Chapter 267: Obviously Not Annoyed (She Was Very Annoyed)
Chapter 267: Obviously Not Annoyed (She Was Very Annoyed)
Elyn’s POV
Zorathys looked at me.
Then at the children.
Then back at me, and then he sighed.
And just like that, the children were outside the cell.
I wasn’t surprised. At this point, nothing he did surprised me. He was the demon king. Moving five children through a locked cell door without touching anything was probably the least impressive thing he had done since I had the displeasure of meeting him.
And yes, I said displeasure. The only thing pleasurable about this demonic husband-to-be was his face, and even at this moment, it displeased me... a lot.
Anyway, the children, now free, surged toward me all at once, and I barely had time to do anything before they hit me from multiple directions simultaneously, and the crying continued in full.
Thalira grabbed my arm. Retheris took the other side. Velira found my sleeve and held it with both hands. Aziren pressed into my shoulder, warm and familiar, his grip immediate and tight.
Azerion stood slightly apart from the others.
He was very clearly not crying.
He was also very clearly losing the argument he was having with himself about whether or not he was going to cry.
He lost, and then he came forward and pressed into my side and said nothing about it, and given who I was, I said nothing about it either.
I held them.
All of them, as much as I could manage, given that there were five of them and only one of me, which was not a perfect arrangement but was sufficient.
"It’s okay," I said. "You’re out. You’re safe. I’ve got you."
Zorathys’s shadows stirred around him, his face in obvious disgust, but he didn’t say anything.
That was the correct decision because if he did speak, I planned on drilling a hole into him.
I rubbed Thalira’s back. Retheris’s shoulder. I kept my hand on Aziren’s hair... okay, that was a bad idea. I immediately moved my hand to his shoulders instead.
The crying softened.
Gradually. Then a little more. Then Azerion sniffled once, loudly, and looked deeply offended that the sound had come from him.
"It’s okay now," I told them softly.
Then I tilted my head, thinking of what to say when I had a thought.
"Would you like some snacks?" I asked them. "The sweet ones. When we get upstairs, you can have as many as you’d like."
Azerion’s eyes, still wet at the corners, sharpened immediately.
"Anything?" he asked.
"Anything," I said.
He nodded. Very serious. He had clearly already begun the selection process internally.
Aziren looked up at me with those amber eyes, and the tiny flames in his hair that had been so low and subdued the whole time finally crept back upward a little.
"Can we have a picnic?" he asked.
"No," Zorathys answered before I could, and I fixed him a glare.
"Yes, we can," I told Aziren.
Zorathys did not like that answer. "Why can they have a picnic with you?" he asked me with a frown.
I ignored him.
Instead, I picked up Azerion first, and he went immediately, arms around my neck, settling against me like he had always planned to be there. Then I reached for Aziren, and he tucked himself against my other side, warm and solid, his grip careful in the way he was always careful with me when he remembered that I didn’t have fire-resistant clothes on.
The others gathered close. Thalira walked beside me, Retheris walking beside her, Velira trailing slightly behind with her bunny pressed to her chest.
And then I started walking.
"Firefly," Zorathys called out.
I kept walking.
The corridor was long, and the children were around me, and the snack situation needed resolving, and I had absolutely nothing to say to Zorathys right now.
"Are you not going to say anything to me?"
That made me stop walking.
Not because I wanted to, but because I knew him well enough by now to know that if I kept walking, he would simply appear in front of me, which would be more annoying.
I turned just enough to look at him over my shoulder.
"Why would I say anything?" I asked pleasantly. "We’ve already had the conversation I wanted to have. You released the children. Everything is sorted."
He just looked at me, as if he was trying to see through me, but there was nothing to see through. I told him the truth, and it’s not like I was annoyed with him.
Obviously, I hadn’t spent fourteen days walking past my room, the staircase, and even the garden... every place I could think of, every single time I had the chance, just in case his door had decided to appear. Obviously, I hadn’t followed his shadows around the palace on more than one occasion like someone with nothing better to do, hoping one of them would lead somewhere useful... him.
Obviously, I hadn’t noticed the exact spots where his shadows moved and mapped them in my head and arrived at zero useful conclusions.
Obviously, I hadn’t put the maps away, putting my plans on hold just so I could search for him.
Obviously, I hadn’t been worried.
Obviously, the dread that had been sitting in my stomach since the incident — the thing none of them would explain to me, the thing Ignivar wouldn’t explain, the thing Guilidern had almost explained before a single look shut him up completely — had nothing to do with Zorathys’s absence.
Obviously, when I lay awake at night going over the petitions and all the things I was supposed to be thinking about, I wasn’t also thinking about him.
Obviously not.
We had spoken after all.
We were seeing each other right now after all.
That was enough. That was completely enough. That was more than enough, and I was perfectly fine.
I smiled at him.
"Since I’ve taken the children," I said, in the same pleasant voice, "you can go ahead and make yourself scarce again." I tilted my head. "You’re clearly gifted at it. Maybe not just two weeks this time — really commit. Perhaps a month. A year." I paused, considering. "Ten years, perhaps. Five hundred if you’re feeling ambitious. You seem comfortable with that kind of timeline after all."
And then I turned and walked away just as Azerion’s arms tightened around my neck just slightly.