“Your aunt,” he said. “She threatened to drown your mother if I didn’t give my word never to leave Trollus, and for obvious reasons, I can’t kill her to free myself. No one plays the game better than her, and no one is less trusting.”

“Can you blame her?” Pain ricocheted through me as I climbed to my feet, using his desk as leverage. “No one forced you to be a tyrant. That was your choice, and these are the consequences.”

Laughing, he picked up a bottle of liquor sitting on the mantle and drank from it directly. “You remind me of myself at your age. Idealistic.” He took another swallow and grimaced. “So certain you know everything.”

“Since obviously I do not, perhaps you might enlighten me.” The clock was ticking, my chance to put an end to the man who had haunted my steps all my life growing smaller by the second. But I had to hear him out.

He drained the bottle, then turned to face me. “I hated my father as you hate me, perhaps more so, for he was a far worse creature. Perhaps the worst ever to rule, in that he relished in killing. Though they were bonded, he slaughtered your grandmother with his bare hands in front of the court for crossing him, and if it hurt him, he never once showed it.” He paused. “He and Roland were cut from the same cloth.”

I’d heard stories of my grandfather, but they were not given much breath. Why should they be when Trollus had to contend with a living and breathing tyrant king.

“Like you, I had a vision of a better Trollus. And as you have your friends and coconspirators, I had mine, your aunt being one of them. We dreamed of abolishing the enslavement of half-bloods, of setting laws that made everyone equals. That, if given the chance, trolls would choose their matches based on character and commonalities, not power. That, if given the chance to love as they wished, the classism of magic would cease to exist.” He snorted, then snatched up another bottle. “Hearing it now, it sounds like some sort of comedic nonsense a poet might spout.”

I wiped away the blood dripping into my eye as I struggled to come to terms with this vision he was painting.

“Of course, there was a girl.” He sat on a chair, the wood creaking. “There always is.”

“Lessa’s mother.”

His chin jerked up and down once. “Vivienne. She belonged to my mother and then to me, and I loved her. And she told me she loved me. That there was no one but me.”

Lost in memory, his eyes were distant and unseeing.

Kill him!

But I would’ve soon as stabbed my own heart as struck him down, because he was telling his story. And his story was my story.

“I was going to change all the laws of Trollus so that I could bond her and make her my queen. And in doing so, I believed I would start our world on a better path. I kept our relationship a secret, and when she became pregnant – as will happen easily with any girl with human blood,” he gave me a pointed look, “I hid her in the city until she had Lessa. Until I was ready to act.”