Caelan continued to pace, shaking his head. Rayne still couldn’t bring himself to look up at Eno. The man might say that he loved Rayne, but Rayne suspected that he’d had feelings for Vale. His actions had not been about jealousy, but that didn’t mean some dark part of his heart wasn’t glad she was gone.
“No, Rayne,” Caelan growled.
“Yes. She was a problem, and I fixed it,” he lashed out. “That’s my job.”
The king’s head snapped up and he stopped. The anger was now replaced with horror. “It’s not—”
“It is. It has always been my job. Fix the things that you can’t afford to be dirtied with because you need to protect your image of the benevolent ruler. Fix the messes. Sweep them aside. You don’t want to know the details. You just want the problem to go away.” Rayne sneered, but his heart was screaming on the inside. “You needed to get to Mrtyu and you didn’t care how. ‘Fix it, Rayne.’ That’s what you said. Fix it. And it wasn’t the first time you’d said those words to me.”
His king was pale and shaken by his words. Had he really never thought about what he was saying? Pity wormed its way into Rayne’s heart, and he relented.
“You’re not the first, Caelan, to have an advisor who handled the unsavory side of ruling so that the king or queen could keep their hands clean. There’s no question that Queen Amara had an entire team of people who fixed things, and so did the kings before her. It’s naïve to believe otherwise.”
Caelan glared and pointed a finger at him. “I am not my mother! I will not rule like my mother or my ancestors.”
“Vale was a traitor. You nearly ended up dead. Drayce could have died. I could have died. Executing Vale was what you would have done!” Rayne argued.
“I don’t know, Rayne!” Caelan shouted, throwing his hands up in the air. “You took that decision away from me. Maybe we would have come up with another solution if you had discussed it with me, but you didn’t. Even if we would have come up with the same answer, a woman’s life was on the line. I should have been the one to make that call, but you took that from me.”
“I was protecting you—”
“No! You did it, and then you hid it. You covered it up. You thought you were right, but you didn’t trust me to make the same decision as you.”
Rayne rocked back on his heels as Caelan’s words slammed into his chest. Was Caelan right? Had he not trusted Caelan to make the same decision?
Caelan’s voice dropped to a near whisper and so much pain filled his words. “I trusted you, Rayne. I made you my heir. I believed that if something happened to me, that Erya would be safe in your hands. More so than if I left it to someone in the military. I wanted Erya to be a place that would recover from the war and grow, but now…I don’t know what would happen if you were to lead. What kind of things would be decided in the shadows? Would my people even feel safe in your world?”
He couldn’t breathe. Caelan’s words were a knife carving up his heart. Rayne’s knees gave out and he sat hard on the sofa, the papers he’d been clutching in his left hand fluttering to the ground from numb fingers. Had he lost all of Caelan’s faith in him? He couldn’t. Everything he did, every decision he made was for the protection and well-being of his king and his home.
“Cael,” he gasped.
But his king was already shaking his head. “I can’t. I need to think. For now…I want you to remain behind with the Omari.”
Rayne lurched unsteadily to his feet, reaching for Caelan. “No! You need me to help protect you.”
Caelan shook his head. “No. You’ll stay here. Adrian can take your place.”
His king turned and hurried from the room. Both Drayce and Adrian followed silently after him.
No. He couldn’t be losing everything. No.
Rayne turned his head at last to Eno to see a look of raw pain etched deep into his handsome features.
“Eno,” he said, voice breaking. He licked his lips and tried again. “You understand. I had to protect Caelan. It was the only way.” He reached for Eno, but the large man jerked back, staying just out of his grasp.
“You’re not the person I thought you were,” Eno choked out. He turned on his heel and walked out of the room.
Rayne’s legs gave out on him a second time, making it impossible to give chase. He landed on his ass, his elbow hitting the edge of the sofa’s cushion, but he barely noticed. Pain screamed through his chest, squeezing his heart and lungs to dust. His brain was scrambling for some answer, some way of fixing this mess, but every thought was dissolving in the growing black mire sucking everything down. His entire world had fallen apart in a matter of seconds. He had nothing left.