King of Shadows Read online

  King of Shadows

  Amelia Wilde

  For my husband, who sings with me anyway,

  even when we know how it ends.

  Contents

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  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

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  1

  Persephone

  She won’t let me go.

  My mother digs her fingers into the flesh of my upper arm, her grip so hard I’m certain it’s gone down to the bone. A dishcloth dangles from her other hand. She wouldn’t dare crush the dishcloth like this—not something embroidered with a blood-orange poppy. I stitched it when I was six years old. The fact that I made it gives it none of its value. The flower is everything. Flowers are always everything.

  “The city? Again?” The quiet words are a perfect match for the buttery sunlight coming in through the double panes over the sink and splashing against the heavy wooden table that takes up most of the kitchen. Early summer, and everything outside blooms lush and green. From here, I can’t see the fence that surrounds the house and my mother’s fields. I can’t see much of anything, with her standing so close. “I already told you it’s too dangerous. Besides, you have the spring planting to do.”

  I plant my feet on the floor and try to visualize being a tree. This is the yoga move I’m shittiest at in general. I’d rather be moving, but if I move at all, she’ll only hold tighter. Pain throbs through my arm. I want her to let go, but I want her lightning-bolt attention too. I want her to love me enough to let me go.

  She’ll leave marks if this goes on much longer.

  Then why do other girls get to live in the city? I want to ask. She let me go to school for three years. I only saw the city once. Once, and I paid for it dearly. One time, I went with two friends to an antique bookstore in a snug alley that sells first editions and rare prints, owned by three women whose long dresses reminded me of uniforms, only they had subtle differences. An asymmetrical hem. A bright red scarf. A gold headband twining into chestnut hair. You’re hurting me, I want to say. What comes out instead is: “You don’t need me to do the spring planting. There are employees for that.”

  Her grip tightens, a bruising cymbal crash of pain, and then she releases me. Steps back. Takes a long breath in. A pang of disappointment vibrates through the center of me like a strike on a tuning fork. Why am I possibly disappointed by the release? Probably because nobody looks at me the way my mother looks at me. With...intensity.

  Not until recently, anyway.

  A match strikes, hidden beneath flesh and bone, but I don’t let her see the warm glow of hope. She’s not the only one anymore. His existence is what gave me the courage to bring up the possibility of leaving one last time. “You think my precious flowers should be planted by employees?”

  My hand goes to my arm in spite of myself and I rub at the tender heat, crane my neck to see if she left a mark. Red fingerprints, that’s all I can see. It’s anyone’s guess whether they’ll darken into shadowy bruises or fade away in the sunlight. “No, of course not.” I cover them with my hand. “It was only an idea I had, the city. You’re right. It’s too dangerous.”

  She whips the dishcloth onto a hook below the sink, the set of her jaw apocalyptic. Once, she let slip that men in the city knew her for her beauty, and I believe it. If she went there now, they’d still talk about her. Her hair, even at forty, is gloriously bronze, curls springy and full. She gathers that hair at the nape of her neck and glares out the window while she pushes it into an elastic. My heart flutters beneath the skin of my neck. She could be a figure in a painting, standing tall and proud at the window, the sun kissing her face.

  But a painting would only capture the fine burgundy of her outfit and the way her tunic pinches in at the waist, and her pants fall in a graceful line over shapely legs. She has the tunics specially made to match her image as an earth-mother, a lady of the dirt and plants. The opposite of all the businesswomen in the city, with their pantsuits and silk shells. I would kill for a silk shell, honestly. I’m tired of linen, linen, linen, linen for miles. My mother’s legs, in linen like everything else she wears, are a direct result of all the work she does, also part of her image. There are some farms where people hire out all the work, but she gets her hands dirty. I’ve seen the brochures she keeps in the tiny room she calls an office—thick white paper, a photo of her on the front. In the photo she’s grinning in a wash of golden-hour sunset and literally holding a handful of dirt. That could be me. So, so easily. Wouldn’t she love that, if I stepped up and took her place?

  A painting of my mother in this moment would never capture that latent electricity in the air. A storm coming in. All the softness of the kitchen—the cheery checked tablecloth, the matching curtain at the window—is an illusion. There is nothing soft here.

  Her thunder-dark gaze snaps to mine and I almost—almost—take a step backward. “I didn’t raise you to be a sheep, Sepphie.” The sharpness of her voice is as loving as I’ve ever heard it. “What does the city have for you? Glass and concrete. Dangerous men who’ll rape you as soon as they’ll look at you.”

  “No, they—”

  “The city has violence.” She sweeps across the kitchen, and this time I do turn—I can’t help myself. This time her hand on my arm is a featherlight touch. She skims me across the kitchen floor and opens the door with a graceful tug. My mother takes us several paces out into the yard, my bare feet sinking into the loamy dirt and the flawless carpet of grass, and arrests my momentum with a yank on my shoulder. “What do you see, Sepphie?” Her breath on my ear is hot, her hand soft on my shoulder but no less terrifying.

  “The mountain.”

  Despite everything—despite my dry lips and parched throat and the slow anxious turn of my stomach—irritation sparks like a stubborn ember at the pit of my gut. “The mountain,” she repeats. “And who lives in the mountain?”

  I can see the gash of his fortress even from here, though it’s miles away. Only a very rich man would carve a mansion into the side of a mountain, and the man who lives there is very, very rich. I’ve heard other rumors, too—that the inside of the mountain is a diamond mine, that the inside of the mountain is worse than a diamond mine, that the diamond mine is a front for terrible things. There’s no need to stand here and look at it. The mountain can’t come to us. “Luther Hades.”

  The sooner we can get this two-person play over with, the sooner I can get out into the field. My mother was right about one thing—it was a mistake to say anything to her about moving out of the house. Even though I’m twenty. Even though it’s time. She turns me to face her, one swift movement. Her gray eyes, silvery in the golden hour, bore into mine. “And what happens to pretty girls who go into the city unprotected? What would happen to you?”

  I didn’t say I would go unprotected, I want to shout at her. But that would give everything away, wouldn’t it? It would. The words come out well-rehearsed. “He would find me, and he would kill
me.”

  “That’s right.” She screws up her lips, and for a flash of a second all her bravado drops away. It’s back again in the next breath. “He would kill you.” My mother raises a hand to my face and draws her fingers down the side of my cheek. “And I can’t let that happen. Don’t you understand that?”

  “But why?” She’s said this so many times, and today, today, I can’t stand not knowing why. I believe her. She’s said it so many times that it’s hard not to believe her. Even if there’s no reason. “Why are you so sure he’s going to kill me?”

  “Does it matter why?”

  “I’m twenty years old now, mama. I deserve to know the truth.”

  “You’re still a child. Far too innocent for the city. Too innocent to face the likes of Luther Hades.” She stares out at the mountain, narrow-eyed, almost as if she’s challenging him to come down to her field right now and try to get to me.

  “He’s never even met me. Why would he want to kill me?”

  “Because that’s what men like him do, all of them, every one. The city crawls with them. You’d never get out in one piece.” She brushes a lock of hair away from her cheek. “Trust me.”

  And we’re back at the beginning again. He will kill me because men are killers. Because men are rapists. Because men are dangerous. Especially men with money.

  I understand a lot of things, but this obsession she has with Luther Hades, this burning hatred shining in her eyes—I don’t understand that. If all men are ruthless killers, then why does she hire them to work for her? There are other questions—questions I don’t dare ask. Like what happened when she met Luther Hades. She must have met him. You can’t hate a person you’ve never met. Not like this.

  Can you?

  Her eyes on mine tug at a far corner of my memory. The day I stitched my first poppy into the dishcloth, following a pattern she’d ordered from a catalogue. Her face, pale. Get into the closet and don’t make a sound. I shake it out of my head. Who can count on memories from fourteen years ago? And why, honestly why, would a man I’ve never met kill me? A secret reason? Something I’ve done, without knowing I’ve done it? Impossible. I haven’t done anything. She’s never allowed me to do anything. A soft ache pulses at the center of my heart. For so long, I believed that my mother knew everything. Now I think she’s a sad, paranoid woman who just wants to keep me here so she won’t be lonely, and it’s easier to keep me here if I have nowhere else to go.

  I let my shoulders sag a little. “I trust you. I won’t ask again.”

  My mother catches my hand in hers and squeezes. The fingerprints on my arm smart. She takes a deep breath. “Are you working in the south fields today?”

  I put on a smile. “No, I finished those yesterday.”

  “There’s my good girl.”

  Does she buy it? I wonder if she does while I collect the specially made basket I take into the fields, the one with ridges at the bottom to keep the blooms separate from one another. While I wave at her through the dining room window. While she paces with her phone pressed to her ear—the phone she keeps locked in her bedside table at night.

  In a way, I told the truth. I do understand why she wants to keep me behind her fifteen-foot fences and away from the world. I’ve read enough books to know that mothers have some base instinct to protect their children, even if that instinct is only biological. In my mother’s case, it can’t be emotional. Like a less-valuable flower, I am one of the creations she can control.

  I told the truth.

  But in so many other ways, I lied.

  2

  Persephone

  Decker meets me at a gap in the fence a full two hours later. A gap—it’s not a gap, not empty space per se. At this stretch of the fence the metal slats give way to a chain-link gate. The sight of him hopping to his feet sets off a fluttering feeling low in my belly. “Persephone.” The late-afternoon sun glows brighter in his eyes, which are green as the leaves and shot through with yellow the color of the tulips in my mother’s greenhouse. He twines his fingers through the metal. “I almost gave up on you.” That grin. That joke. He would never.

  I drop the basket into the grass at the base of the fence and curl my fingers over his. He looks good in his jeans and white t-shirt. Modern, if not entirely fresh. He’s tall, lanky but muscular, like something out of the historical fiction my mother approves in the house. She’s against the romanticization of dangers in society, which is what she said when I asked her about ordering more books online. She’d be against Decker, if she knew.

  Which is why, of course, I’ve never breathed a word about him in the six months we’ve been...talking. At the fence. In midwinter my mother got a cough, and she asked me to take a last-minute delivery to the platform. And there was Decker in an Army-green coat, rubbing his hands together, cheeks pink, watching me. I couldn’t help myself. He’s got this boyish grin that makes me think of the sunrise, or pulling the ribbon off a gift.

  God, I wish I could touch him—and really touch him, not with the cold press of metal against my hips. If I close my eyes and imagine it with all my might, I can almost picture what it would be like to lean my head forward and feel his skin meet mine instead of the frigid kiss of the fence. If I could do that, then I’d know for certain how I felt about him. It’s probably love. Love can feel uncertain, can’t it? It can feel overwhelming and strange and more than a little dangerous.

  “Don’t,” I whisper back. “My mother…”

  He draws back, green eyes instantly knitted. “You changed your mind.”

  I rub a thumb over the base of his knuckle. “No. God, no.” Sparkling adrenaline mixes with breathless heat. “I’m definitely leaving.”

  Decker blows a breath out through thin lips, slightly chapped from working out in the sun all day. For most of my life I was expressly forbidden from talking to any of the people my mother hired to work in the fields or in the greenhouse. For all her photos cradling the dirt, she doesn’t have enough hands to weed, water, and collect her prizewinning blooms. And her flowers do have to be tended, even if she’d rather people think they sprout naturally from the earth, picked with a gentle smile and a thankful prayer by a woman in a linen outfit. The people my mother sells her flowers to desperately want them to be free-range, whatever that means. So she grows them in open fields and a glassed-in greenhouse, scattering the seeds in fistfuls meant to seem random. As if anything my mother ever does is random. Paranoid, yes. Random, no.

  But even if she carefully selects every one of those handfuls, it means there are no tidy plots and rows, which would look bad in her brochure photos. It makes no sense. Nobody ever comes here to see what the fields are like. Why would they? She ships the flowers in tightly wrapped Styrofoam coolers to whatever wedding or event they’re having—they all go on the train at night. In a few hours, it’ll chug to a stop at a wide wooden platform thirty feet beyond where Decker stands at the fence. The night crew will load the coolers on, and they’ll be away into the night, the howl of the whistle cutting across the sky to my bedroom window.

  Decker leans forward again, angling his face so he can brush his lips against my forehead from the other side. “I’ve been thinking about us. About being together without this damned fenced in between us.”

  I pull back an inch, skin bristling. Decker is the first person other than my mother to pay any attention to me, and yet...I’m not entirely certain I like his attention either. I’ve lived under my mother’s thumb every waking hour of my life, even during those three years she let me go to school in the city. She’s always watching, always assessing. And I’m always watching her. If I’d done a bad job, she’d never have squeezed my hand. Most nights I dream about wide open fields with no fences and no prying eyes. “Me too,” I murmur toward his smile, and then his words settle into my brain.“When will everything be ready?”

  A broad smile spreads over his face, a strange light in his eyes. “Tonight. We’re leaving tonight.”

  A surge of energy bolts
through me from the top of my head to the tips of my toes, the air getting so light it barely fills my lungs. “It’s all set?”

  “It’s all set.” Decker leans in hard against the fence and groans. “Christ, I wish I could touch you right now. But soon. When the train comes—” He pulls back to look deeply into my eyes. “You’ll be here when the train comes, won’t you? You’ll meet me tonight?”

  “I can get out, but I don’t know if I can get back in. If you can’t open the gate, if my mother finds me out of the house—”

  “It’ll be open when you get here, I swear. I have it figured out.” Decker laughs, his voice blending with the breeze rustling through the new green leaves. “I have it all figured out.” He leans in again, dropping his voice like there might be somebody listening. “By this time tonight, we’ll be on our own. I’ve got you a temporary place to stay in the city—”

  “Us.”

  “I’ve got us a temporary place to stay in the city, one night only, and then we’re out of here. It’s a wide-open country, Persephone. I can get a job anywhere the road takes us. We could go east, toward the ocean, or into the desert if that’s what you want—”

  “New York City,” I say without pause.

  He laughs, because he’s heard that before. “Okay, okay. To the library.”

  “The New York Public Library. With the lions outside.” I don’t tell him that they’re named Patience and Fortitude, those lions. I’ve waited so long for this chance. I’ve used all my strength to get here. In some weird way it almost feels like those lions are waiting for me.