King of Me (The King Trilogy #3)(46)
Author: Mimi Jean Pamfiloff

An image of that whip popped into my head.

I started to sweat, and my pulse accelerated in a bad way. Okay. Don’t think about the island. He’s in control of himself, and has been since you got here. And frankly, I needed to talk to him about the Artifact, but only after I laid out the conundrum we faced regarding his earlier question: if I could choose to let the events repeat, would I?

So what if I told him everything I knew? He could prevent certain events from occurring. Yes, it seemed some tragedies in our story were unavoidable, but I had managed to save Callias. That meant I might be able to save my brother, too.

This was definitely an angle worth discussing.

Wearing a very soft, flowing white dress, belted at the waist, I slipped a pair of skimpy leather sandals on my feet and headed down the hallway. The palace was extremely drafty and cool with no real windows and large open rooms—a sitting room with musical instruments and a fire pit, a library or study, and another room containing elaborately painted clay pots stacked up along the wall. The wine cellar?

Beautiful murals of Greek women coated nearly every wall and reminded me of King’s modern-day palace. So did his chamber, actually—soft warm bed with white linens, a giant sunken tub with steaming water, and a balcony overlooking the city. A warm fire glowed in the fire pit and wine had been left out on the table, too. It looked like he planned for us to have a romantic evening.

“King?”

No answer.

I called out once again and waited for a few minutes, but he was nowhere to be found. I decided to go back to my room and ask the servant, but she had left.

I made my way downstairs to the main hall—also empty. “King?” I stood there for a moment listening for anyone, but a sound emanating from a set of stairs caught my attention. They were the same ones King had dragged me up after discovering me in that dark room.

Halfway down the obscure stairwell, I called out for King once again, and in that moment, colors burst from the walls. Reds and yellows—anger and pain. I had to remind myself that the colors couldn’t hurt me, but perhaps whatever was down there might, which is why I turned around and decided to wait for King back up in his chamber. Before I made it two steps, a low rumble followed by a faint moan caught my attention.

“King?” I yelled.

Oh hell. Maybe something was wrong. After all, it wasn’t like King to leave me waiting. That man was all about punctuality.

I made my way to the landing at the bottom and pushed on the wooden door. It creaked open and inside was a long hallway. At the end, orange light poured through a cracked door. The place was almost exactly like King’s modern-day dungeon, and memories of Vaughn bombarded me.

My skin crawled and my hands began to shake as I walked to the second door, where another deep moan blared out. I pushed the door open and held back a horrified scream. An unconscious man with deep gashes on his chest was chained to the wall, his body covered in blood. On the table in the corner, the body of another man lay. It was headless.

Holy f**king shit. That’s Blondie. The head of the man who’d sold me as a slave in that market sat topside up in a large clay bowl filled with blood beside the body. The man’s eyes looked at me, and his mouth opened as if trying to scream.

My legs nearly went limp beneath my weight, but I willed myself to stay standing. King had done this to these people. King. My King.

I turned and ran up the stairs, unsure of where the hell I would go. I slammed right into King.

“What were you doing down there?” he asked with a smirk.

My mouth opened, but no sound came out.

He crossed his thick, muscled arms. “Answer me.”

I stared, unsure of what to say. This was bad. Really, really bad.

He read my thoughts.

“So now you know my dirty little secret.” He laughed wickedly.

“There’s—there’s a head. A live one.” The moment I said those words, I remembered the two heads in jars—live heads—back in his San Francisco warehouse. The faces had been distorted and the water sort of foggy, but I had no doubt that those warehouse heads belonged to Blondie and the redhead.

More lies. Mack had fed me some bullshit about them being related to one of King’s jobs. I’d believed him.

“Why?” I asked.

“They betrayed me. They sold you into slavery when I asked them to take you to safety.”

I was about to say that the punishment was just too horrific—two thousand years too horrific—but King didn’t give me a chance.

“Do not think to lecture me, woman, about the severity of the punishment. Not after you cursed an entire family for hundreds of generations.”

Although it had been by accident, he was right. However, I didn’t decapitate them and leave their heads still alive. Seriously. Who does that?

“Fine,” I said. “I will remove the curse on the Spiros as soon as I figure out how. Please, please undo whatever you did to that man? Just let him die.”

“You would beg for this man’s suffering to end,” he screamed. “You would let him die and release him from the pain, but me…?” he roared louder. “Not I! No! You sentence me to this purgatory, force me to become all that I hated as a man. But this piece of shit,” he pointed downstairs, “he deserves your mercy?”

It was King’s pain, the curse in control now, triggering this rant. I knew because the calm, rational man inside understood it wasn’t the same situation. Hell, he’d been the one to give me the idea to curse him in the first place.

“I will not undo his punishment,” King said. “And as soon as I catch the other man, he will share the same fate.” King leaned in close, and I could feel the heat of his breath. “They will be part of my collection, their only purpose to serve as a reminder of why I should show you no mercy, why I should loathe you—you selfish bitch.” He grabbed the sides of my head and kissed me so hard that my teeth pressed into my lips. I tasted blood in my mouth.

He jerked back and grinned. “Do you love me now, Mia? Do you?”

I wanted to answer, but my mouth didn’t want to move. Fear had the upper hand.

He gripped my arms and squeezed so hard that I thought he’d break my bones. “I’ll take that as a no.”

“Yes!” I barked. “I still love you.” Because it was the curse talking, and I knew that somewhere inside was the real man.

“I am real!” he yelled. “And I will teach you to love the true me!” King dragged me down the stairs.