Dragon's Dawn (To Kill a King Book 1) by Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes

Author:Sam Burns & W.M. Fawkes [Burns, Sam & Fawkes, W.M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Flickerfox Books, LLC
Published: 2023-08-16T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

Misha

I’d spent a lifetime playing second best. Not as kind and sensitive as Kostya. Not going to be king like Dima. Not as clever as . . . well, any other member of my family. This, though, might be the biggest insult I’d ever fielded.

A honeymoon with me was second best to court. Fucking court.

Prancing arrogant pricks stabbing each other in the back while sipping tea and eating mediocre finger food was a better afternoon than spending another moment with me.

And of course fucking Dima had called us back. Dobryanka was rebelling against the king, and someone had mentioned it in my presence. No doubt that news had been winging its way back to Dmitri before the farmer and his family had even made their way off the estate.

But . . .

I crashed back out of my bedroom door and looked at the guard there. “Pavel, the farmers who left this afternoon—”

“Annika saw their names stricken from the visiting record before they’d set foot outside the house,” he answered, before I’d managed to gather my thoughts to explain what I wanted. “No one saw their names and the town they hailed from but you and she.”

My shoulders slumped in relief.

The boy had been young and foolish, yes, but he didn’t deserve to die for it. His family certainly didn’t deserve to suffer for it. And my mad cousin? He was the type to burn a farmer’s crops to ash without knowing his name or anything but that they hadn’t liked him very much.

And since everyone in Voronezh had reason to hate the ass, I thought he needed more than that before he went and burned someone’s home down or executed them.

Slightly relieved, I gave Pavel a nod and returned to my packing. I would take him back with me. He was one of the best guards the family employed, and read me well. Though being with me was to be at court, so the kinder course would have been to leave him at the estate.

I turned back to my room, yanking clothes out of the drawers I’d stuffed them into only a few days ago and shoving them into my trunk. The servants would do it if I left it to them, of course, but why should Dima’s whims be their problem any more than they were already problems for all Voronezh? No, I wouldn’t put them out. I’d simply wear rumpled clothes, and it would confirm everyone’s opinion that I was second best at everything.

It was fine.

All I’d ever truly excelled at was killing, and rightfully, no one wanted to boast about that. Death was nothing to be proud of, even when you were skilled at dealing it. The people of my land wrestled with death every day. We had a healthy respect for it, but no love. No strange obsession as some other lands seemed to have with killing. Lives that continued after death were not a concept my people understood. Death was an end, the end,

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