The Alpha King Marked Me. I Still Haven't Told Him I'm A Girl novel Chapter 36

Chapter 36: Thirty Six

Lucien

The dungeons reek.

It wasn’t so much as the stench of stale piss as it was the unbearable stink of fear and death. If I listened hard enough, I could hear their pleas. Or their curses. I tap my foot in tandem to the music of it.

"Tell me everything there is to know about Valka," I demand, Trent hovering over my shoulder with a grim frown of disapproval. *You shouldn’t be in here,* was written all over his face, but he knew better than to speak it, try to tell me what I couldn’t do.

Rhea Ironfang stares at the window, making a point to keep her lips clamped shut.

I find it amusing when they do that. Mortals. Resisting. Everyone has a price, and even if they do not, I could just as easily boggle their minds and take what I want from them. Usually, it doesn’t take much.

But for some inexplicable reason, everytime I find myself reaching for Rhea Ironfang’s neck, I remember Valerian--Valka’s face.

If you so much as touch a single hair on her head...

I scowl. Even now, she torments me. The flimsy little thing has been haunting me for centuries. In my dreams. In my bed. In my waking moments. In the way I can’t even take a shit without thinking I’ll find her face in the chamber pot. And after the grande reveal--for the lack of a better word--I want nothing more than to bleach my eyes out.

And my mind too, if that works.

My fingers tap against the armrest. "I could do this all day, you know. If there is anything I have, it is time. You on the other hand," I murmur, taking in her bedraggled form. Hair matted with dirt, blood and sweat. Face tired and hollow. The injury from the pierced blade through her side stinking of a spreading infection. Sweat sticks to her sagging skin and I can just about smell the fever. "Give it a day or two without the physicians and you’ll be just another one of the rotting corpses in here."

She catches the inclination of my head towards the dark corner of the small cell. Trent angles the torch beside her and her scream is loud enough to deafen me when she notices the rotting body sitting pretty on the side.

The woman, older in appearance, but nothing but a child beside me scampers back, away from it, her fear blooming yet another foul stench.

"Now, tell me about Valka."

Her eyes rise to mine. They’re a dull, ordinary brown. "I couldn’t tell you about the bitch even if I wanted to. Eldric swore me into secrecy."

"Eldric is dead."

Her eyes flash with fire and hatred. "My vows to him are not."

"They will be if you do not tell him what he wishes to know," Trent growls, hand on the pommel of his sword.

She shakes her dark head, bringing up her knees and her soiled skirts gather around her ankles. "Eldric and I may have been mates, but there many things he didn’t trust me with. His daughter was one of them. I don’t know much of their past. All I know and can say without tempering the blood oath he forced upon me is that she was ill when she first came to us."

I cock my head. "Explain ill."

Her fingers trembles, eyes flitting back to the body in the corner as she gauges which weighs heavier. Her life. Or her oath. She chooses like every feeble-minded mortal would.

She chooses cowardice.

I’ve lived long enough to know that you may not trust the words of man or deity alike, but you may trust their fear and desperation to survive.

"Ill of the mind. When she had awoken from her endless slumber after five years, she was frail, thin, but she’d found me hunched over the fire in the kitchens and called me mother." Her lips curl in disdain. "I was with child, then. My first with Eldric. I hadn’t even known it until she pressed her hand to my stomach, felt the life in me and began weeping. She said she was sorry. I asked her what she meant and she said, *’I had a bad dream.’*"

My brows furrow and the woman’s hollow eyes meet mine for the fraction of a second, before lowering from the pain of trying to stare too long and force her mind to comprehend me.

"My boy died at fifteen," she whispers in sorrow. "She mourned him with me. As she did the rest of my children. And I knew she was ill, couldn’t even remember what her name was or having that particular conversation with me, but I hated her. I wanted her gone. By the time I’d lost my fourth son, I knew it had to be some kind of curse. I did everything. *Everything*, to get her away from my family. But she sabotaged every arrangement I brought her way. Every suitor left claiming different things of her. She had a ruthless cunning I couldn’t fight against, and if you asked the entire village what they thought of Valka, they would tell you a million different things. And it was all by her design. You may think you have the power here, but I assure you that if Valka is here, in your castle still, in your life, it is not because you will it. It is because she orchestrated it."

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