The Dark God's Bride Trilogy, #3 (17 page)

She found his attempt to pacify her charming. Her sisters told her the horrible details of their wedding nights of how the old man wanted to touch his young wife or how the brute took everything by force. She felt sick from just remembering the graphic details of her sisters’ descriptions and that was when everything fell apart. He asked if she wanted to summon a physician and she
was so scared that everyone would find out that she panicked.

He
was furious when he figured out the truth. His gentle blue eyes became unrecognizably hostile toward her. She was petrified when she saw him glancing at the sword at his side. She cowered back, shut her eyes, and waited for him to take her life. A moment came after another, he was still standing still. His sword was still at his side.

For whatever reason, he decided to spare her life.

For the next two months, life was peaceful for her. Her husband did not reveal what he knew to others. He rarely spoke to her since that night, and if they happened to run into each other, he would exchange a few polite words. She speculated that he had spared her life for the sake of the alliance between their two kingdoms. She also speculated that he would secretly try to eliminate the child in her womb to conceal his shame, but no harm befell her or her child. He was kind to her up to her death.

She still remembered very clearly the moment she was killed. She
was surrounded by spears and soldiers. In that final moment, she heard him calling out.

“
Stop…! I command you to stop!
”

If she had more time with him, he would have grown to love her as she did him.

Rion folded her arms in front of her chest and dug her nails into her trembling flesh. Even when her mother taught her to overlook her husband’s indiscretion, the reality upstairs was difficult for any woman to overlook.

You must be patient
, Rion advised herself. She was given a second chance by Death to mend her marriage and must treat it with the utmost care. She truly believed that if she had more time with her husband, he would grow to love her as she did him.

After a quick
, refreshing shower, Noctis dressed himself in the usual manner – the only thing that he didn’t do was button his dress shirt all the way. He could never get used to the tedious task of fastening buttons, so he returned to his bed and gently shook the shoulder of the naked female lying in it. When she refused to budge, he bent his head.

“Amara,” he whispered into her ear. “Help me get dressed.”

She turned her body to lie on her back and looked up at him with clear grey eyes. The damaged tissues on his face and neck had healed significantly so he didn’t mind showing his face to her in daylight. “Is that an order or are you asking nicely?”

His bride was getting more insolen
t by the day, but he wasn’t upset with her. “Hurry up,” he urged her.

She sat up and shyly pressed the comforter in front of her chest as though he hadn’t seen every inch of her body. She made sure her breasts were covered before she reached out to help him fasten the buttons of his shirt. She smoothed out the fabric that was on his chest after she was done. “There.”

“Well done,” he said.

She smiled up at him and asked, “No ‘thank you’ for me?”

He ignored the question and said, “Get dressed and come with me to breakfast.”

“I would have to shower first. I’ll meet you downstairs?”

He nodded to show his approval and went downstairs by himself. The corner of his lips curved into a frown as soon as he arrived in the dining room. There was a blonde woman sitting at the table where his bride would usually sit. She was facing the windows with her back against the entrance, but he didn’t need to see her face to know she was Rion. He was puzzled by her reappearance in the land of the living since last night, but she had been buried at the back of his head until now. He realized that he had made an enemy with Death, but why had Death chosen Rion of all people? Surely, it couldn’t be from a lack of candidates. He had a long list of enemies to choose from, and there were a few personal favorites that would make his life a lot more interesting.

He entered the dining room casually and seated himself at his usual seat. He picked up the newspaper that
was meticulously ironed smooth and began to read through the current events. He flipped through the paper, reading only the headlines, and skimming through the rest. There was nothing interesting going on with the exception of the coming solar eclipse. He skipped right to the business section of the newspaper. His stocks had gone up.

“Your highness,” Rion called for his attention.

“Speak,” he said, giving her permission to continue.

She was quiet for a long while and then she spoke again, “…Summit.”

Noctis lowered the newspaper in his hands just enough for him to see the woman behind them. The Rion that was sitting in that chair was even more beautiful than the woman that he had in his memory. Her golden hair looked as though it was made of sunlight. Out of the three sisters of Haba, she was rumored to be the most beautiful. He confirmed that fact after he met her other two sisters, although he couldn’t remember what either of them looked like now. The memory was too distant, and he didn’t bother to recall it.

What really surprised him was the way Rion addressed him by his given name. There was once a time when he had given her his consent to call him by his name, but that license had long since expired. Hadn’t she realized that?

Just as he was about to make a correction in her form of address, Amara arrived. His bride looked at the woman sitting at the table and suddenly remembered she had invited her in their home the night before. Her facial expression was incredibly transparent.

“So you decided to stay the night,” Amara said as she walked toward the table and then seated herself on the other side. “The weather has been unpredictable lately; it’s no surprise that it caught you off guard. Did you sleep well? Do you need to call the mechanic to have your car fixed?”

His bride was assuming Rion had arrived by vehicle.

Rion glanced at Amara and then slid her eyes back to him. “Please kindly tell her that I do not understand the language she is speaking.”

Noctis sighed and then passed the word on. “She can’t understand you.”

“Oh…” Amara formed an ‘o’ with her luscious lips. “I didn’t realize she didn’t speak English. How rude it was of me to rant in front of her.”

“Have your breakfast,” he reminded her.

For a reason beyond his understanding, she was hesitating. She was waiting for him to do something, but he didn’t know what she was expecting him to do. After two minutes had passed, she smiled and then started on her breakfast. He lifted the newspaper to eye level again.

“She doesn’t know who I am, does she?” Rion asked him.

“Does she need to?”
he countered without removing his eyes from yesterday’s closing stocks.

“I suppose that it doesn’t matter to me if your mistress has knowledge of me or not.”

He disliked her choice of words even more than he disliked her tone of voice. “Amara is
not
my mistress,” he made the correction with a severe tone of voice.

“I was being respectful to you by calling her your mistress. Would you prefer I call her your whore?”

Noctis couldn’t hold back his temper and slammed his hand against the corner of the table. The ground beneath the leg of the table indented and cracked. His bride looked up at him, startled.

He rose and leaned over the table. “I forbid you!
I forbid you
from ever insulting the woman I love again, am I understood?”

“Don’t!” Amara bolted up from her seat. She grabbed him by his right arm and used all of her strength to pull him toward herself. “Why are you acting up again?”

Rion was staring back at him with fright and swallowed. He kept a stern glare on her until she nodded.

He reseated himself on the chair and turned to his bride, who was glaring at him angrily. She released her grip on his arm only when his muscles relaxed again.

“Have your breakfast,” he switched back to English in a harsher tone than he had intended.

“I want to apologize to her for your behavior, but I don’t even know how to make her understand.”

“She’s the one who should be apologizing to you!”

“Why?”
his bride curiously asked.

Noctis leaned his head on his hand when he felt a massive headache underway. He was beginning to see why Death had brought Rion back to life and not some other names on his long list of enemies. He was bound by honor to treat her civilly, but if she overstepped the line once again, he
wouldn’t be playing by the rules anymore. Honor is swell and all, but he could go both ways.

“I know that
he
has sent you here with a purpose,” he said to Rion in his native tongue. “I don’t care what it is and I won’t ask what it is, but know that if anything should happen to her,” he pointed at his bride, “I will gladly send you back to wherever you crawled out of.”

“Why are you point
ing at me?” Amara asked, clueless.

Rion regained her composure and glanced over to Amara. “I didn’t realize that you were so smitten with this mistress of yours.”

“Again, Amara is
not
my mistress,” he repeated himself with great annoyance.

“I had no prior knowledge of her until she answered the door wearing nothing more than a thin layer of silk.”

“I like silk,” he said with a widening smirk on his face.

Rion couldn’t hide the furious blush from her pale face. “I am here because I want to…” she inhaled deeply, “…I want to mend our marriage.”

He lifted a brow. “Run that by me again?”

“I was given a second chance to put things right, Summit. So many things
went wrong that we both lost sight of what could have been.”

“I’m curious. What brought this on all of a sudden?”

“It is not sudden at all. It is what I have always wanted for us. If I had not been… pregnant with another man’s child, we would have gotten along.”

“Perhaps,” he admitted. Prior to meeting her, he already made up his mind on being a committed husband. He planned on spoiling his new wife with everything that was within his powers to give. And being an obscenely wealthy man in his own rights, the future mother of his children would have been the envy of kingdoms far and near.

“And with time, we would have developed an understanding toward each other,” she continued.

“That is also a possibility.”

“You would have grown to love me as I have learned to love you.”

He didn’t think his headache could have gotten any worse, but he was wrong. A moment ago he could still talk to her with a straight face, but now he realized that there was something terribly wrong with the conversation they were having. He should have ended the conversation then and there to save whatever good impression he still had of her, but he was very curious as to why she shamed him on their wedding day when their marriage had been planned months in advance.

“In love with me, you say?” He chuckled coldly. “What about the father of your child? Wasn’t he the man you were in love with?”

“He was a liar and a coward!”
she cried. “I had no idea what my future husband was going to be like. I was frightened. Around that time, I met a nobleman who was besotted with me. He said he would ask my father to break the arrangement and marry me himself. I fell for his honeyed words, but when I became pregnant with his child, he and his family fled from the kingdom. I didn’t know what to do…”

“So you weren’t in love with him?”

Two lines of tears ran down her cheeks when she lowered her eyes. “…No. I was so afraid that I would marry an old man or a violent brute like my sisters had that I fell for the first man who offered to take me away. If I had known that I was to marry a kind and handsome husband at the prime of his youth, I would have never done what I did. He was a liar and a coward, and I hate him with all of my heart! I could never love a man like that!”

Kind
. Noctis chuckled contemptuously at the word. He was capable of kindness, but he could be very selective of whom he showed it to. 

“Are you alright?” Amara got up from her seat and came to Rion’s side and offered her a clean piece of napkin. “What’s the matter? Why are you crying?”

Rion shoved Amara and the napkin away. “Don’t you dare touch me!”

Amara turned to Noctis as though he was the culprit. “What did you say to make her so upset?”

“Are you done eating?” he asked.

“Yes, but…”

“Good.” He got up from his seat, took her by her hand, and led her out of the dining room.

“Are you just going to leave her crying in there?”

He hauled his bride out of the mansion to the garden in the back and closed the door behind him. He felt the urge to laugh so he did. His bride looked up at him with confusion in her eyes and that made him laugh even harder. He was laughing as if someone had successfully told him a witty joke.