Chapter Fifty Nine: To Quiet the Turmoil

Delicate, soft fingers trailed a line across Carnen’s cheek, smearing on the familiar scent of an herbal cream. It was the first thing he registered when his senses began to return, what had to be hours after Aya had stabbed him with her needle. That skin tingling touch was tracing its way over his every cut, every stinging line on his chest, and abs, and upper thigh. He seized hold of her wrist, eyes snapping open with the pre-decided taunt, “Patching me up just so you can rough me up again yourself?”

It was not Aya sitting beside him in this bed however. It was Clara, and the words died on his lips, cheeks flooding with color. He drew instantly away from her and pulled up the sheets to cover his exposed lower half, demanding raggedly, “What are you doing here?”

“I was treating your wounds,” she replied, appearing not at all abashed. “We were both carried back inside the castle unconscious, thanks to that evil assassin. I woke before you did though and ordered you be brought here.” She gestured to the royal bedchambers around them.

“For the sake of security?” he pressed, scrambling up out of her bed, though he stopped at the farthest corner of the mattress, because he could not see his clothes anywhere, and though Clara did not seem at all uncomfortable with his nakedness… This was still horribly indecent, and wrong, and Yuri was going to kill them for it. He should have already… “Where is my father? Outside? Leading the troops?”

“You are their leader now, Carnen,” Clara informed him gently, and he stiffened, staring at her in dismay.

“What are you saying? You’re saying he’s dead?”

“I’m sorry,” Clara offered, laying a tender hand upon his arm. “It was a most powerful poison, slipped into his wine just before your aborted wedding. We have Aya Ronin locked up in the dungeons now. She will stand trial for his murder, and you and your men will be sated the need for revenge.”

Carnen felt all the feelings deaden, and his heart grew hard and cold. Of course Aya had killed the conquering king. It was probably her main mission in returning to this city. She had broken into the castle while Carnen was wasting his time carting Charlotte off to the chapel for their failed marriage ceremony. She had adopted some disguise and served his father poisoned wine, and Carnen and Clara and all the rest of their men had not even bothered to send someone to go look for their king or wonder why he had been absent from his son’s wedding.

Yuri had probably died choking on the floor, just as painfully as Faust, only no one had been there with him to try to help, or to say farewell…

Clara had already pulled him into her arms, but there were no tears in his eyes as there had been for his brother. He felt nothing at all, save failure and exhaustion.

“This is hard for me too,” Clara whispered in his ear, “but I won’t have to carry it alone, and neither will you. We have each other. We can lead this nation together, because you are kinder and so much better than your father.” Her lips caressed his neck, and he stiffened in unease, putting hands on her shoulders and pushing her back.

“What are you doing?”

“The natural thing. You are the king of Stalis now, and I am the queen.” She cupped a hand to his cheek, leaning in once again, but he pulled back his head.

“You are in love with my father. You are married to my father--”

“Your father is dead.” Her eyes were so frighteningly empty as she said that. He had never seen it before, but there was something so alarmingly empty about her. “I need to be thinking about the future, my future.”

She climbed right into his lap, and he did not want his instincts to betray him as much as they did, calling for him to respond to her movements in kind. Her fingers were so enticing, unhesitating in their caress and increasing scandalous in their explorations of his body. She was so very beautiful, but this was so absolutely and utterly wrong. “You’re not in your right mind,” he insisted. “This is just the grief--”

“So maybe it is,” she breathed, wrapping her hands around back of his head. “But you’ll feel better too. I can make you feel better than you have ever felt.” She caught his lips, and it did not feel at all better. It was all pounding heart-rates and rising heat, and it was a thousand times worse than his treacherous attachment to Aya. It made him sick to his stomach that he wanted this woman at all, and that she wanted him… She wanted him just because he looked like his father. His dead father. His father had died this very same day.

He pulled back his head. “Stop. Stop it now. We can’t…” That look in her eyes and the slipping shoulder of her dress was saying most clearly that they could. He could bed her right now, and the guards would never dare criticize or question it now that their former liege was gone. The people of Stalis on the other hand... “Charlotte. I am supposed to marry Charlotte,” he reminded her sternly.

“Charlotte was wed to a demi-marquis from Arakesh just this past hour,” Clara informed him coolly. “I made peace with their nation by exposing my cousin’s schemes. It turns out all the leader of that armada of ships wished was for his descendants to have claim to the Stalis throne. Etienne Marseir promised to gift them his daughter for the purposes of producing a royal heir, so I have honored that bargain and secured my rule of this country in the meantime, until that heir is grown. I always have back up plans to my movements, Carnen,” She smiled, pushing a hand through his hair. “And this plan worked out perfectly. It will be better for all of us. You could never have loved Charlotte anyway. You told me that, remember? I wanted you two to be happy, my dear, but I should have known you needed someone stronger. You need a real woman.”

She started moving against him again, with those lips drowning out all his protests, and he found himself dipping slowly down toward the bed. Then his hand brushed her stomach and he remembered himself with a sudden jolt. He shoved her forcefully back from him and headed straight for the door. “You are not in your right mind,” he repeated in a strained growl of an insistence, keeping his back firmly to her so he would not need to glimpse the outrage in her eyes, the hunger, or the pleading… “These are not my rooms, and I am taking my leave.” He shoved open the doors, snatching a pair of trousers and shirt from the wardrobe in the outer chambers. They were Yuri’s clothing, but they fit him perfectly.

Clara drifted up behind him, but did not lay hands on him again. “They are your rooms, Carnen,” she nonetheless insisted, “and I am thinking as clearly as ever when I say that I need you for my king.” He froze, and that hand drifted onto his back. “You’ll come around. But you need time. I understand.” She headed over to the exit. “We’ll bury King Yuri at dawn.”

Carnen would not be in attendance of that funeral. He had no patience to grieve, and he had no patience to await a formal trial for the girl who had stripped away every piece of family he had. If he really was the king now, then he had no need to settle for such tedious justice. Aya Ronin would die by his hand this very night, and all of the lingering twisted feelings and turmoil inside of him would finally be quieted.