A Kingdom of Gods and Ruin (A Game of Malice and Greed #0.5) by Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti

Author:Caroline Peckham & Susanne Valenti [Peckham, Caroline & Valenti, Susanne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Amazon: B0BWJXX18C
Goodreads: 122996537
Published: 2023-03-03T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVEN

I knelt on the cold floor of the temple of Herdat, goddess of death and ruin, my sister’s body laying before me on the stone altar, her hair brushed to a shine, her silver dress accentuating her beauty beyond all denial and the low neckline letting the entire world see what had been done to her if they cared to look.

The time that had passed since her death had been an agony unlike anything I had ever known.

People had come to mourn her, speaking words of loss and despair over a woman they had never truly known. Not like I had. Not like Aren and her twins had.

Something inside me had splintered and shorn off. A piece which would never return because it had been so intrinsically linked to her that it couldn’t exist without her to breathe life into it.

I felt cold. Deep down to the roots of my core, cold. Like frost had taken root in the part of my soul which demanded I keep living beyond her death. It was growing inside me, climbing through my veins and freezing everything it touched, kissing my lips so that they forgot how to smile, chilling my eyes so they forgot how to cry, and stilling my heart so that it only beat in shallow, insignificant thumps which did nothing beyond staving off death.

Because I didn’t want to die.

Not yet.

I wanted to claim my revenge first.

Inside me, a little girl still screamed and raged at the world, her broken heart whispering words to me between thoughts, giving me a taste of her pain whenever she could with the lash of her tongue against the inside of my skull. She was me and not me. Fractured, divided. Like I had split in two but remained in one body.

You made that bargain, she hissed with venom, the memory of Carioth’s acid green eyes haunting me from within my own mind. You let her leave the house that day.

“I know,” I told myself, because I wasn’t denying it. Aalia’s death fell on me. It was my doing almost as much as it was the emperor’s.

I knew it was him without needing to ask the question. I knew what he’d done, and I knew he had done it before and would do it again.

He’d seen something that wasn’t his. Something beautiful and pure and loved beyond any emotion he knew, and he had wanted it. She’d denied him in front of the entire court, embarrassed him and dented his ego. So he’d snatched her, and beaten her, and taken what he had been refused before wrapping his hands around her neck and stealing her from this world once and for all.

The Fae couldn’t tell lies. But secrets were easily kept by the dead.

I took Aalia’s hand in mine one last time, the coldness of her touch so alien that it didn’t even feel like it was her I was holding.

You killed her.

“And I’ll avenge her,” I swore in reply to my own mind. It wouldn’t fix it.

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