The Queen of Traitors (The Fallen World Book 2) (8 page)

The ominous silence turns to murmuring. People are listening, some nodding.

“I may have married the king, but I am not him. I am one of you. I hurt like you, I love like you, and I can die like you.”

The words flow out of me. I don’t know if anything I’m saying finds its mark, but this is the best I have to offer.

“I’ve seen what war does to a place. It brings out the worst in us. But the war is over. It’s time for us to not simply survive, but to thrive …”

The crowd’s talking and shifting. People point to the erected screens and I follow their gazes.

I see myself, my face angled slightly away from the camera. Dripping from my nose is a line of blood. I reach up and touch it, staring at my fingers.

The noise of the crowd rises. People are shouting, and they’re repeating one word over and over—

Plague.

Chapter 11

Serenity

“It’s going to
be okay.”

Five words every soldier fears.

You can rephrase them, elaborate on them, parse them down, but the meaning is always the same: you’re fucked.

It doesn’t help that the royal physician—Dr. Goldstein, the man who administered the antidote to my memory loss—says this while wearing a hazmat suit. He’s already swabbed my cheek and taken a sample of my blood for testing, and now he’s cleansing my arm for a shot.

What no one’s mentioning is that the king’s pills should’ve prevented me from catching plague in the first place. Or that the plague has run its course in this region of the world.

“What are the odds that the shot will work?” Montes asks from where he holds me down alongside his guards. I’ve obviously been a little too transparent with my hate for doctors.

I don’t fight them too hard, however. The king and his men have quarantined themselves with me inside this room in the palace, and judging from the bits and pieces I’ve gathered, they could be at risk.

Even the king.

It’s unlikely, considering that prior exposure to the virus means their bodies should have the immunities needed to fight it, but it’s not impossible.

The doctor’s shaking his head. “Decent, though I’d need to see her bloodwork first.”

He slips the needle under my skin, and now I do jerk my limbs.

“She can take a bullet, but not a shot,” the king murmurs. I think he’s trying to lighten the mood. He shouldn’t bother. I know the odds. Despite what the king said last night, Death and I are old friends, and he’s decided to pay me a visit.

Two hours later
it’s clear the shot hasn’t worked. I’m drenched in sweat, yet I have the chills. No wonder this plague killed so many. It has a swift onset and it escalates quickly.

My head pounds, my brain feeling far too swollen for the cavity it rests in. For once, there’s no nausea, just an ache that’s burrowed itself into my bones.

Montes sits at my side. “You’re okay,” he says, taking my hand.

My teeth chatter. “Stop saying that.”

His lips tilt into a smile, and he brushes the hair back from my face. “This wasn’t how I imagined getting you on your back.”

“You’re such an asshole,” I say, but my lips twitch at his words. He understands that I don’t want pity. I’ll drink up his strength.

Unlike the others, he hasn’t bothered donning even a mask. My eyes prick. Illness unwinds the last of my defenses. The immortal king risks his own health to be by my side. I’m too sick to wonder about this, but not too sick to be moved by it.

Montes wipes away a tear that leaks out the corner of my eye, staring at it wondrously. “She cries.”

“Put on a mask, Montes.” I can’t think about the fact that I’m actually concerned about his wellbeing.

“I’ll be fine.”

I want to place my hands over his lips to stop him from speaking, but that might just increase his chances of catching whatever I have.

“Please.”

A knock on the door interrupts us. A moment later the doctor, who had left to run my bloodwork, returns, clad once more in a hazmat suit.

One look at his face and I know whatever he has to say won’t be good.

“Montes,” he says, not meeting my eyes, “a moment please?”

The King

Dr. Goldstein pulls
me to the edge of the room.

“I sent Serenity’s bloodwork to the lab,” he says when I approach him. He looks tired, which is not the expression I want to see on his face.

“The lab confirmed that the queen does in fact have the plague. However,” the doctor looks more than a little concerned, “this strain … it’s new.”

“It’s
new
?”

How does a new strain of plague show up out of thin air and choose my wife as its first victim?

“Where did it originate from?”

“One of your laboratories—the one stationed in Paris.”

It takes me a moment to register his words. I’m expecting him to say a general region like the Balkan Peninsula, not a specific location, and definitely not one of my labs.

“From what I was able to gather, it matches a strain of plague your researchers have been testing.”

The news is a shock to my system.

“They’re in the initial stages of creating an inoculation for this strain,” Goldstein continues, “but an inoculation won’t do Serenity any good now that she’s already caught it. We’ve already given her the antidote for the old virus.”

“What good is an old antidote if this is not the same illness?” My voice is rising. I pinch the bridge of my nose and pace. “And how the hell did this get leaked?”

Heads are going to fucking roll. Now I just need to figure out whose those will be.

“Your Majesty, we have no idea. No one at the research station in Paris has reported a contamination, but that could be a failure in oversi—”

“Don’t feed me that bullshit.”

This was a deliberate attack. Someone went into one of my laboratories and harvested a super virus to kill my queen with.

I run a hand down my face. I’ll torture all those technicians one by one until I have my answers, and then I will hunt down whoever did this and I will kill them slowly. A point must be made: those who dare to turn my weapons against me and my own will die, along with many innocents.

“What’s the kill rate?” I ask.

“Pardon?” Dr. Goldstein says.

“The kill rate. How lethal is this strain?”

“Your Majesty—”

“Just give me the goddamn number, Goldstein.”

He shakes his head. “I don’t know. Your researchers in Paris didn’t know, but they thought it was somewhere around,” he takes a breath, “eighty percent.”

Eighty percent.

Eighty percent.

I’ve turned away from him before even realizing I’ve done so. I rub my mouth at the horror of it all. Four out of every five victims die.

I glance over at Serenity just as she lets out a wet, rattling cough.

“What happens at this point?” I ask, returning my attention to Dr. Goldstein. “Do we move her into the Sleeper?”

Goldstein shakes his head. “The Sleeper specializes in trauma, not illness. It won’t work for this, just like it won’t cure Serenity of cancer.

“Your Majesty,” he continues, his voice already apologetic, “this is out of our hands. If the queen is to live, she’ll have to beat this on her own.”

Serenity’s condition worsens.
By the evening, she’s strapped to several different monitors, and I tense at every beep.

No one else in the room contracts the plague. It’s not too surprising given that on this end of the hemisphere, people have either survived the plague once, or been inoculated against it. Goldstein speculates that this mutated strain is much less transmutable, meaning that while lethal, it won’t readily spread. This only strengthens the argument that someone deliberately infected my wife.

And Serenity, who’s never encountered the plague before, has no defenses against it. The pills that should’ve protected her from this pathogen, the pills that prevent me from aging, she hasn’t taken since the bombing on the palace, which was a month ago. Any she took before then have long since been purged from her system.

I watch her toss and turn in the hospital bed.

I brought one of the victims of my war into my house, and she’s brought the world’s blights in with her.

I run my hand over hers. Scars mar her knuckles; it’s the same hand that wears my rings. Love and war—they battle it out across her skin. I thread my fingers between hers and bring them to my mouth.

Serenity doesn’t react to the touch, but I do. My hand trembles, and I can’t be sure whether fear or fury are responsible for the palsy.

Even as I sit here, my researchers are being interrogated and punished.

It’s not enough to slack my need for vengeance. Not nearly.

Serenity lets out a moan and tugs against my grip. Only then do I realize I’ve been squeezing her hand so tightly my knuckles have whitened.

That night in Geneva, when I first held her under the stars, I told her all the ways she was unexceptional—how she wasn’t the prettiest, or the smartest, or the funniest person I’d encountered. I didn’t bother to tell her that she was the most ferocious woman I’d ever met, or the most tragic. I didn’t tell her that whatever combination of pain and hardship she’d endured, it enthralled me completely.

She’s not dying. She can’t. Serenity’s final act is not succumbing to fever in a hospital bed.

Serenity will live—she must. I rely upon it, and humanity relies upon it. Otherwise, I won’t rest until the world burns.

Chapter 12

Serenity

They say it
took me five days to beat this thing.

They say that it was the most lethal strain of plague they’d yet seen. They tell me that four out of every five people die from it. That my compromised immune system saved me from death by a virus that primarily kills the healthy.

They say that someone planted the virus on or near me.

They say it was the Resistance.

I believe everything but the last.

“Trust me when I tell you that if the Resistance knew about your super virus, they would’ve taken advantage of it long ago,” I say to the king’s council.

I’m pacing inside one of the palace’s conference rooms as Montes and his advisors go over the attack.

“It’s been months since you were part of the Resistance,” one of his men says—a former West African ruler. “How would you know that?”

The king’s lounging back in his chair, his calculating eyes moving between me and the advisor. He’s been quiet, and that’s probably for the best. Usually when he talks someone ends up with a bullet between their eyes.

“You were the one that suggested that Resistance members are planted everywhere,” the man continues. “Now we’re missing a driver and an official car; one matching its description has been found near a suspected Resistance stronghold.

“Correlation is not the same as causation,” I say.

The man guffaws, and I thin my eyes. The derision these men have for me is almost palpable. I know what they see: a young, pretty girl from a backwards nation who wishes to talk to them as equals. They can barely stand it. And while I enjoy their silent seething, I’m never going to make inroads with these men if they don’t respect my opinion.

I place my hands on the table and stare him down, letting the civility bleed from my expression. I’m no delicate flower. I’ve seen more of war’s atrocities first hand than most—if not all—of these men have.

“It’s reasoning like that that’s set the world back decades and dropped the global lifespan from the high sixties to the mid-thirties,” I say.

He stares back at me with flinty eyes. “It’s reasoning like yours, my queen, that’s nearly gotten you killed multiple times.”

“
Efe
.” Montes rises from his chair, his expression ominous. The threat is clear—an insult to me is an insult to him.

“They’re both right.” This comes from Alexander Gorev—or Alexei, as he prefers. I know him better as the Beast of the East. Everyone in the WUN’s heard tales of the former general’s penchant for torture and rape. He’s the man who replaced Marco’s seat. Now he’s trying to be everyone’s best friend to make up for the fact that he’s new to this council. I’m having trouble not stealing one of the guards’ guns and putting a bullet in his belly, right where I know death will come only after an agonizing ten minutes.

My gaze flicks to him, and whatever he was going to say dies on his lips. He must sense how close to death he is. Him I will kill eventually.

I don’t understand why Montes has chosen this group of despots as his advisors, but I now understand why he uses fear to get them to cooperate. It’s the only mechanism that they react to.

“I didn’t come here to discuss my mortality,” I say.

“Mmm, but I did.” Montes’s voice coils around us all. He’d barely let me out of bed this morning, despite being cleared for activity by Dr. Goldstein. Only my expert opinion on the Resistance and his own thirst for vengeance swayed him.

“We’ve been working on this for a week,” he continues, “and we’ve made no progress. Who do I have to kill to make things happen?”

If only the psycho were joking.

His men pale. Already the whispers I’ve heard suggest that the king’s killed off several people he suspected of facilitating my assassination.

“Perhaps we could start with you, Efe.”

The man’s eyes widen, but before he has a chance to plead with the king, Montes’s eyes move to Alexei. “Or you.”

I swear the Beast stops breathing. He hasn’t become accustomed to the king’s threats.

“Hmmm, no,” Montes continues, “I believe the blame must lie with all of you. You have another day. Bring me something tomorrow, or I’ll find myself new advisors.”

People nod and murmur, some shuffle papers. Just another day in the life of a demagogue’s advisor.

Someone clears his throat. “We should discuss the former WUN.”

My hackles rise at the mention of my homeland. These men are predators ready to tear into their newest kill.

My eyes land on the speaker. Ronaldo. He was the one that orchestrated the nuclear blasts that wiped my country apart, the one whose life I saved in one of these last meetings.

“No.” The word is out before I can censor myself.

Montes swivels in his chair, an eyebrow raised.

“
I
will be dealing with the WUN,” I say. Not Ronaldo, who played a key role in destroying it. Not any of these other men that hold no love for the scarred land I once called home.

Montes’s advisors look aghast. Their gazes move from me to the king and back.

“Your Majesty?” It’s Walrus Man from our wedding who pipes up, the man with the bulging eyes and belly. I don’t remember his name and I don’t particularly care.

The king focuses all that disturbing intensity of his onto the advisor. “Yes?”

Walrus glances to either side of him, his face beginning to redden when no one else speaks up. Had he thought to dispute me? Was it his hope that breaking the silence would herald in more complaints from his colleagues? No one else seems interested in disputing the king’s wife, despite the fact that many of them appear angry.

Such loyal comrades, these men.

“Nothing,” Walrus says.

Weak, weak man.

“Good.” Montes’s eyes twinkle when they meet mine. He keeps me around because I’m still amusing to him. “Your queen’s spoken,” he says to the room. “All dealings with the western hemisphere will go through her from this day forward.”

There’s a collective exhale as twelve men hand over their balls to a woman. I can’t help the satisfied smile that stretches across my face. I made a promise to myself that I’d help my homeland.

Today I’ve begun to in earnest.

“You defied me,”
the king says after the meeting.

The last of his men have left, and by the time we leave the conference room, there’s no sign in the hallways that over a dozen of the world’s wickedest men had convened here ten minutes ago.

“Taking control away from those men is not defiance.”

The king’s hand falls to the back of my neck, his fingers caressing the pulse points on either side of it. It’s oddly sensual, but it’s also an innate threat. Power flows from the king; for all my posturing I’m just his puppet.

He pulls the side of my head to his lips. “It is if I say it is,” he said, his breath tickling my ear.

Even his words are some combination of sensuality and threat. My mouth usually gets me into trouble, I decide for once to muzzle it.

“How are you feeling?” Montes asks. He still holds my neck hostage, and he’s using the grip to keep me even closer.

“Healthy.”

Healthy is the last thing I’m feeling. The king doesn’t know that half my bathroom breaks consist of me hugging the toilet rather than sitting on it, or that blood continues to speckle the evidence of my sickness. Up until today I’ve been on forced bedrest. I’m not about to blow my first taste of freedom.

“I was hoping you’d say so. Tonight we’re hosting a very important dinner party; if you’re feeling better, you’ll be there by my side.”

I’ve been cornered by a master manipulator. It’s either attend the stuffy dinner party or languish in bed.

“This is revenge for speaking up today, isn’t it?”

This twisted man.

“No, Serenity,” the king says. He removes his thumb from my pulse point to stroke it down the back of my neck. “That, I will collect on later.”

The dinner party
we walk into is identical to the ones I went to during the peace talks with the king. The only things missing are the camera crews and my father.

I swallow down the lump in my throat. Had I felt objectified then? It’s nothing compared to now. The room’s collective gaze fixes on me. I can feel their eyes studying my hair, my makeup, my jewelry, and my outfit. If only they knew that when I walked into my room several hours earlier, someone else had laid it all out for me. The woman they see is a stranger. Maybe one day I’ll get just as used to wearing dresses as I do fatigues, but not today.

“Relax your features, my queen,” Montes says, his voice pitched low for only me to hear, “you look ready to massacre the room.”

“Don’t tempt me.”

Out of the corner of my eye, I catch a glimpse of Montes’s smile.

Ahead of me, thirty odd people lounge in whatever this room is—a sitting room? A standing room? Does it even matter? Most of these rooms look identical to my untrained eyes.

The people here are just as interchangeable, and I have to study their features closely to distinguish them. What I find surprises me.

Some of the younger women wear their hair loosely curled. Just like mine.

Another sports a jewel just below the corner of her eye. It’s on the same side as my scar. Several women wear pale yellow dresses. Another wears a gold dress eerily similar to the one I wore at my engagement announcement.

They’re emulating me.

I work my jaw. I hate it. What’s worse, I’m fueling this.

I don’t think I can be civil tonight. Not here, not with these people.

I have to remind myself of all the lessons my father taught me. Not everything needs to be a confrontation.

Shortly after they catch sight of us, Montes’s guests begin to approach. Many of the men are his advisors, but not all of them. The bejeweled, bright-eyed women join them, smiles fixed on their faces.

I’m glaring at all of them while Montes charms the group.

“Montes, can I steal your wife away?” This comes from the woman with the jewel at the corner of her eye.

“I’m right here,” I say. “You can ask me.”

She reels back slightly. “Of course, Your Majesty. Would you care to meet the wives of the king’s advisors?”

I would care very much. But this is the world of politics and diplomacy, a world my father schooled me on. Study your enemies.

“It would be a pleasure.” The words come out clipped. It’s my one lie of the night. I’m tapping out after this.

The king flashes me a look. He knows exactly how deceptive I’m being at the moment.

I’m dragged away from the king towards the far left side of the room, where most of the women are grouped.

“I’m Helen,” the woman says as she leads me. “I met you briefly at the wedding, but there were so many people.”

She’s apologizing for me, like I need or want an out for not remembering her name.

I stare at the rubies that drip from her ears. So this is how the rich bleed—elegantly.

“We’re so excited to see the king finally settling down. We thought that he would never,” she says as we join the group.

“Your Majesty,” the women echo, dipping their heads.

“This is Beatrice, Anouk, Isabel, Katarina, …” Helen introduces. I forget each name the moment my eyes move on to the next. Some are old; most are young.

They can’t all be the advisors’ wives. The way some of them are looking at me … if I had to guess, I’d say that the king’s mixed business and pleasure plenty of times in the past.

Jealousy lances through me before I can stop it. To think that any of them might’ve also experienced the king as I have …

The thought is followed by a good dose of self-loathing. For me to be jealous of the affections of the king—it’s unconscionable.

I square my jaw, forcing my emotions down. I swear the group notices my anger. They shift a little restlessly. I’m a predator among prey.

Someone breaks the silence that follows the introductions.

“Beautiful dress, and—” she gasps, “are those heels from Vesuvio’s summer collection?”

I glance down at my toes. Vesuvio?

“They are!” she exclaims. “I adore his entire summer collection. I would
kill
for a pair.”

My jaw tightens. “Would you?” I say, looking back up.

The woman falls silent, and the rest of the group tensely watches the exchange, some clutching their jewel-encrusted necklaces. They must sense how offensive I find it to even jest about killing over
pretty
shoes.

Finally, someone breaks the silence and asks the woman next to me about some recent trip she took. As the group gets swept up in the newest conversation, I withdraw further inside myself.

These women are nothing like the ones I’m used to. They care about the length of their skirts and the color of their face paint and the weave of their clothes. They have no idea what goes on outside these walls.

The women I lived with sharpened knives and oiled guns. I saw one fight through a bullet wound to the stomach, even though it eventually killed her. Another performed CPR on an unresponsive boy lying in the streets we patrolled while we were being attacked by local gangs. They were some of the hardest women I ever met, but they would die for you.

And they’d never give a shit what you wore.

Remembering is all it takes.

I leave right in the middle of the conversation. At my back I hear a chorus of soft-spoken protests. I ignore them. Some people you can’t change, and the effort of trying would be wasted.

My eyes sweep the room as I walk. The genders are divided. Men to one side of the room, ladies to the other. The women gossip and preen like all those exotic birds that died off first when war struck. They’re just like them—pretty and soft and so unenduring. The men swirl amber liquid, their faces ruddy. They look so damn proud of themselves. I want to shout at them that anyone can destroy a city.

And, amongst them all, there’s Montes. I never glance his way, but I feel his eyes on me the entire way out.

As soon as
I leave the room, the king’s guards fall into step behind me. I come close to threatening them, but even if I promised them death, they still wouldn’t leave me. Say what you will about Montes, he has some loyal guards.

I storm through the palace, heading for the gardens. I feel a great deal of disgust. This is what the new world order does while its citizens starve. I can’t be a part of it.

Once I push open the palace doors and the cool evening air hits my skin, I give into the impulse riding me since I entered that dinner party. I kick my shoes off and wipe my lipstick away with the back of my hand. I pull out the few pins in my hair and shake my locks loose. I pass through the gardens and bypass the giant hedge maze.

I break the delicate clasp of first my bracelet and then my necklace, and let them fall to the ground. Only then do I feel like myself again. I’m still in my dress, and my hands itch to tear into the fabric, but I hold myself back.