The Rise of Deragon (The Deragon Duology #2)

44

Pandora

A small whimper escapes Madden at the sound of his true name on my lips.

“You must know the spell you’ve cast on me,” I say, teaching myself to be unafraid of these feelings or the prospect of laying my heart out on the line. “You must know how I began allowing you to lure me in a long time ago, and how I’m aching for the moment you’ll ensnare me forever.”

“Pandora,” he trembles, his lips brushing mine as he says my name. “Please—”

“And maybe it was all a game. A masterful, calculated way to get me to see all the atrocities of those I trusted with my life. If so, you’ve won—because after what I’ve seen and everything you’ve told me, I am furious enough to learn how the hilt of a knife may feel in my hand as I drive it into someone I once looked up to. I hurt for you so fervently that I could forsake my own family .”

The storm in his eyes settles, as if holding his stare equates to standing in the eye of a hurricane. And a stillness falls over me, a foreign sense of peace—one that tells me that he never played me. Never lied.

Madden Seagrave lost everything —his siblings, his parents, the security and power of his bloodline—and sacrificed his one, potential shot at retribution. He traded vengeance . . . for me .

“But that doesn’t even seem to scratch the surface of what you deserve, and it overwhelms me. How is there anything I can offer you that would be worthy enough to honor what you’ve done for me, my love?”

“That,” Madden tells me tenderly. “Your love. Yourself . That’s all I will ever need in this lifetime. So long as you love me, my world will not carry on in vain.”

My bottom lip trembles.

“It never did,” I say.

And in a surge of reckless adoration, I throw myself onto him.

The kiss we collapse into is frantic, wild, and thrilling all at once. More than that, it’s healing. It mends the wounds in my soul to the point where I feel an invisible force stitching me back together—or maybe that’s just Madden grappling at me. His touch is hungry. His eyes are ablaze with heat before they dip down as he lowers his lips to my neck.

In my bones, I know the kiss isn’t stopping here.

“Say it,” I whisper as I dare to guide Madden’s hands towards the hem of my dress.

His eyes go wide at my silent permission, and I hear his heart thundering beneath his chest. “I’m yours, Pandora,” he says, rounding the fabric up my thighs. His eyes follow the path of his hands in a manner that makes him look like he’s come undone. “I’ve been yours since the moment you opened your mouth and sang your way into my soul.”

“Tell me that I belong to you,” I plead, shifting to let the fabric move up past my waistline.

He smiles darkly at that, but his words remain gentle. “You’re mine, angel. You always have been.” The certainty of his statement summons shivers across my skin. “You belong to me.”

The sheer possession in his voice seals my fate, and Madden guides my arms above my head to remove my dress. Before any sort of anxiety gets the chance to creep in, I kiss him deeply, fiercely. I busy my hands by fumbling with his clothes, unsure of how best to remove them—

“Slow down, angel,” Madden croons in my ear, laying me out on the bed so fluidly it feels like the wind carried me there. “We’ve both been waiting for this for a long time, and I intend on getting it right.”

My eyes burn as I drink in his handsome face for as long as he’ll let me, memorizing every feature like I would lyrics to my favorite songs. I think I forget how to breathe as Madden scans me over again, the brazen eye contact setting my body aflame.

“Let me be the first and only one to ever tell you,” Madden murmurs, lips peppering my collarbone with kisses before descending lower. “You look perfect like this. Skin flushed, bashful smile, no fear.”

“Madden.”

The desperation in my voice has his name coming out on a sigh, and the depraved sound makes an accidental reprisal as he dips to press a kiss onto the inside of my thigh. I writhe in his hold. “That’s it, angel,” he urges, his touch turning savage. “Sing for me.”

Everything beyond this room melts away as I give myself over to him. The anxieties of learning the truth about everything, the dangers waiting for us back at Andromeda House, the years of feeling so isolated in who I was. None of it matters anymore when, in its place, our adoration abounds. And as Madden decides neither of us can hold out any longer, he vanquishes our long-standing loneliness in a blistering kiss that has him shedding the last of his barriers.

+

Madden leads us out of the palace for some fresh air, insisting that we cannot embrace the mid-September sun from behind the panes of the windows. And while I’m content with staying burrowed up in the sheets with him, I must admit, the warm rays casting light onto the gardens easily lure me further from the back courtyard. The trees are overgrown and the topiaries that once bore designs of grandeur have given way to nature in the absence of permanent staff. Still, I can imagine what the space would look like with the right amount of love. I shut my eyes against the warm breeze and picture public festivals, solstice parties, or even family picnics—the images deepening as Madden drapes an arm around me.

“My mother loved to host,” he mumbles. “That much I know, even if I wasn’t old enough to attend most of her parties.”

“I like that—picturing your mother in her element.”

“Did you picture her differently?”

“Not really. I mean, I’ve seen actual pictures of her before, but—”

“You have pictures of her?”

His voice comes out tortured, and only then do I think about the fact that in their haste to leave the palace, no one might’ve thought to grab one. “Back in Broadcove, there are troves of them. Harriet and Jericho’s mother were loyal pen pals, and your mother would send photographs with every letter. I’ll be sure to steal them away for you when I get the chance.”

We both drink in the implication of me having to go back there sometime, but he doesn’t press me about it. He merely says, “That would be wonderful.”

“Seriously, though. I don’t ever think about your family operating . . . normally. All I know about your family is the slander Venus and Jericho always spouted about them, the stories they told me. Is there any truth behind what I already know?”

“Well, it depends on what exactly it is you know.”

“Now that I think about it,” I say, chuckling at the vague memory, “they did mention you. Once. You were just a boy, you and your brother.” That information will certainly take some getting used to. I already want to tear Kit— Kellan —limb from limb for deceiving me. But to think about him being mentioned to me before we ever met, and I never knew . . . I choose to focus on the here and now with Madden instead.

“Because of how young you were, the two of you were more of an afterthought in my uncle’s mind. My aunt’s, too. Despite my reaction earlier, Venus did mention once that you may have fancied her upon first sight.”

Madden doesn’t deflect, even though color rushes into his cheeks. The fact that I’m finally offered the privilege of seeing his skin blush without a mask hiding the human gesture fills me with warmth. “Old habits die hard, I suppose.”

“And the Deragon genes prevail for an additional generation.”

Madden presses a fleeting kiss to my temple. “What can I say? I recognize beauty when I see it.”

“ Anyway ,” I rein him in. “I also know that, despite the bad blood between families, the Seagraves gave Venus her tiger, Roxie. She was the most loyal friend I knew growing up, carnivorous beast aside. I’ll never forget the look on Venus’s face when she realized Roxie was getting too old to function properly. It was like she had lost a child.”

I try not to be jealous of a dead tiger—to envy how loved she was by Venus—and Madden notices the shift in my demeanor. He promptly reverts to our earlier tangent.

“Slater was as gullible as he was headstrong. Venus just happened to be the first woman to capitalize on that part of him. Honestly, if any other objectively attractive woman would’ve walked into his life first and batted her lashes in his direction, he would’ve fallen for their whims, too. Greer . . . well, she never had much to say.”

That’s a light way of putting it. Greer Seagrave, Madden’s middle sister, had gone mute in response to her father’s abuse and retaliation for uncovering their family’s dark secrets. I wonder if Madden ever knew, or if he merely thought something was wrong with her—

His fingers tip my chin towards him. “I spied on your family for five years, angel. I might know more than you do on certain matters—I just don’t care to voice some of them aloud.”

Understood.

He gently releases me, setting that same hand on the small of my back. “Annabelle loved animals. Learning about their behaviors, identifying their different breeds, playing with them. Our parents were frequent donors to Mosacia’s wildlife conservation efforts. I only hope, for Anna’s sake, that those causes managed to stay afloat after . . . everything. And Diana—”

Her face immediately brands itself behind my eyes. Were Madden touching me along bare skin, he would feel the goosebumps cropping up along my arms, my legs. I force the shiver climbing up the column of my spine to dissipate.

“She was the sibling that cared for Kellan and me the most. Mother doted on us, sure, but in regards to our siblings, Diana loved us. Empowered us. She made sure we knew that our roles were just as vital as Slater’s, even if our position in the bloodline made it highly improbable that we’d ever rule.” He smiles solemnly at the memory of her and stares out at the horizon. “Diana saw us as people instead of princes.”

Madden doesn’t need to ask me if I understand the feeling. If anyone on this planet understands, it’s me.

“Was she your favorite?”

“From what memory serves me, yes.”

The forlorn in Madden’s eyes tells me that I ought to tread towards something new, because the longer we fixate on Diana, the queasier I feel.

“Do you think,” I start, testing the waters a bit, “that everything between our families had to unfold so tragically in order for us to find our way to one another?”

Madden’s eyes glimmer with quiet interest at the question. “I’d like to think that in another world, where you and I weren’t descendants of rival bloodlines, we would’ve hit it off on our first encounter.”

“Is that so?”

“Absolutely, had I really been Cato Andromeda and you Pandora Prokium.”

His final word jolts me, the name foreign and damning in the same breath.

“What did you just say?”

Prokium.

The sensation that courses through me then feels otherworldly, like someone in the Beyond breaches through realities and flashes me a knowing, somber smile.

“You didn’t know?”

“I only ever knew my father by his first name,” I stutter, the echo of his family name—my true family name—reverberating in my ears. “Kurt.”

Kurt Prokium .

I spied on your family for five years, angel. I might know more than you do on certain matters.

I try to divert my attention away from the new, heart-halting piece of knowledge about the father I never got to form a relationship with. “Do you truly think we’d get along?”

“More than get along . It likely would’ve been love at first sight.”

“Quite presumptuous of you to think so.”

“Imagine you first saw me in the Noble Lands. Imagine that I sang a ballad before an audience of hundreds, and yet, your presence was all that tethered me to the earth. Imagine that my eyes befell you in a stunning gown that you wanted to wear—not something your family stuffed you into—and in one glance, I wanted to know everything about you.”

My heart gallops in my chest, threatening to break open the front of my body as I picture it for myself. In the universe behind my eyes, my caddy friends grab fresh flutes of bubbly when our eyes first connect. Stars explode around him like obliterated diamonds, as if the Saints are crying out, “It’s him, Pandora! The search is over!” I make up a song for him to sing in my head, his soothing voice and dapper suit drawing chills up the length of my spine. I let the finality of this first meeting and what it means for the rest of my days course through my entire being.

“It’s a beautiful concept,” I say, the words turning sad.

“Imagine it takes only that one look to know that there’s no one else for us,” Madden continues, painting the picture in vivid, tormenting detail. “No deception, no games, and no going back. Imagine that I court you in front of our entire community, and your loved ones and all of those around us come to accept the inevitable just as we did. Imagine, when the timing feels right, I work up the courage to ask your father for your hand, and he relents for a moment, if only because he wasn’t prepared to let go of his little girl so soon in life.”

My eyes fly open when I sense Madden draw impossibly closer to me. Tears scorch my eyes and fall like the first signs of afternoon rain, sudden and surprising.

How could I so deeply mourn a man I never knew firsthand? How can I mourn a reality I never got to live out with him the minute Madden brings it up? I try to fight off the sorrow, but it persists with a vengeance.

Madden delicately wipes away each tear that falls. “I would have loved you in every lifetime that fate allowed me to spend with you. Even if they weren’t at your side or in your bed—even if each and every one of them forced me back into the shadows of isolation—I would consider myself eternally grateful just to exist at the same time and place as you.”

I might just die if he says anything else. “Madden—”

“But the fact of the matter is, that life, that fantasy . . . it could’ve been real for us. I know it could’ve. And instead, Jericho took that away from you.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It all leads back to him, Pandora. The root of every evil and every tragedy can all be traced back to him. Think about it. Venus never would’ve sideswiped the Mosacian Empire if she didn’t love him, if he hadn’t pursued her in the first place. If his dreams hadn’t insisted he do so. My family would still be alive, and your father might be, too.”

A horrified sob breaks in my throat, and I struggle to hold my ground.

“My father?”

“Yes, angel,” he confirms bleakly. Somehow, his gaze is both apologetic and stone cold. “Jericho murdered your father.”