When mages come to collect on the deal that resurrected Elias Batesian with deadly supernatural powers, he, his mage-king Beau, and brilliant queen Penny find their kingdom caught in a centuries-old battle between ancient magic and the secret society built to defend against it. If Elias can come to terms with the man he was before Beau–and may have to become again–he’ll secure unlikely allies to keep magic from breaking the world. Book two of the Heart-Mage Trilogy, A VILLAIN’S HOPE is a polyam, bi fantasy romance. A perfect read for lovers of found family, steamy on-page spice, royal/guard, complex and loveable characters, and bi, Autistic, and ADHD rep. Book one of the trilogy was named to Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of 2025 and Top 6 Best LGBTQ+ Indies of 2025.
Having his soul stripped from his body and deposited on the floor of the jade room was not as painful as Elias Batesian had expected it to be. In fact, it was something of a relief to be free of the wounds that had been rapidly unraveling his tie to life.
His relief was immediately swallowed, though, in impatience. Beau still fought for his life on the other side. When he scrambled to his feet and spun, looking for an exit by which to return to the battle, he found Vensharice instead.
A hand materialized first, seeping out of the cold, green walls like smoke before coalescing into claws and fingers, then the arm to which they were attached, and then—Elias staggered back, trying to wrangle his writhing, frantic fear. Easily nine feet tall, the creature was shaped like a nightmare’s anthropomorphization of death.
Because taking it all in at once threatened his sanity, Elias flicked glances at each part: two arms like a human. Two legs as well. Two hands and two feet with twenty digits between them, albeit capped with claws as long as Elias’s fingers. Its knees bent backward; El’s mind supplied him with images of birds and cats and deer, trying to anticipate how this thing would move. It wore no clothes, but it also hadn’t fully taken form in the space between its limbs, only swirling and juddering green smoke.
Its face—it took every scrap of will to drag his eyes to the face—was smiling. The long teeth, carved with symbols down their length, were startlingly white, sickening in the green light of the room. Its tongue, too long, jointed as tongues should not be, slid out over its lips and vanished behind the teeth again.
Though every instinct in Elias’s body told him to run, he’d seen nothing but green walls, smooth as glass. His hands came up in loose claws before him, small protection against a demon with natural weapons, but better than nothing.
“Hello, morsel.” Though it spoke in nothing more than a whisper, he felt it in his chest, in his bones. “Welcome. You may call me Vensharice. You were a warrior, I see. Still prepared to fight. You can let that go now; you have died. Your fight is over.”
“Like fuck it is,” Elias snapped. “How do I get back to my body? I have to protect someone.”
Its smile widened as though it had expected this and was delighted. “Is that your business then, little offering? Someone wanted a bodyguard? Not a good use of a revenant, but I can hardly fault a desperate mage. Take a moment. I have brought you outside time. You may orient yourself to your new circumstances.”
“I know my circumstances. I put the necklace on, I died, now I’m here. It was supposed to keep me fighting. How do I get back to Beau?”
As the creature slid closer, Elias backed up in step until he bounced hard against the wall. Leaning to flatten its hands to either side of him, it stopped any escape to left or right. Trapped, his panic for Beau and his fear of this creature wrestled, and for the first time in a long time, his instincts failed him—he froze.
“Look at me,” it breathed. Against his better judgment, Elias met its eyes. Fear was displaced by chest-crushing awe. Its eyes were pure, raw, unfiltered magic. Universes were born and died in them, emitting colors deeper than purple and brighter than yellow and everything in between. They hurt to look at; Elias’s eyes watered. He longed to answer the call of that magic, to kneel, to worship.
But somewhere back in the realm of the living, Beau was fighting Watchers and injured. He needed Elias now.
He squinted, letting its unbearable eyes splinter and abstract in his watery vision, and said, “Are you going to help me get back to Beau or not?”
“What a curious reaction,” it said, breath cold on his cheek. “It has been a long time since the last offering, but I can recall that this is not how they behaved. Kiss me, morsel. I want to taste you.”
Elias recoiled so hard he could’ve turned inside out. “No fucking thank you.” His eyes rapidly traced the room again. No escape.
The creature chuckled, flooding El with dread. “Very well. I can explore your mysteries the less pleasant way.”
Though it did not move, the air became thick around Elias, cold and gelatinous. Frantically he tried to duck beneath the demon’s arm, but the atmosphere of the room wrapped itself tight around his throat and yanked him flat against the wall. As Elias’s fingers scrabbled at the nothing circling his neck, the creature’s slick, lissome tongue slithered out and traced a slimy line down his face.
Elias’s teeth cracked with the force of his jaw clenching, but no amount of struggle took him any farther from the beast. His anger and impatience fractured into panic, horror, confusion—this wasn’t what the amulet was supposed to do! Why was he here with this thing and not fighting alongside Beau? Why the fuck was it licking him?
“Open your mouth,” it said.
Through a wall of gritted teeth, he hissed, “Get the fuck away from me!”
“Do not presume to order me, morsel.” The tongue slithered down his neck to the hollow of his throat, settling against the pulse pounding between his collarbones. With inexorable, inescapable force, it pressed against his skin. Afraid to open his mouth, Elias screamed through clamped teeth as the tip of the tongue crushed into him. Then it broke skin, and the pop of his trachea and wet, gurgling noises of it tearing its way down into his chest were the only sound.
It burrowed through him. Elias had been stabbed before, cut, burned, beaten—nothing had prepared him for the gagging agony of this invasion.
After an eternity of searching among his lungs and heart, the tongue withdrew, and El collapsed, sobbing, to all fours.
His hands rose to clutch at the hole in his throat, to find the tears in his chest, but they closed on unbroken skin. Nevertheless, the pain persisted. Elias’s entire body shook, and his sobs choked into panting. He couldn’t rise from the floor; he couldn’t do anything but feel where the creature had been.
The demon walked away, and Elias was dragged behind it like the tongue had left a hook in his chest. Though he tried to stagger to his feet, its pace and his shaking allowed nothing but a crawl.
“The taste of you answers some questions and raises more,” Vensharice said, conjuring a jade chair from nothing and sitting. When Elias tried to stand, the creature pointed sharply at the floor, and he slammed face-down against the smooth, cold surface. He had failed. Beau was going to die because Elias had thought he understood the amulet, and Elias was going to spend eternity…here. Pinned to the floor on his belly, sobbing in torment.
“You are riddled with heart-mage enchantments,” Vensharice continued, speaking to Elias, but not as if it expected any response. “But what necromage would take the thrall of a heart-mage for a revenant? They must know you will be practically useless to them. Magic against magic—it will drain your will immediately, and your body was already on the edge of death. Waste of a trade, a ten-minute revenant.”
Elias cleared his throat and fought to slow his breathing. Mage? Flat denial seemed the safest course. “There are no mages involved,” he said, pushing up onto his elbows so he could look in the creature’s face. “And no magic except that fucking amulet. The books said it would keep me moving after I should’ve been dead. It never said I’d be trapped in cold hell with some lizard-tongue demon.”
“Some demon?” the creature hissed, and the force of it nearly scoured Elias’s skin from his skull. “I am Vensharice. I am a Source. Surely a mage’s thrall knows that much.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about. I don’t know any mages. I’m no one’s ‘thrall.’”
The creature’s hand snapped up, palm pressing to El’s mouth and fingers wrapping uncomfortably far around his head. “I enjoy a pretty lie on occasion, but I insist you choose lies whose falsity I have not already tasted. Once I return you to time, you will wane quickly. Answer me while you are able. By whose order were you offered in trade?”
Elias’s mind raced. Was it possible Beau was a mage? El thought of the changes that had been wrought in him over his time with Beau, and the flashes of gold light he’d seen in the king’s eyes. Not an artifact, not rogue Maurilel blood, but a heart-mage? It was true he’d never met anyone who loved as hard as Beau did, he’d seen the magic in him, but a mage?
And what the fuck was a thrall?
If Beau was a mage, El didn’t like how interested this creature was in him. Time to provide some of those “pretty lies” it asked for.
Elias licked his lips and said, “I’ve been in service to a nobleman for nearly a decade. Perhaps he’s this…heart-mage. He found the amulet in a basement and gave it to me as a gift for my loyalty. All I knew about it was that it would kill me but keep me fighting. A friend of mine is in danger, and I was nearly dead; I used the amulet so I could stay and protect him.”
Narrowing its universe-collision eyes, Vensharice leaned closer and sniffed, then pulled El to his feet by a hand around the throat. “Tell me, this nobleman you serve…what manner of man is he?”
Elias shrugged. “Decent. Pays me well, never demands anything from me I’m not willing to give. He likes his privacy and his books. But none of this has anything to do with the amulet. I put the chain on myself—I made that choice. No magic or orders.”
With no apparent effort, the creature flung Elias backward, slamming him hard enough into the wall he felt his skull crack. As he crumpled to his back on the floor, it stalked toward him, stepping directly onto his belly and driving all air from his lungs. It bent to peer into his face, then slashed at it, claws raking through the flesh of his cheek and scraping the teeth below.
“That is enough lies,” it said quietly, no hostility or anger in its voice but blood-chilling all the same. “The amulet has a master; I can feel it. Tell me about Beau.”
It slid a single claw down Elias’s chest, parting the skin like silk, pressing deeper as it peeled him open down to his waist. El couldn’t move; he could barely manage to watch in gasping horror. Eyes boring into Elias’s, Vensharice demanded, “Well?”
Oh fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck, the guard thought. He could see the fluttering of his lungs, the thud of his heart, the steam rising into the cold room from his organs. It wanted—it wanted him to speak? To answer? His head echoed with incoherent screams.
“Beau,” it prompted again.
Don’t tell it anything about Beau, he thought, the only lucid thought he could manage.
Everything beneath his skin began to glow gold. Lightning forks traced his veins, and a steady pulse radiated through his muscles and organs. His heart glowed so brightly he expected it to hurt, but it didn’t. At first, he thought the creature was doing this, burning him somehow, but Vensharice settled back with a satisfied grin.
“Ah,” it said, twisting its hand in the air and sealing Elias’s body up whole again. In disbelief, El pressed a hand to his stomach. “So you are a protective thrall. Do you dislike my questioning about your heart-mage? That lit up every enchantment in your body.”
It paced the short distance from one wall to the other, moving unnaturally on its strangely bent legs. Elias sat shakily up against the wall. In any other situation, he’d want to be on his feet, but the futility of running, of fighting, of any resistance to this entity had overwhelmed him. He felt tender, fragile along the line it had sliced. Afraid he’d fall open again, he kept his hands pressed to his middle.
When Vensharice tilted its head back and inhaled deeply, Elias flinched, but the creature didn’t turn to him. It muttered to itself, “That magic is the same as the master of the revenant. Why would a heart-mage come to me? Dayin and Opaless are not weakened, by the taste of him. Stronger than anything I could manage, although it is messy. Unfocused. A young mage dealing with them, perhaps? Untrained?”
Trying to control his breathing, Elias listened. Most of it made no sense to him, but he absorbed it anyway. Then something tugged at him, a faint force hooked through his breastbone that grew stronger the longer he sat still.
Abruptly it jerked, and with a cry, he lurched to all fours. It yanked harder, dragging him forward a few steps, and Vensharice seemed taken aback. Then its eyes narrowed. “Ah yes, the bargain. Our time out of time is ending, morsel.”
Vensharice gave him no pause to respond. One moment he was on his hands and knees in the jade room, and the next he was cocooned in what felt like green mud, barely transparent enough to see a pale image of the isles ahead of him: returned to the real world, in a manner of speaking, but not quite returned to his body.
Agony speared through him—his wounds from before, dozens of cuts from his scalp down. When he took a deep breath, the stab through his right side sucked the air out of his lungs and replaced it with pain.
He tried to move his arm to press it to the injury. Something moved, but it was jittery, weak, and distant, like puppeting someone else’s arm on ten-foot-long strings. He panicked, frantically trying to move, and though it stirred the jelly around him, it did nothing to lift the limbs he could now see through the window of vision he had.
Vensharice’s whisper crawled through his head. “None of that, little offering. You are not a body anymore. You are a soul. You operate on will alone.”
What the fuck did that mean? He concentrated on moving closer to that watery image of the isles, and things became slightly clearer. Duchess’s face swam into view, flooded with anguish, and he could vaguely feel her hands on him. Where was Beau?
He tried to recall what had been happening when he…left. Duchess had helped him get the amulet on, and Beau had been walking ahead to defend them against two soldiers.
At the thought of Beau fighting alone with the injuries he’d already sustained, Elias felt all those gold-touched places inside him glow up again, and he growled. It echoed inside the confines of his gelatinous prison, and Vensharice added its own growl alongside. Though he couldn’t see the creature, he could feel its presence and sense its attention following his own as he looked for the soldiers.
There—there was Beau.
He’d nearly closed with the soldiers, though the cuts to his hip and shoulder were bleeding heavily. The rage Elias felt at seeing him bleed made the cocoon vibrate. He wanted those soldiers dead.
And quite suddenly, they were. He hadn’t made his body move, but he stood before them, and they were in pieces, and a jolt of dark, awful pleasure thrummed through Elias’s body as they died and Beau was safe again, for the moment.
Vensharice hummed. “Delicious,” it sighed, and then chuckled breathlessly. “I was mistaken; a thrall-revenant is perfect.” Though the creature did not seem to be physically near him, Elias felt a rolling wave of pressure pass over his body like a stroking hand, and he shuddered. “Protect him again, morsel.”
He would, obviously, but he didn’t like how much gratification the demon was getting from it. In the ongoing waves of pain, he tried to think. “Can you do something about how much this hurts?” He tried to speak aloud but didn’t seem to be in control of a mouth.
Vensharice heard anyway. “I am afraid not, offering. You will feel every—” The stroking hand passed over his throat. “—little—” It squeezed. “—bit.”
----*----*----*----*----
Elias sobbed as grief and torture dragged him out of the cocoon again, slamming him to the cold, green floor of the jade room after weeks. “Please,” he croaked, dragged out, broken. He could see nothing, think nothing, feel nothing but unending agony and the faces of the dead. “Please—I killed them all. The Watchers are dead. Everyone I’ve ever…they’re dead! They’re dead! Why does it still hurt so much! I can’t do this anymore! Why isn’t it over? Please—”
Vensharice bent to cup his chin gently in its overlong fingers, tilting his head until its every-colored eyes swam in El’s blurry vision. “I can end it. You have held out so much longer than your body should have carried you. You need suffer no longer. Offer me your soul, morsel, and all the pain ends.”
Elias held his hand out, weak. “Take it. Please. End this.”
It opened its mouth, wrapped his forearm in tongue, drew his fingers, his palm, his wrist past those long, carved teeth. It closed its mouth, and tore through flesh, through bone, through spirit. It chewed and swallowed something Elias would never get back.
----*----*----*----*----
He woke face-down on cold tile, a dark pool of blood creeping closer to his fingers at a pace that said someone was dead. His chest was tight, as if his ribs had forgotten how to expand for lungs. El coughed, twitched, groaned.
Someone was screaming near him, the hoarse and wretched shrieks of surprise grief, of loss so sudden, so unexpected, so horrific it draws sound from the guts.
Elias blinked, curled his fingers in so the blood wouldn’t reach them. Is this Vensharice? Is this some fresh torture?
Only he didn’t hurt anymore. The all-consuming pain that had shredded and pulverized him for four weeks was gone. Vensharice had said the pain would not be gone until it was over.
Am I finally…dead? Truly dead?
But if he were dead, why was he so stiff and so…physical? He was in a body again, not just a facsimile projected by the jade creature to help El comprehend his existence.
The screaming continued, broken and guttering with sobs.
Elias drew his hand to his chest and out of the path of the spreading blood. So much blood.
Slowly, with great effort, he lay his palm flat on the floor and pressed up until he could see beyond the glistening edge of the pool.
Duchess knelt on the floor, blood soaking into her dress from the knees, blood to her elbows. Before her lay mincemeat and bone—not even a body, but a heap of gore in the vague outline of a man. Elias blinked stupidly at it.
What was that? What was it? What had happened? And why was Duchess scream—
A jolt ran through Elias, cold and green as Vensharice’s magic. He’d thought the memories of Beau appearing in the jade room had been a hallucination, a blessed bit of delusion born of more pain than any person could possibly endure bringing him a final image of his love. But if he hadn’t convinced the king to leave him to his fate, if Beau tried something magically, if Beau followed him to hell—
Elias took a step forward and slid in blood, arms jerking as he recovered. That couldn’t be Beau. That couldn’t be Beau. That couldn’t be a person. It was scraps, it was chum, it was—Duchess was sobbing now, hands curled against her stomach, horrible gulps of anguish catching in her throat.
It couldn’t be Beau.
Beau had offered his hand, hazel eyes reflecting the green of that terrible place, and Elias had taken it, letting its grip yank his soul out of Vensharice’s desolate, cold realm. Back here. Back to life.
Oh gods. Did Beau…trade places with him?
“Duchess,” he said, voice grating as if his vocal cords had never been used before.
She jerked, hand splashing into the viscous pool as she turned and lost her balance. Her dark eyes, reddened with tears, took in his appearance in a long, shocked stare. “He brought you back,” she mouthed, throat too choked with sobs to allow sound. “He—” She turned back to the shredded corpse.
“No,” Elias said. It sounded calm, flat. “No. That’s not Beau. That’s…not Beau. That’s not Beau.” He tried to close his mouth, to stop speaking. The words rolled out unstoppably. “That’s not Beau.” Not calm anymore; tight, high, strangled. “That’s not Beau.”
Duchess stood, putting herself between Elias and his view of what could not, could not be Beau on the ground. Slick and sticky, her hands gripped his elbows. “It’s okay, Elias. It’s okay.” Still no voice to her words, just air. “He—he—it—it’s—”
“That’s not Beau.” He stared at her because he couldn’t look at it again, the mess of what might have been a man but was never, never Beau. “Where is Beau?”
She sobbed again, head dropping against his chest, then lifting again as she tried to swallow, tried to speak. “I’m so sorry. I’m so—he—he chose you. He chose you. He brought you back.”
A tight ball of heat in Elias’s chest began to grow, to spin, to ignite. Anger. Rage. Beau knew better. Beau knew better than that. Molten gold heat traced his veins, made his hands shake, turned every exhale to smoke and cinder. “No,” he said, more certain this time. More insistent. “No.”
Duchess’s grief slipped, eyes widening in alarm. She took a step back so her fingers barely touched his wrists, eyes on his body. Elias looked down.
The heat was not entirely internal. It burned along his skin, gouging into his hip, his shoulder, tracing out swooping lines across his chest, his back. A ferocious, jagged streak of it burned down from his neck along one arm, tracing a slice to the back of his thumb. It was an achingly familiar line: Beau’s scar. Then the gold hatched its way along his chest, down the insides of his thighs, along his arms from wrist to the inside of his elbow. These are Beau’s scars.
They seared hot as brands, but after the pain of the jade room their burns barely registered to Elias. The gold of them flared, then drained down his body like a thick liquid, leaving behind a strange, pale iridescence in its wake. Pooling at his feet, the molten gold slithered toward the wide pool of Beau’s blood.
When it touched the deep red, it lit like fire thrown onto tar and sulphur, gold flames eating through the blood, spreading along the pool, flickering and consuming and leaving nothing but clean tile behind. The ring of light and magic tightened around the meat and bone, then poured over it. Elias expected the remains to char, but instead they began to lift. El’s fingers ached: he held Duchess’s hands, and both of them squeezed too tightly.
A piece at a time, the scraps and shreds of King Beauregard floated into shape, a sketch of the man in red ink. They couldn’t reseal—too much of him was missing—but the gaps between filled with molten gold. As Elias and Duchess watched in open-mouthed dread and awe, Beau’s body stitched itself back together with thick, aureate seams.
It was over in less than a minute. The floor was spotlessly clean. Duchess’s hands and skirts showed no evidence of their blood soaking. Beau was unrecognizable, too many glowing gold lines webbing his features to pick out the shape of his mouth, the curve of his throat. Slowly, the gold faded, drawing toward Beau’s center as if draining there. When the last of it circled and vanished, it left behind the same milky pearlescence of Elias’s new scars.
On Beau they were beautiful. El stumbled toward him, staring down in such a tangle of wonder and terror and shock he felt none of it at all. He knelt, touched Beau gently, afraid of those seams, desperately afraid to see Beau in pieces again.
His fingertips ran lightly over the vertical strike through Beau’s brow, eyelid, and cheekbone. A blinding scar—Elias had been blinded in that eye as a revenant. He could feel it even now, the throwing knife that had carved through his brow bone, drawn blood like tears down his cheek, stolen vision in that eye until the cold, green magic swept in to provide the images nerves no longer could.
“These are my scars,” he whispered. “These are my wounds.”
“Oh Elias.” Duchess’s hand on his back as she sank down beside him was small and comforting. “Gods. They’re…” Her other hand hovered over Beau as if she, too, were afraid to touch. Tracing the scars with her eyes, she catalogued them.
Elias cupped Beau’s cheek, ran his thumb along the seams. “Beau. Wake up now. Come on. You take your scars back and I’ll take mine, all right? These aren’t…these aren’t your injuries to take.”
Beau’s eyes did not open.
“Beau,” El said more sharply, eyes burning. “Trade me back. Beau! Please. I was protecting you. You can’t—this isn’t how—”
Beau was so cold, unmoving. He was dead. He wore Elias’s wounds and he was dead, and Elias was alive. This isn’t how it’s supposed to go. It cannot go this way; my life before his, always. This can’t…
Abruptly he stood, turned from Beau’s body, and paced to the throne. To one side of it, gore splattered walls and floor: the remnants of Lord Courdur, whose attempt to usurp Beau was the reason the king now lay unmoving and scarred. He eyed it for a moment, swallowing hard against the rage that welled up in him at the sight.
I wish you were alive. You earned a longer and more painful death than my revenant gave you. I would give you so much more. I learned from Vensharice; I would unravel you like a tapestry, one thread at a time, and smile at your screams.
“Beau!” The exclamation behind him drew Elias’s head up. “He’s—” Duchess met El’s eyes for a moment, then turned back to Beau, who was moving.
Elias’s relief dropped him to his knees. He wanted to see Beau, speak to him, but he was so dizzy with the sudden release he couldn’t breathe. As the royals spoke quietly, Elias fought to keep from sobbing.
I am steady. I am stone. Beau does not need me falling apart.
When, at last, he was under control again, he crawled to his feet and bent over the prone king. “Beau? Does it hurt?” If those injuries were even a tenth as painful as they’d been when El received them—
“Hurt? No, nothing hurts.” Beau’s eyes closed, stayed shut for too long, opened again. One hazel eye had an iridescent line through the iris, a glittering slit that continued down his cheek to meet the tangle of other scars. Gods, every inch of him was scarred. He’d never forgive Elias. Never. “I’m just so tired. It was hard to fit my soul back in. Are you all right? You look perfect.”
El nearly collapsed again. Yes, perfect. I look like you. I was supposed to protect you, and instead—
“Perfect,” he said, nodding. When he held his arm out to show Beau the scars he’d stolen, the king squinted, uncomprehending. It wasn’t until he swept aside his scraps of shirt and showed the mother-of-pearl tattoos that Beau jerked up in recognition. “What?”
“We made a trade,” Elias said. He braced for anger, for Beau to say, you were supposed to protect me, not the other way around. With his pulsing heart in his throat, he watched the king examine his many, many new scars.
Beau ran his fingers over the cratered mass of his chest, glittering and glimmering as he shifted. “Even your scars are pretty, El. You should be studied.”
It was said so gently, with such good humor, that Elias coughed out a laugh before he truly registered the words. There was nothing funny about the circumstances, but Duchess laughed, too.
When Beau turned his eyes up to Elias, they were soft and warm. Peaceful. No anger in them at all. It gutted Elias. Does he not understand that I failed? That I wasn’t good enough, and now he’ll never be the same?
A cold exhale played over the back of El’s neck, and he jerked, searching behind him as others came into the hall and Beau and Duchess spoke to them. That had felt eerily, horrifically like Vensharice’s breath on his skin.
“And I see you’ve successfully un-revenanted the revenant. Hello, prince-killer. I’ve heard a lot about you.”
Elias stopped searching for a demon and met the eyes of a small, ferocious-looking young woman very similar in appearance to the queen. “Duchess’s sister, I presume.”
As she confirmed and then spoke again to the royals, Elias was distracted by the light tickle along his ribs of four sharp points—like claws. When he looked down, nothing was there. Sweat broke out along his brow, and he shivered. Vensharice can’t touch me here. I’m back. I’m alive. Right?
Beau made a small sound, and when Elias looked up, the king swayed on his feet. No one else noticed; they were talking about the army outside and what was to be done with it.
Grabbing Beau, Elias steadied him. Gods, it was good to touch him and feel burning hot skin, thrumming with magic and life. “Sit down, Highness.”
He paused, wondering if Beau would call him down for the title, which no longer matched his stature. It’d become something closer to a habitual nickname than a title, but if Beau wanted El to call him “Majesty,” he’d change in a heartbeat. Beau didn’t seem to notice, though.
“When you came back,” Beau said as Elias helped him sit, “was my body all in one piece?”
The image of those unrecognizable remains inflicted itself on Elias’s mind’s eye, and he had to swallow before he could say, “No.”
“Ah. Was yours?” He accepted the answer so simply, as if that were to be expected.
“Yes.” And I’m sorry for that. It should’ve been me in pieces. It should’ve been—
“Good.” And Beau sounded like he meant it.
Elias found himself lost for words. Maybe the king simply hadn’t processed yet that this was a subversion of their natural order, a betrayal of their tacit agreement. “Beau…how do I thank you for what you did? How do I earn your forgiveness? How do I begin to repay you?”
“Repay?” Beau’s expression was briefly incredulous. His face was so strange now, so powerfully marked by magic. Alluring and otherworldly and incomprehensible as a dragon sitting on the throne, Beau frowned. “You’re mine to forgive as I please. And I do forgive you. But I don’t know that you owe me a debt.”
So he did recognize that Elias had failed; he’d just forgiven him already. How? How was he always so…good?
Beau must’ve seen his thoughts on his face because he shrugged and said, “All right, if you feel you do, you do. So here’s my proposal: pay me in honesty. Never lie to me again for as long as we live. No white lies. No lies of omission. No oblique answers to ‘protect’ me. I gave you everything, which means somewhere in there, you have my honesty. Use it.”
I gave you everything.
Elias felt the magic in him—the gold enchantments Vensharice had peeled him open to show him—heat. He nodded. He’d die before he lied to this man again. “Yes, Your Majesty.”