Free Web NovelMatt and the queen were eating in silence.
Well…
Matt was eating in silence.
The queen was eating pressed against him.
That was the only way to describe it. freēwēbnovel.com
Pressed.
Not close.
Not beside him.
Pressed.
The queen had her shoulder against Matt's shoulder, her arm against Matt's arm, her leg against Matt's leg. Every time she moved to grab another slice of pizza, that movement traveled through the contact, and Matt felt it along his entire left side.
And the worst part was that she was getting closer.
The queen ate her slice of pizza with complete composure. She took small, elegant bites, chewed without hurry, and swallowed without making a sound.
She wasn't looking at the food.
She was looking at Matt.
She watched him eat with that total attention she'd given him ever since he woke up — that quiet half-smile that never left her face.
Matt could still feel the sweat from his workout clinging to his skin beneath the black shirt.
'Damn it, can't you tell I'm covered in sweat?'
That thought should have been enough to make any normal person back away.
Matt had been doing push-ups and squats on the floor for a good while. His white hair was damp, his back was soaked, and his shirt was stuck to his body.
He smelled like sweat.
But the queen didn't mind in the slightest.
Matt endured two more bites.
But he couldn't endure any more.
"Move away."
The queen didn't move.
"I told you to move away."
"I heard you."
"And?"
"No."
Matt squeezed the burger between his hands. He could feel it was still warm, soft, with melted cheese dripping down one side of the wrapper.
"I'm sweaty," Matt said.
"I know."
"You're going to ruin your dress."
"I don't care."
"You should care."
"Well, I don't."
And then the queen did something worse than being pressed against him.
She hugged him.
She slipped one arm behind Matt's back, wrapped it around him, and pulled him against her side with a calm but firm strength.
Matt couldn't resist.
Not because he didn't want to.
His weakened body wasn't strong enough to push anyone away, much less her.
So the embrace pulled him in effortlessly, and suddenly Matt found himself with half his body leaning against the queen, trapped in that arm that had no intention of letting go.
And the queen rested her head against his.
She rubbed her cheek against Matt's damp white hair, slowly, up and down, with an affectionate gesture that turned Matt's stomach.
"Your hair is a little short," she murmured, her voice soft and close to his ear. "But it suits you like this."
Matt went rigid.
Not from fear.
From disgust.
He could feel the queen's face against his head. He could feel her steady breathing stirring his hair. He could feel the weight of the arm that held him trapped against a body that smelled of something clean and sweet, mixing with his own sweat.
It was unpleasant.
It was deeply unpleasant.
But Matt endured it.
He clenched his teeth, fixed his gaze on the burger in his hands, and endured it.
Because there was nothing else he could do.
Because pushing her away was pointless.
Because asking her to stop only made her move closer — she had warned him about that herself.
Because complaining was giving her exactly what she wanted.
So Matt did the only thing he had left.
He stayed still.
And he thought.
'I have to train more.'
That thought gave him something to hold onto.
'I have to get my strength back.'
Another bite of the burger.
He chewed it without tasting it.
'I have to get strong again.'
The queen kept rubbing her head against his hair.
'I have to get in shape. Enough. Enough so that one day, when she least expects it, I can kill her.'
Matt swallowed.
'And then all of this will be over.'
It was the only way to endure the embrace.
To think about the day she wouldn't be there.
To think about the moment that face rubbing against him would stop smiling.
To think about the silence that would follow, when the queen could no longer hold him, or count his push-ups, or watch him eat, or anything.
Matt held onto that thought.
Even as something else inside him was beginning to cloud his judgment.
Something pushing in another direction.
And the queen, without releasing him, spoke.
"Do you still think about them?"
Matt stopped mid-bite.
"About who?"
"Your human family."
Matt didn't answer right away.
The question had come out of nowhere.
But Matt knew that with her, nothing was casual.
Nothing was a simple question.
Matt set down the burger.
His mind started working.
'That's the opportunity.'
The plan he'd discussed with Noxx came back to him.
The idea was this.
Make the queen lose interest in his family.
Make her stop seeing them as a tool.
Convince her that Matt no longer needed them — that he no longer cared about them — that she could threaten them all she wanted and it wouldn't matter to Matt.
If Matt showed indifference now, if he said he no longer thought about them, if he pretended that part of his life had died in the cave along with everything else…
Maybe the queen would ease up.
Maybe she'd stop watching them.
Maybe.
Matt opened his mouth to do it.
To say no.
That he didn't think about them.
That he no longer cared.
But then he remembered the burger.
The exact burger.
The pizza place from his neighborhood.
The burger joint near his old job.
The logos.
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The flavors.
Every small detail of his human life that the queen had observed, noted, and filed away over the years.
And Matt understood something.
He couldn't fool her with words.
Not her.
If the queen knew exactly how he liked his burger, would she really believe him if he said he no longer cared about his family?
The queen had been watching him for months.
She knew how much he loved them.
She knew he had hugged his mother before leaving.
She knew he had asked Iris for ten minutes alone just to say goodbye to them.
If Matt suddenly said he didn't care about them, the queen would notice.
She'd see the lie in an instant.
And then she'd know Matt was planning something.
That he was trying to manipulate her.
That he had a strategy.
No.
Saying he didn't care was just as dangerous as saying he did.
As long as the queen kept watching him, as long as she knew where his family was, as long as she could reach them, there was no lie Matt could tell to protect them.
The only way to get his family out of the queen's sight was to get the queen out of the picture entirely.
Matt pressed his lips together.
'I have to kill her.'
He came back to that thought.
'I have to kill her, and kill Iris, and then no one will know where I came from. No one will be able to use my family. No one will—'
Matt stopped.
He stopped cold.
Something felt off.
Something didn't fit.
Matt frowned, still holding the burger halfway between the table and his mouth.
'Wait.'
He had decided to kill the queen.
He'd decided it in the cave.
He'd decided it in the mental world.
He'd decided it just minutes ago, while eating.
He'd decided it so many times it should have been a certainty by now.
Something solid.
Something without doubt.
And yet…
Why did he keep hesitating?
Every time he thought about killing her — the concrete act, the exact moment of driving something into her chest and ending it — something inside him wavered.
A resistance.
A brake.
A small hesitation that appeared right at the last instant of the thought and made him stop.
That didn't used to happen.
Before, the hatred was clean.
Direct.
No brake.
When he thought about killing the queen, he thought about it with clarity, with intent, with nothing holding him back.
It was one of the few things in his life he had completely decided.
And now?
Now he doubted.
And that doubt pushed him back toward the plan of running.
The plan of deceiving.
Toward anything that wasn't killing her directly.
Matt set down the burger slowly.
'Since when do I doubt?'
The answer came to him like a memory.
The night before, before waking, Matt had gone down to the mental world to rest.
To get away from the room.
From the queen.
From everything.
And there, in that place that only existed inside his head, he had talked with Noxx.
◇◆◇
Noxx was sitting in the grass, her legs pulled up to her chest and her chin resting on her knees.
Her white hair fell on either side of her face, and the bun holding it back had come slightly loose. Her gaze was lost somewhere on the false horizon of that world.
Matt sat down beside her.
"You're very quiet," Matt said.
Noxx didn't answer right away.
"That's usually a good thing," Matt went on. "But coming from you, it's strange."
Noxx lifted her head slightly.
"Matt."
"What?"
She took a moment to speak. She moved her fingers on her knees, opened her mouth, closed it, and finally said it in a low voice.
"Do we really have to kill her?"
Matt went still.
"What?"
"The queen."
Noxx didn't look at him.
"Do we really have to kill her?"
Matt frowned.
"I thought we agreed on that."
"We did."
"And now?"
Noxx didn't answer.
Matt watched her.
And for the first time, he noticed something he hadn't noticed before.
When they had first started planning everything back in the cave, Noxx talked about the queen with indifference.
With coldness.
With that calm distance of someone the subject didn't touch at all.
And sometimes, when Matt recalled what the queen had done to him, Noxx said it with hatred too.
She went along with it.
She was on his side.
But that night, in the mental world, Matt saw neither indifference nor hatred in Noxx's face.
He saw something else.
Something he couldn't name right away.
"Noxx."
"Yes?"
"Are you afraid of her?"
Noxx didn't answer.
And that silence was an answer.
Matt watched her a little longer.
Then he looked down at his own hands, and realized something even more uncomfortable.
He was doubting too.
Every time he thought about the act of killing her, something inside him stopped.
And that stop didn't feel entirely his.
It felt shared.
It felt as though part of that hesitation was coming from Noxx, filtering through the bond that connected them, mixing with his own thoughts until Matt could no longer tell which fear was hers and which was his.
The queen was powerful.
Too powerful.
And Noxx, who was a vampiric ego, born from the very blood the queen had placed inside Matt, felt that difference in power with a clarity Matt didn't fully understand.
Every time the queen fed Matt her blood while he slept, Noxx felt it.
Every drop.
All that absurd, condensed, overwhelming strength.
And something in Noxx — something instinctive, something that came from what she was by nature — recoiled before it.
Matt didn't ask her anything else that night.
There was no need.
◇◆◇
Matt came back to the present with the cold taste of the burger in his mouth.
He was still at the table.
Still trapped in the queen's arm.
Still with her head leaning against his hair.
And still doubting.
'It's her,' Matt thought, annoyed. 'It's Noxx. These thoughts are her fault. I didn't used to doubt. Now I doubt because she doubts. The fear seeps into me through the bond.'
That explanation calmed him a little.
Because it meant the problem wasn't him.
That his decision was still firm.
That he just needed to separate his fear from Noxx's, ignore that borrowed brake, and everything would be clear again.
'I have to—'
"You're tense."
The queen's voice pulled him out of his thoughts.
Matt looked up.
The queen was looking at him up close.
Too close.
She had lifted her head from his hair, and now both her hands were moving toward Matt's face.
Matt didn't have time to pull back.
The queen's hands took his face.
Soft.
Warm.
They held him by the cheeks with a gentleness that didn't match everything else she was. They tilted his face to one side, then the other, while the queen's red eyes moved slowly over him.
"Look at you," she murmured.
Matt clenched his teeth.
"Let me go."
The queen didn't let go.
"You're more beautiful than ever," she said, her voice low, almost awed. Her thumbs brushed his cheekbones. "The transformation settled completely. Your skin, your features, your eyes… everything finished shaping itself while you slept. You're exquisite."
Matt felt the revulsion climb up his throat.
"Don't touch my face."
"Why not?"
"Because I don't want you to."
The queen smiled.
But she didn't let go.
She held his face a moment longer, watching him with that attention that weighed on Matt like a hand pressed to the back of his neck.
And then she did it.
She asked the real question.
"Which one did you make the contract with?"
Matt went completely still.
"What?"
"The guns."
The queen moved her head slightly toward the nightstand, where the two crystalline weapons Matt had brought out of the cave rested side by side.
"You took out two ego-weapons. That's extraordinary. Almost no one comes out of that cave with even one, and you came out with two."
Her thumbs kept brushing his cheeks.
"So tell me."
Her voice dropped a little lower.
"Which one did you make the contract with?"
Matt's heart quickened.
Inside, everything in him went on alert.
The question was a trap.
No.
Worse than a trap.
It was a test.
The queen knew about both guns.
She had seen them.
She had touched them.
She had placed them on that nightstand herself.
But she didn't know about Noxx.
She didn't know the guns weren't really his.
She didn't know that Matt's soul contract wasn't with either of the two guns, but with the bow-lance — the ego that lived fused inside his own body, hidden, concealed, compressed until it was almost invisible.
If Matt chose one of the two guns, the queen could examine it.
She could search for the bond.
And finding nothing, she'd know he was lying.
So Matt did the only thing he could.
"Neither."
The queen blinked.
"Neither?"
"Neither," Matt repeated, his voice as flat as he could make it. Without trembling. Without rushing. Without letting the fear bleed into any part of him. "I didn't make a soul contract with either of them. I use them, but I'm not bonded to them. I didn't need to be."
The queen looked at him.
She looked at him for a long second, with those red eyes that seemed capable of reading things Matt preferred to keep hidden.
Matt held her gaze.
He didn't tremble.
He didn't look away.
He didn't swallow.
He kept his face relaxed, annoyed — the face of someone bothered by a question, not threatened by it.
Inside, every muscle in his body was taut.
Outside, he didn't move an inch.
And the queen, finally, loosened her hands and released his face slowly.
"Hm," she said, pulling back slightly. She brought one hand to her own cheek, thoughtful. "Maybe it was my imagination then."
Matt didn't ask.
He kept eating in silence.
'All this doubt, all this fear that isn't mine, all this reluctance to kill her…'
Matt took another bite with more force than necessary.
'It's Noxx's fault. It has to be. Ever since she started being afraid of the queen, I doubt too. It wasn't like this before.'
Matt closed his eyes for a moment.
'As soon as I can… I'm going to have to fix this. I can't afford to doubt. Not with her. Not with the queen.'
And as Matt sank into those thoughts, eating in silence, irritated, focused entirely inside his own head, he stopped paying attention to the woman sitting beside him.
That was his mistake.
Because the queen was watching him from the corner of her eye as she ate her pizza slowly, with her usual calm, with her usual smile.
But inside, her mind was working at full speed.
'Neither,' she repeated in her head, recalling Matt's answer.
Matt's voice hadn't wavered.
He hadn't looked away.
He hadn't shown a single sign of nerves.
Her dear son had answered with perfect composure, with the bored face of someone stating an unremarkable truth.
And precisely because of that, the queen didn't entirely believe him.
Not because she had caught a lie.
On the contrary.
Matt had answered too well.
And the queen knew Matt.
She knew how he reacted when something made him uncomfortable, when something frightened him, when something caught him off guard.
She had been watching him for years.
And the calm with which he had answered that particular question — that question about the ego-weapon — told the queen there was something there.
Something Matt was hiding.
The queen set down her slice of pizza and laced her fingers together, thinking.
'He took two ego-weapons out of the cave. That alone is extraordinary. Almost impossible.'
Her red eyes settled on the two guns on the nightstand.
'But I felt a signature inside his body. A third energy.'
The queen narrowed her eyes.
'Is it possible to take three ego-weapons out of the Forge Cave?'
The mere thought thrilled her.
Three ego-weapons from a single trial was something she had never heard of in all her existence.
Not in the oldest records of the kingdom.
Not in the legends of the oldest houses.
One was an achievement.
Two was a miracle.
Three would be something without precedent.
'If he took three,' the queen thought, 'and only showed me two…'
A possibility surfaced in her mind.
'Could he be holding the third one back as an escape card?'
The queen considered this.
It was possible.
Matt had already escaped once.
He was smart, patient, capable of planning carefully.
If he had a third weapon hidden away, he could be saving it for the exact right moment — for when she least expected it.
But then the queen shook her head slightly.
'No. That doesn't make sense.'
Because if Matt wanted to hide a weapon to escape, why would he show her two?
Why leave both guns out in the open, on the nightstand, where the queen could examine them whenever she wished?
If his plan depended on secrecy, the logical move would have been to hide two and not draw attention.
Not to show two and conceal one.
The signature the queen had felt was different.
It had been buried so deep inside Matt's body that it only surfaced for an instant before disappearing — as though something inside him had concealed it on purpose the moment it realized she was looking.
And that word — concealed — brought her another idea.
A much larger one.
The queen felt excitement rise through her chest.
'Two souls.'
She had been noticing it for weeks. Every time she gave Matt her blood while he slept, every time she analyzed his body, she felt two distinct presences inside him.
Two souls.
In the beginning — when she had first captured him — there had only been one.
Matt's, his human side.
After that, Iris had been there, yes.
But Iris had separated.
Iris had her own body now.
Iris's soul no longer lived inside Matt.
And yet the queen still felt two.
Matt's soul.
And another — alongside the trace of a fused ego-weapon.
The queen raised a hand to her lips to hide what was happening in her expression.
'Could it be…?'
The idea was immense.
She almost didn't dare to think it through completely.
'Could it be that Matt awakened another consciousness inside himself?'
That would explain everything.
The two souls.
The hidden signature that appeared and vanished.
The strange calm with which he answered certain questions, as though he had the confidence of knowing someone had his back.
The way he had survived almost three years in a cave that killed nearly everyone who entered.
When the queen turned Matt into her daughter, Iris had been born inside him.
An ego.
A new vampiric consciousness, created from royal blood, destined to grow and consume the human.
What if it had happened again?
What if, by retaining some of the royal blood when he separated from Iris, Matt had caused — whether by accident or intent — a second consciousness to be born?
Another Iris.
Another ego.
A new one.
Hidden.
Living inside him and keeping him company.
Thinking alongside him.
Perhaps even fused with one of the ego-weapons from the cave.
Just imagining it, the queen felt an excitement so overwhelming she had to breathe deeply to contain it.
Because if it was true…
If Matt had awakened a second consciousness on his own, without anyone's help, without the queen's blood guiding the process…
That was something extraordinary.
That was something that had never happened in all the history of the kingdom.
That made Matt something far more valuable than the queen had already believed him to be.
The queen turned her head slightly and looked at him.
Matt was still eating, gaze fixed on his burger, brow mildly furrowed, completely lost in his own thoughts.
He wasn't looking at her.
He hadn't noticed anything.
He hadn't seen the change in her.
And so he couldn't see the queen's face.
A face that was no longer smiling calmly.
A face that had let slip, just for an instant, all that composed elegance.
A face that was, simply…
Far too excited.
