the guards that had been incapable of bringing either of them back to Broadcove had died trying, because if I were to see them now, I’d tear them each limb from limb. Urovian soldiers do not fail. Maybe struggle, but never fail.

This isn’t just a defeat. It’s a bloody joke .

Venus senses my frustration reaching a pinnacle and lays a hand over my thundering heart. “The tribunals would be flooding our intel passages if the princess or the duchess had been apprehended, which means they’re alive. That ought to count for something—”

“If they’re not here ,” I snarl, pointing straight down into Broadcove soil, “they’re as good as dead, Venus.”

“Do not speak things into existence that might not be true, Jericho,” she urges, her voice wobbling on my name. There’s no additional counter argument that follows.

“My King,” a guard cuts in from across the final hallway, his voice awkward and trembling. He races over to us, bowing before me, then before Venus. “Queen Inherit. You must proceed wisely. We are dealing with traitors to the crown. Particularly volatile ones.”

“Traitors?” Venus drawls with the kind of delight that drives me wild for her.

The guard slides open the observation window in response.

The mirrored walls within cast the unforgiving image multiple times over, and I study the different angles of how the two traitors in question lay on the floor, chained down and knees bruised from kneeling for Saints knows how long.

The man I don’t recognize, and not just because he’s beaten to a pulp and making a slow recovery. Golden hair, ordinary face, tattered clothes—the kind of man anyone would easily pass over in a crowd. His eyes track every movement his cellmate makes, and I, in turn, direct my gaze there, too.

A woman braces herself on her hands and knees, the look in her bloodshot eyes bordering on feral. So fearsome I cannot look away. Her bottom lip appears split from whatever previous struggle landed her here, and as the observation window fully clicks into place, her head turns towards the sound, revealing her face fully.

When Venus and I get a clear look at her, we freeze.

The gag in Genny’s mouth does little to smother the hatred she spews towards the both of us. A threat—no, a promise.

“I will never forgive you.”