Glow (The Plated Prisoner, #4)

by Raven Kennedy

To those who stand on their own two feet despite their stumbles.

I get it all out of her, until there’s just one single fragment left. One seed left buried in the center of her chest. Yet when I call to it, try to unearth it from her depths, I find resistance. Instead of withdrawing like the rest, this piece sinks in its thorns as if it’s trying to stay.

I can’t get that fucking last drop of rot out of her, but she’s alive, and that’s what matters.

I won’t allow another storm to touch Auren. She has been flooded and wrung out, left to take the barrage without shelter. But so long as I’m here, I will be her shelter.

“That’s okay, I fell too,” he says, pointing to his soiled socks. “And know what?” he asks. “What?” “The grass stains match your eyes too.” I don’t think I ever saw a smile that looked so sad.

Rage surges inside of me, and I wish I was in Ranhold, that I could turn back time and bring Midas to life again so I could kill him myself. I’d do it slowly. Cutting off limb after limb. Rotting him one vein at a time. Crushing his heart in my fist. Making him suffer.

“We’ve all got a little rotten in us, and I wouldn’t change that for anything. It’s how we’ve survived.”

“You don’t have to be cruel to be strong. You don’t have to be mean to seem brave. You don’t have to look down on others in order to stand tall. Having emotions does not mean you’re weak. It means you’re smart enough to let yourself feel.”

“When we fuck, it’ll happen because you want it to happen.” There’s a spark of heat in her eyes right before she puts it out, and that petulant, pouting look comes back over her face. “What makes you think I’d ever want to?” I give her a crooked smile before I turn and scoop up the bowls. “Because, Yellow Bell, you might be poisonous, but you’re not immune. There’s something here.”

“What’s the fun in it if you don’t loathe each other just a little bit?”

“You don’t deserve punishment for anything. You deserve reward.” A sob churns out of her, and I don’t need her to say a thing, because I see it all there in her eyes. “I will drive myself so far into you all you’ll feel is pleasure for how fucking glorious you are as you burn for me. But there will be no punishment.”

“I’m going to thumb your clit and make you scream, proving to you that you’re a goddess who takes her pleasure because that is what you deserve,” I growl out. “Now ride me.”

But I will always ground her. I will always remind her of who she is. Because I see her. I always fucking have.

“Where else would I be if not with you?”

I’ve always been treated like treasure, but with Slade, I’m simply treasured.

Fear to face what I did, fear over how spectacularly I lost control. It’s like getting black-out drunk and having no recollection of what you did except for jumpy fragments that pop up unwanted, none of the memories good.

That’s the thing with trauma to the body—it shows up instantly. In breaks and bruises, in burns and in blood. But the trauma on the inside, that’s harder to see. It creeps around your mind, poisons you with disquiet. It can hit you out of nowhere, debilitating and ruinous. There are no marks visible for those. None, save the shadows in your eyes.

One of these males watches over me, the other sees right through me, no matter where I tell him to look.

Because I’ve passed the point of no return now, and it’s not just that there’s no going back—it’s that my back doesn’t even exist anymore.

I may be empty, but I am not alone. And that, at least, is something.

When you hit rock bottom, you feel it. You break down, walls crumbling until you’re free-falling. The feelings that you tried to run from suddenly rush up around you in an unstoppable force, the gravity of your thoughts now nothing but a punishing plunge. When you slam into the bottom, that landing jolts you all the way to your very soul. You hit hard, and it cracks the very foundation of the world. The ground fragments beneath you, lines stretching far and wide. And then you’re left, a pile of rubble.

Maybe none of us truly know our own strength. Not until the world has hacked away at us. But the point is, we aren’t strong because of our trauma. We were always strong to begin with. We just needed to figure it out for ourselves.

You never notice what’s keeping you balanced until you realize you’re not standing straight anymore.

“Even the most powerful people can be made to feel powerless. Finding your strength even when you believe you have none is what makes you a true force. Nobody made you into what you are, my lady. You were always strong. You just had to prove it to yourself.”

And then, my stoic, steady, inscrutable guard cries.

“Oh, Goldfinch, I’d follow you to the end of the world and tip right off the edge, all because of a crook of your finger.”

“Where were you?” When I was drugged. When I was shoved into that room with Digby. When my ribbons were slashed, right along with my soul. When I was propped up on that mezzanine, confused and lost. “I thought you were going to come. But you didn’t.” My voice is choked, shaken, and every word I say lands a flinch across his face. “So where were you?”

I have been beaten. Stabbed. Head held beneath water until my lungs burned. I have been ripped apart by the fury of my power to the point where it felt like my skin was flayed from my body. But none of that is as painful as hearing those words out of Auren’s mouth.

I killed everyone in Carnith.

“It hurts?” I give her an incredulous look, because of course it hurts. “Yes.” She points right at my face, the gesture catching me off guard. “But that means you feel. That means you’re alive.” This isn’t the laid back, friendly Lu talking. This is Lu, the captain of Fourth’s army, addressing a soldier. A hard swallow jostles my throat. “Only part of me,” I admit. Twenty-four strips didn’t make it. “That’s okay,” she says without a hint of doubt, a hard glint caught in the edges of her eyes. “Just make that the strongest part.”

“No, Goldfinch,” he interrupts. “I’m good to you. But I am every bit the villain that I warned you I was.”

“If you’re a villain...then I’ll be a villain with you.”

“Control, Father,” I mock, throwing his constant command back in his face.

Eleven years, my mother said. She’s been having this affair for eleven years. My brother is ten. Ryatt isn’t my father’s heir.

But I don’t care. I will be a monster if it means I can destroy one.

I learned control so that I could take his away.

“Oh, Goldfinch. I would’ve found you in whatever world you were in. In whatever life.” My lips tip up in a soft smile, because I believe him. “You would’ve found me in them all.”

With the right person, there is power when you kneel. There is adoration with submission. There is balance with control.

“One person’s pain doesn’t negate another’s. Our heartaches are not competition, but the bridge to empathy. So that we can look at one another and know that on some level, we understand. That’s one beautiful thing about grief, I think. That sometimes, we can find someone in the world to look at from the other side of the bridge of our torments and know that we are not alone.”

“If you give me names, I’ll rot their brains from their skulls.”

But my song of home doesn’t come from the sun. Mine comes from her.

“Alright. But I want a list, Auren.” “A list?” “Of everyone who’s ever hurt you.” My eyebrows jump up. “Why?” “I think you know,”

“With gold and rot, we will protect what is ours. We will be our worst when we need to and be our best together. And at the end of the day, we will fucking destroy our enemies.”

“Because. We will be the villains for each other.” He grins. Slow, emphatic, licentious. “That’s exactly right.”

“The fae are returning. And this time, Orea will be ours.”