The Queen of Traitors (The Fallen World Book 2) (4 page)

“Fuck.”

I jerk the wheel and pull the car off into a subterranean parking garage.

Across the street a building rises high into the air. Most of its windows have long since fallen away, but it appears sturdy enough for me to occupy until the chopper passes.

Shoving the liquor bottle into my back pocket, I stumble out of the car and head for the skyscraper across the street. The stairwell inside cants a little to the side. The whole building is starting its slow slide back into the earth.

I make it up ten flights before I stagger out onto a random floor. This is the last push my body will endure. I can feel it in my marrow.

The plate-glass windows that once covered the outer walls are shattered. A howling wind slides through what remains, kicking up dust and stirring my hair.

The blades of the chopper beat outside, and I can hear a chorus of engines closing in on our location.

Somehow, the king has found me.

Chapter 5

Serenity

I pull the
gun from the small of my back.

Heavy boots jog up the stairs. Despair sets in.

Sick, injured, but not free. Never free.

I back up as the king’s men pour out of the stairwell. There’s at least a dozen of them and they’re covered from head to toe in gear. Their guns are bared, but almost immediately their barrels swivel around the room, looking for threats other than the one in front of them.

One of men parts through the group and removes his helmet. I have to lock my knees to keep from falling.

The king.

My tormentor and my husband.

I don’t remember him, and yet a part of me aches with such ferocity that I know he’s imprinted in my bones. Or maybe it’s just the look in his eyes. It’s the first time I’ve seen compassion, and it railroads me.

There’s also a good dose of horror in those eyes of his. They track each of my features. He can see my sickness and my wounds.

With a shaky hand, I point the gun at that face. I don’t want to feel this way—like I belong to someone. I’d rather die than live a prisoner shuffled between two enemies.

Behind him, his men turn their weapons on me. The king holds up a hand and signals to his men to hold their fire.

“Put the gun down, Serenity.”

I don’t. I don’t react at all. I’m incapable of reacting, frozen between my heart and my head.

He should die.

He must live.

He needs to pay.

He wants me safe.

“Put it down.” I think he has an idea where my mind is because he’s coaxing. “You’re not going to shoot me.”

I cock the gun.

His body tenses at the sound, but he’s still edging forward. “You can’t kill me. You know this. My men will take you out if you don’t put the gun down and come with me.”

“I can’t.” I don’t know anything else besides this—fighting lost causes. I was always meant to go down with the ship, not to survive it.

“You can. My queen, you already have once before.”

I waver, searching for a memory that isn’t there.

My aim droops. A wave of dizziness passes over me and I stumble.

“Serenity?” Is it my imagination, or does the monster in front of me sound frightened?

I try to focus on the king, but my vision’s clouding. I fight to stay in the moment, but my body is finally, finally giving out.

The King

Serenity’s eyes roll
back. Ignoring my men’s warnings, I run the last distance between us and catch her as she falls, her gun clattering harmlessly to the floor.

This feral woman. I’d learned long ago that she was most ferocious once you peeled away her layers. Whatever happened to her over the last few days had done exactly that. She didn’t know enemy from friend.

I pull off a glove and touch her cheek. She’s burning up.

“Serenity.” I shake her lightly. “Serenity!”

She moans but doesn’t wake.

“Soldiers! I need a medic!”

Men rush to my side, and things happen quickly after that. A stretcher makes its way to our floor. They have to pry her out of my hands, and when they move her, she’s limp, lifeless, this woman that burns so brightly.

Fear tastes like gunmetal and blood. How long it’s been since I’ve feared for anything, save myself. I don’t like it that the most important parts of me live inside a dying woman.

When we’ve boarded my jet, I follow the medics into the back cabin, where a hospital room and a Sleeper have been set up. I’d known that she would need medical attention, but I’d underestimated the extent of her injuries. Vastly so.

They cut away her clothes, and her head lolls to the side. One of the men working on her curses, drawing my attention. He removes the last of Serenity’s bandages. I almost gag at the sight of the wound on her upper arm. It’s swollen and festering. Another medic pushes me out, and I don’t fight him.

I place a shaking fist to my mouth. No, fear doesn’t sit well inside me. I’m the leader of the entire globe, and the Resistance dared to hurt
my
wife, their queen.

I head to the onboard phone and dial the head of my special weapons unit. “Move ahead with our original plans.” By nightfall, that Resistance outpost will be obliterated. Everyone and everything that hasn’t escaped by then will be captured, and I’ll make sure they understand what happens to those that cross me.

Serenity

I blink my
eyes open and stare at the white molding decorating the ceiling above me.

I don’t know where I am.

A hand squeezes mine. “You’re awake.”

My entire body reacts to that voice. I’ve only met this man twice, and already his presence overwhelms me.

I turn my head to face the king. He sits next to the bed I’m in, my hand clasped in both of his. His eyes look sad, regretful.

I try to sit up and look around. Already my body’s tensing. I may be a woman without a past, but I haven’t lost the memory of the past few days. This world eats the innocent for breakfast, and it does far worse to those like me.

The king gets up to sit on the edge of my bed. He’s too close. Gently he places a hand on my chest and pushes me back down.

“Not so fast,” he says.

I’m a cornered creature. It makes me want to lash out.

“Let me up,” I demand.

“Serenity, you’re safe.”

He can read me. That’s good to know.

Rather than letting me up, he leans down. All sorts of unforgiving angles have sharpened his features. His expression’s only tempered by his eyes, which are devouring me. When his mouth’s a hairsbreadth away from mine, I realize what he’s going to do. At the last second I turn my face away. His lips brush my cheek.

The king pulls away enough for me to think through the haze of his presence. Does he not know that I lost my memory? I assumed my previous captors told him, but in hindsight, they had plenty of reasons to keep this a secret.

“Is my wife suddenly shy?”

My cheeks flame.

One of his fingers trail my blush. “She
is
. How very titillating.” He leans back in, his breath warm against my throat. “Let’s see how long it’ll take for me to make you forget your embarrassment.”

He presses a kiss to my neck.

I can’t hold it in any longer.

“I don’t remember you.” I stare at the velvet chair the king sat in not a minute ago, but I’m not really seeing it. I swivel my head to face him. “I don’t remember you.”

Above me, the king’s fallen ominously silent. I feel the weight of it bearing down on me. Nothing this man does is subtle. Not even his silence.

“What do you mean?” he says carefully.

“My memory is gone.”

The King

Marco.

The Resistance made it appear that he’d died at their hands, but Serenity’s words paint a new picture.

Marco carried the memory suppressant on him at all times in place of a cyanide capsule. When he and Serenity were cornered, he must’ve used it on her. He could’ve still died at the Resistance’s hands, but if he’d had time to give her the serum, he probably had time to die, either by his own hand or knowingly by another’s.

Faithful until the very end.

The crushing weight of his absence tightens my lungs. I force my grief down. I’ve had plenty of time to mourn him while the Sleeper pieced Serenity back together. I won’t let it ruin this day.

I stare at my wife, flummoxed by this turn of events and more than just a little unnerved that she lost her memory and I hadn’t noticed.

She remembers nothing.

All those reasons she hated me so viciously—gone. I could avoid her ire altogether. I could charm her as I had the many women who passed through my bed before her. It’s tempting. But as I fall into her guarded, wary eyes, I find I want the old Serenity back.

I married my hardened, angry queen because her spirit was the twin of mine. Without her past, all her rough edges will be blunted; she’d only be a shadow of herself.

I touch her cheek. “Would you like your memory back?”

“You can do that?”

My thumb strokes her skin. I’m practically vibrating with the need to take action. The weeks spent waiting for her to recover have tested my patience. Knowing it’ll be a while longer until my Serenity returns is almost too much.

“I can.”

“Then yes,” she says, “I want my memories back.”

Serenity

I don’t like
doctors. Soon enough I’ll find out precisely why.

The king still hasn’t let me up from the bed. He has, however, stopped trying to kiss me. I’m horrified that mixed in with my relief is regret. His touch awakens all sorts of slumbering emotions.

I’m supposed to hate him, and yet he’s the first person I’ve encountered who treats me like I’m something precious. It’s heady, feeling cherished, and it’s making me question everything I’ve been told about him.

I do, however, believe he’s a bastard—otherwise, he wouldn’t be holding me down while the doctor comes at me with a needle.

“Let me go,” I growl, trying to push him and the other guard they called in off of me.

“I’m seriously questioning your memory loss,” he mutters under his breath. Louder, he says, “It’s just a needle.”

I don’t care if it’s just a needle. I’m tired of people asserting their will on me.

The king nods to the doctor. The man in the white coat captures my arm and steadies it. Before I can pull it away from him, the needle slips under my skin, and he empties the antidote into my veins.

It’s over before I can react. The king lets up as the doctor moves away. I glare at him as I rub the crook of my elbow.

Belatedly, I realize I’m rubbing my arm with my injured one. Only, it no longer hurts.

I’ve been too distracted by the king to notice what else about me is different. I roll back the sleeve of my shirt, expecting … something.

What I don’t expect is smooth skin.

It’s gone—the wound, the infection, the scar that should mark it. My skin prickles. Not only has the king saved my arm from amputation, he’s removed all evidence that there ever was an injury to begin with.

It reminds me eerily of my memory wipe, replacing the ugly and scarred with something new and unsullied.

“It’s gone.” I run a finger over it. When I look up at the king, I can tell he’s drinking in my wonder. “How?”

“The East’s medicine is better than the West’s. You’ve been inside the Sleeper for a long time.”

“‘The Sleeper’?”

The doctor’s lingering at the foot of my bed, and now he clears his throat. “Your memories won’t return all at once,” he says. “The bulk of them will come to you in three hours or so, but it’ll take up to several days for the drug to fully reverse the effects of the memory suppressant.”

“Is that all?” the king asks.

“Yes, Your Majesty.” The doctor bows to the king, and then he and the guard take their leave.

It’s just the two of us again.

My eyes meet the king’s.

“Want to see the rest of our home?” he asks.

My heart skips. From prisoner to queen. I may be trapped in a whole different way here, but I much prefer the king’s presence to that of Lieutenant Begbie’s. We’ll see if it’ll remain that way once I get my memories back.

I nod to the king. Hopefully a tour of this place will break up the strange tension crackling between us.

He extends a hand to me. I don’t bother taking it, not so soon after he held me down. I’m not above pettiness.

This, oddly enough, makes the king’s eyes twinkle. “Some things, Serenity, not even memory can touch.”

Chapter 6

Serenity

Nothing’s happening.

Granted, it’s only been thirty minutes, but I’ve taken to stalking through what appears to be an honest-to-goodness palace. The king’s sly smiles only serve to make my foul mood even fouler.

The man beside me, for his part, has been cordial and chivalrous and completely and utterly fake. It makes me want to rake my hands through his hair and shake him until the calculation in his eyes drips onto his tongue and out his mouth. He’s acting like I’m a ticking time bomb and he’s waiting for me to explode.

I hate it just as much as I hate each subsequent room I enter. I don’t like the gold filigree that adorns just about everything, or the intricate designs carved into the very woodwork of this place. I don’t like the white, white walls and the polished floors. The delicate art and the crystal chandeliers.

The sheer opulence of it is an insult to the land beyond the walls.

“They were right about you, weren’t they?” I ask, rotating to the king. When I catch sight of him, déjà vu ripples through me, but I can’t place it—yet.

He’s already studying me, like I’m some fascinating creature he wishes to collect.

“Right about what?” He lays his hand on the small of my back, trying to steer me out of his drawing room—or is it his tea room? They all have absurd names and more absurd purposes.

“Your cruelty.” I shrug off his touch, striding ahead of him.

The ploy doesn’t work. He’s much taller, his legs much longer, and in a few short paces he’s cut me off.

The king looms over me, and he takes a step forward.

I stand my ground, though it means brushing against him.

“Have you not already figured that out for yourself? You’ve always been able to see right through me,” he says, his voice low. The pitch is both secretive and threatening, and I can’t stop the goosebumps that spread down my arms.

He’s the boogeyman, and he’s come to claim me all over again.

With that thought, I catch a memory. Just a snippet, really.

“Serenity?”

My hand was already on the door. I turned back to face an older man with hair the color of dusty wheat.

The wrinkles around his eyes and mouth deepened. “As an emissary, if an accord is ever to be reached between us and the Eastern Empire, you will likely be a key player in it.”

I swallowed and nodded. I now carried a heavy responsibility.

“Do you know what that means?”

I waited for him to finish.

His gaze lingered on me a long time before he finally answered his own question. “One day you’ll meet the king.”

I blink, and the object of my memory is in front of me again.

The king tilts his head. “You just had your first memory, didn’t you?”

I nod. The man from my past—the man I spoke with—he’s at the edge of my mind and the tip of my tongue. I’m positive I know him, but his identity still eludes me.

“What did you remember?” He picks up a lock of my hair and rubs it as he asks.

He wants to touch me. He’s been fairly obvious about this, but I sense his impatience increasing.

“Nothing that I can make sense of.”

Those dark eyes probe mine. “That’ll change soon enough.”
And then you’ll be mine.
I swear I hear the promise, though he never voices it.

The king backs off, but that stubborn hand of his presses into the small of my back again. There’s no use fighting him on this; he’s going to keep doing it, and I’m going to keep losing.

In the halls, men and women pass by, and they’re just as ridiculous as the rest of this place. The people here wear fabrics with fine names I doubt, even if I could remember, I’d know.

Their outfits are intricate things that come in colors brighter than I knew existed, and each one is paired with decorative medals and sabers or ropes of jewels wrapped around necks and wrists. Their hair’s too coiffed, their teeth too white, their skin too stretched, their bodies too soft.

It all looks so luxurious and impossibly fake.

I don’t belong here.

The king must see my lingering attention on the people who side-eye me. He leans in, his lips brushing the shell of my ear. “None of them are as beautiful as you,
nire bihotza
.”

I scowl at him. “I don’t care about your standards of beauty.”

If anything, it annoys me. These men and women bask in the opulence of it. But how many lives has this lifestyle cost?

The king’s gaze tracks my movements, and I wonder if I’m one of the lives it’s claimed.

I suspect I am.

In the brief silence between us, a dizzying number of questions bloom. It’s amazing how many a girl with only a few days of memory can have. I want to know more about who the king is, who I am, who my enemies are, why wrong seems right and right seems wrong. Most of all, I want to know how I’ve been bent and twisted into this person that seems to hate and be hated so fiercely by everyone, save the king.

“Why did you marry me?” I ask as we leave the king’s grand ballroom. I won’t even touch on the ridiculousness of a room dedicated to nothing but dancing.

“Ssssh. I’ll answer your questions soon enough. Let me enjoy the last few minutes before you hate me again.”

I know his words are meant to grate, but I doubt he realizes how ominous I find them. What would it take for a woman like me to hate him?

“When I was a prisoner, they told me you killed my family,” I say.

“They told you that?”

“They told me many things. Is it true?”

His features are guarded. “You’ll know soon enough.”

And I do.

We’re in the
palace gardens when it hits.

I stumble, reaching out for the king—Montes. After the bits and pieces I received inside the palace, I assumed the rest of my memories would subtly surface. I didn’t imagine
this
.

This is a barrage of enemy fire. It rips through me suddenly and violently.

Montes’s arms lock around my torso as I gasp, my messy golden hair dangling around me.

Every memory feels like an epiphany, and I can’t possibly describe the euphoria that comes with each. Life is a series of experiences that stack, one on top of the other.

I see my mother and my father—the man from my first recalled memory now has an identity! I see bikes with training wheels. Suburbia. My parents hold my hands and, on the count of three, they swing me. There are candles and birthdays and mentions of war breaking out in Europe.

There are chalk drawings and games of tag with the kids on my street—some I’ve known for ages, some who are part of the recent influx of immigrants. Nail polish and days out with my mother while my father buries himself in work. My childhood crush that lives down the street.

The act of remembering is magic; I get to live a little of my life all over again.

And then …

And then, somewhere along the way, they turn.

For every ray of light each happy memory casts, there is a much darker shadow.

I moan as I hear phantom explosions. I see blood spray. This dark past is sucking me under.

I step out of the king’s embrace and hold my head. “No, no, no.”

One bad memory follows the last. My mom’s broken neck, soldiers with glassy eyes. The first four men I killed—my friends watch me with wary eyes after that. A bomb that takes over the sky and hides the sun. My city, my home, my childhood crush and everyone else is obliterated in a single blast.

Then, radiation, everywhere. In the food, the water, our bodies. Civilizations swiftly fell into depravity when the last pillar of humanity gave out.

My father’s body cradled in my arms.

I feel the loss all over again. Fresh. New. As though in this moment I lose my mother, my father, my land, my freedom all at once.

Through it all is a single face, the answer to all my anger and anguish.

Montes Lazuli.

The king did this. I blink back tears. He did this and now I’m his. Bound to the root of the evil I tried so hard to stop. It’s almost unfathomable. There is no fairness in the world. There is no kindness.

A sick feeling twists my gut. I’ve laid with the king. I’ve let him into my body. Worse, I’ve let him into my heart.

I only have a moment to register that I’m going to be sick before I begin to heave. But there’s nothing left in my empty stomach to purge. The queasiness doesn’t abate.

“Serenity!” Montes’s voice cuts through, and it’s so concerned. I jerk myself away from the monster.

More memories force their way through and I press my palms into my eyes. I scream as bloody, broken bodies flood my mind. And behind it all, the kind’s white, white smile. I want to smash it in and not stop until those teeth rip up my knuckles and fall out of his mouth. I let out a sob because I
like
the very smile I also detest.

It’s the face behind every nightmare I’ve ever had, and the face that awakened my heart. It’s ripping, bleeding. This shouldn’t be the way of things, hating and loving something at the same time.

But it’s not enough for my mind to end there. I feel the squeeze of my heart as a memory of the king holding me sneaks its way in. Another of his fearful expression when he learned of my cancer. The unguarded face he wore when nothing separated us. And through it all I see his eyes, filled with a bottomless reservoir of emotions reserved for me.

The heartless king has found his heart after all. It rests beneath my ribcage. God save me, he swapped mine for his when I wasn’t looking. And now we’re stuck—me with the weight of his death count, him with the guilt of my suffering.

Flesh and bone aren’t meant to contain all this. The mind shouldn’t stay sane when the world’s fallen to chaos, and love shouldn’t be able to grow in the wastelands of our consciences.

But, God save us all, it does.

It does.