King for a Day (The King Trilogy #2)(29)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

I stopped to think. The only other place that I knew of where King stored his things were the shelves downstairs. I marched over to the coffee table and picked up King’s giant catalog.

10 Club rules. 10 Club rules. Items were ordered alphabetically, so I opened the book to the first page, thinking he might’ve cataloged names of items starting with numbers first.

The first entry, however, was something I hadn’t expected. The Artifact.

Lot #: TBD. The Artifact

Origins: Unknown

Characteristics: will resurrect the dead

Crap. I nearly dropped the catalog on my foot. This is what King is after? An object that can resurrect the dead?

I chewed on my thumbnail for a moment, mulling it over. Was bringing someone back even possible? If King dedicated every resource he had in search of it, then I had to believe it was the real deal. Even Justin had said that when he held it, he saw things, he felt its power.

Bad power, though.

The thoughts circling inside my head landed on one point: Why was King after it? I mean, obviously he intended to bring someone back, but who?

I checked my watch again. Okay. Focus. Find the rules. I hoped and prayed that I’d find something I could use to stop the Club from taking me. Please be here. Please be here… Nothing.

I thumbed through the R pages, and there they were: Rules, 10 Club.

“Lot number two thousand and seven hundred.”

I bolted downstairs and found the thing rolled up on a shelf near the front door. The entire time, the rules had been right under our noses.

I took the scroll up to King’s chamber, bolting the steel door behind me. I unwound the rolled-up paper and spread it out on King’s coffee table. A tribute to the 10 Club’s arrogance, they only had ten rules, written as if they were commandments from the Bible. Thou shalt, though shalt not, etc.

As Mack had described, stealing, killing, and welching on debts were amongst the “thou shalt nots.” In most cases, the penalties, if caught, were the member’s loss of wealth. When a member died, however, the rules shifted. Property did not go to 10 Club; in fact, members were prohibited from inheriting another member’s wealth so as not to encourage members to kill each other. Property would go to the member’s designated trust, closest non-10 Club family member, or significant other as long as they were not a member.

Shit. There was nothing there to help me. Nothing at all. I scrunched the paper into a ball and tossed it to the floor. I had exhausted all options.

I leaned back in King’s armchair and closed my eyes. I felt like I was standing on a small stone in the middle of a raging river, staring at a flashflood coming my way. There was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. And at every turn, my efforts to escape this horror only made things worse. The hole kept getting deeper.

You mean the river keeps getting wider? I thought to myself.

Yes. What was I supposed to do now? Nothing but wait and hope King showed up in the nick of time to save me?

~~

Draco is not weak. Draco is not kind. Draco is colder and harder than any soul I have ever seen, and if I’d bothered to see him, truly see him, I would have known that my disgust of the man was not for his weakness but because a monster lie waiting inside. Seven months of being in Draco’s dungeon has taught me this.

And now that he has returned this book to me, I suspect my remaining days are but a handful. No doubt, the cruel, cruel man wishes me to capture my final moments of suffering so that he may revel in them after my death. However, I care not. My thoughts are focused on other miseries. My belly is large and ripe with the baby I will never see grow, and I now pray that Draco will show it the mercy he has denied my family. As hard as I try not to dwell, not to give Draco the satisfaction of seeing me weep, I cannot hide the horror I am filled with each time I think upon what he did to my mother, father, and sister. Even the head of Callias remains on a spike outside my window as a reminder of how I misjudged Draco. But I do not need a reminder.

In the first weeks after he imprisoned me, he read this journal. Draco came to my cell nightly and screamed for hours. He never hit me, but I saw the look in his eyes. Oh, how he wanted to. He wanted to tear me limb from limb. He blamed me for taking his brother, his peace of mind, and most of all, for destroying a love he never had. The man lived in a world of disillusion and believed that I felt something for him once, that I’d destroyed something precious between us.

Fool. My Seer blood knew from the beginning what he was. It knew that I could never love such a despicable man.

If you should read this, Draco, know that the moment you take my life, I shall look into your eyes and curse you. I will bind you to my blood. As long as Seers of Light inhabit this earth, you will feel my hatred of you. You will see yourself only through my eyes. You will never be loved by anyone. You will never know peace. You will never be my king. You are nothing.

I gasped at the horrifically malicious words. Had she really cursed him? Did such things actually exist? After everything I’d seen, perhaps it wasn’t such a farfetched notion. But Draco wasn’t a monster. Hagne was insane and had pushed him into a corner. She’d orchestrated a tragedy that should never have happened. No, I didn’t believe that killing her family was justice served, but at the same time, if I were to put myself in Draco’s shoes, it wasn’t hard to imagine being so overcome with despair that I might do some seriously messed-up things in retribution. Sometimes it’s the things we are driven to do by our circumstances that are bad, not the person. Make a man hungry enough, and he might rob a store. Back an honest man into a corner, and he might lie to save himself. Push a man, beat a man, make him feel desperate enough, he might kill. Could I say I agreed with what Draco did? No. Could I condemn him? No.

So what lesson was I to learn from all this? I wondered.

I write to you, Hagne, knowing that your earthly shell has long since passed, as did that of your daughter. I know not if she was mine or truly Callias’s, but she was my blood, nonetheless, and received an honored burial. And though I know my cruelty toward you killed her even before her birth, I do not regret allowing you to rot in that cell. You were not worthy of the kindness or love I bestowed upon you. But our people were worthy, and I should have had the strength to prevent them from going to war with one another after Callias’s death. Thanks to your evil heart, I had not the will to see a future or breathe or care as everyone around me died. So it is not simply my or Callias’s death on your hands, but that of our people.

I paused and reread that last sentence three times. “My,” he said, “my.” But…but…I reread it one more time. Did he mean his death in the metaphorical sense?