Madness of the Horde King by Zoey Draven

Author:Zoey Draven [Draven, Zoey]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zoey Draven

Chapter 29

The horde king returned to the voliki in a blackened mood.

My breath hitched when his eyes immediately found me, sitting in the middle of the bed, cross-legged.

His mood blackened further when he saw the floor had been cleaned and cleared of the old food and broken dishes, but he said nothing. Instead, he stripped off his trews and strode, naked, to the cool bathing tub and stepped inside.

I was only in a tunic, my legs and feet exposed. My pants were hanging near the fire, drying after I’d tried to wash them.

“You are not a slave here.”

His voice was soft but firm.

“I know,” I said, just as softly.

He closed his eyes briefly as I studied him. I didn’t know what had happened earlier, after I’d entered his mind at his command. It had been strange, consuming…and oddly intimate. Even during his apology, I’d sensed the truth in his words. I hadn’t needed to enter his mind to know how he felt about the events of three nights ago.

“I owe you an apology as well,” I decided to say, picking at the furs that tickled my legs on the bed.

Water trickled when he turned to look at me, his brow furrowed. “For what?”

“For that night,” I said. “Truthfully, I have no idea who the Vorakkar was.” The one that had my father killed. “It was wrong of me to accuse you of anything. I think…I think I was just feeling…vulnerable.”

I didn’t know if that was the right word, but it was the only one I could think of to describe my emotions that night.

“And you were right. Names do have power. I didn’t realize how much.”

“Because I called you Vivi?”

I licked my lips. It didn’t hurt as much, hearing him say it now. That first time, though, it had felt like a punch in the gut.

I cleared my throat. “My father wanted a better life for us. He grew up in the old Earth colonies. He knew what peace felt like, what the lack of fear felt like—until his home was destroyed and that was taken from him too.”

When I darted a peek up at him, I saw Davik was watching me carefully from his place in his bath. I got the strange sense that hearing me speak was helping to keep him calm, keep his mood steady. So I kept talking.

“Hordes didn’t pass by our village often. The men took risks. They hunted so we were not hungry. They gathered materials and supplies from the forests so that we might live more comfortably, though they knew it was against your laws. We were a small village, one of the last to settle here. We thought we were safe. Until a horde came.

“I saw my father executed,” I told him, though I didn’t meet his eyes. I kept my gaze on the furs, kept picking at the little tufts of hair across it. “I watched him die, heard my mother’s screams and my sister crying. And all I could do was stand there, like I was seeing something from someone’s else life.

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