Arabella just stared at him, horrified. “All of them?”
Zephan shrugged. “Well, the man is five hundred years old. If there had been a successful spawning of a dragonling, you wouldn’t be standing here, now would you?”
She shook her head, back and forth, back and forth… then stared at her reflection in the mirror. “He was trying to save it—”
“He was trying to save the dragonling.” Zephan paused. “He tore the mother apart. You see, he doesn’t need her. Only the child.”
Her stomach heaved.
She didn’t want to believe it. She didn’t believe it. But the idea had snuck into her mind like a poison that had seeped through her skin and worked into every neuron fire of her brain. A poison that was killing her from the inside out.
Lucian was using her.
She was shaking her head, but no words came out.
“I thought you should know.” Zephan touched the bottom of her chin, lifting her gaze to meet his. “It’s easy to love a dragon, little human. It’s very hard to survive loving one.”
She yanked her face away from his touch. She wanted to deny it. She wanted to believe Zephan was lying. But all of it rang with too much truth.
Which meant Lucian had been lying to her from the beginning.
Lucian was on bended knee before the King of the Winter Court.
“Thank you for permitting an audience, your highness,” Lucian said, keeping his head bent and his gaze fixed on the strange, translucent flooring of the royal receiving chamber. The customs hadn’t changed in a dozen millennia, and he was walking a tight-rope with this situation as it was—better to give the arrogant fae royalty some deference than quibble about who should be bending to whom. Besides, the king was well-known as a tyrant. And being a mere five thousand years old—and thus younger than the treaty itself—he was rumored to be bitter about how it had been bequeathed to him, binding him with magic to an agreement he never fashioned.
“You may rise,” the king said, his voice echoing off the translucent walls of the chamber and climbing through the column of air above them.
Lucian rose to standing.
The king peered down at him with nearly colorless eyes, his long, black hair floating in the unseen magic that also hovered his glass throne well above Lucian, such that he had to peer up at him. Typical fae, and so much like Zephan, his son—flaunting his power, ensuring that Lucian, a mere dragon, knew his place. “But make no mistake, Prince of the House of Smoke. I permitted Brokk to bring you to court only to satisfy the precise terms of the treaty, which require me to demonstrate that this vile accusation you’ve made is utterly baseless.”
Brokk was a high-ranking fae in the king’s court—as well as Lucian’s temporary guide and guard, the one who appeared when he made his request through the limited fae magic Lucian possessed in his DNA. Brokk stood next to Lucian, flexing his hands, which were crawling with runes just waiting to strike against the Summer Court blood running through Lucian’s veins. Treaty or no, if Lucian stepped one millimeter outside Winter Court protocol, the king’s enforcer would take great pleasure in meting out some kind of punishment. Strictly speaking, according to the treaty, Lucian couldn’t be killed or irreparably harmed. But if Lucian acted first, committing some offense against the court, they could plausibly make him suffer for it without triggering a war with the Summer fae.
“Your son has taken my treasure.” Lucian kept his words even, in spite of the hammering in his chest. If Zephan had harmed her, Lucian would have a hard time controlling himself. “The treaty strictly prohibits interference of any kind in—”
“Do not lecture me on the wording of the treaty!” The king’s bellow pounded Lucian’s ears, enhanced by the magical space of which the entire court was comprised. The court itself, and everyone within its walls, existed in a netherworld that was neither heaven nor earth, but somewhere in between—magic space. Another dimension, as the humans would call it. The Court was as much an idea as it was a place—a powerful construct of energy, wards, and magic—and while Lucian was in it, he was even more vulnerable to the fae’s considerable powers. He could travel here only with the expressed permission of the court and when accompanied by a fae guide; this realm was only accessible to fae, true angels, and the devil himself, beings Lucian seldom had occasion to encounter and always wished he hadn’t.
The king drifted down from his floating throne, his pointed ears tipped red with his anger. “I’ve summoned my son. You may have your plaything back. Although, having visited my son’s bedroom, she may prefer to stay.”