Glass of Revenge

~10~

Athril didn't know what he was thinking as he charged across the room. All he knew was that he didn't know how long Lyria had been forcing herself on Sam for – since his last visit, perhaps? And he knew deep down, just knew, that he could not let Lyria continue to do that to Sam. Not any longer. The time of Lyria's rule of fear was over.

It wasn't that he particularly liked Sam. He didn't. Athril may very well have been alive for the last thousand years, but in all that time, he had never seen humans as people worth taking note of. For the most part, he found that they were just the same – stupid, selfish, ignorantly hateful, prone to terrible laziness, undeserving of the little magic they possessed, and not to mention quite often power hungry. Case in point, look at King Dorian Haviliard and his father.

Athril often thought that the Galathynius line – the royal family of Terrasen – was the exception to the rule. It may have just been a personal bias though, Athril often thought. He still felt great affection for his late friend Brannon, and had watched over his line from afar ever since his death centuries ago. Athril had been devastated when the last members of the Galathynius family had been murdered during Adarlan's invasion and suitably delighted when Aelin's survival and return had stunned the world ten years later.

And that was why he could not allow Lyria to continue to destroy his oldest friend's legacy. And he could not allow her to become a monster that all that knew of them feared, the way Maeve and the last King of Adarlan had become.

Too late, Lyria became aware of the danger. She looked over at Athril just as he lunged for her and wrapped his hands around her throat.

"Wh-whaat... are... y-you... do...ing?" Lyria barely managed choke out, already struggling to breathe.

"Something I should have done a very long time ago," Athril snarled, tightening his grip. "Do you not remember me telling you to leave this boy alone? That if you so much as laid a hand on him or touched a man without his consent I would kill you for it? DO YOU REMEMBER NOW?!"

Suddenly disgusted, Athril stopped throttling the Fae woman and threw her body across the room with such force that the entire room shuddered.

"I should have realised that you wouldn't obey my orders," Athril ranted and raved. He had never been so enraged before in his entire life. This woman's mere existence made him furious. She should have been killed centuries ago. "I should have known that a worm like you had no taste for honour, or respect for your elders. I should have known that you would work around what I said. I merely said you weren't allowed to lay a hand on the boy, or abuse him physically, so you just decide to circumnavigate that by abusing him sexually? By raping him? What on earth did you hope to achieve by that?"

Athril shook his head bitterly. Instead of calming down, he was simply getting more and more worked up and agitated about it. One thing was for sure and that was that Athril was never going to forgive himself for this. If he had only returned to this house earlier, he might have been able to save the boy from this fate.

"It's not considered rape if it's for a good reason," Lyria giggled flirtatiously, apparently recovered from the near strangulation.

"So what's your 'good reason' for sexually assaulting a child?" Athril snapped back at her. "You'd better have a damn good one considering the state that he's in."

Lyria glanced over at Sam who was huddled up in a ball in the corner of the room, sobbing. She smirked flirtatiously at him before turning back to Athril.

"Because if I ever stand a chance of winning back my Rowan and permanently getting rid of that bitch queen of his I need a child," Lyria said, trying her best to make herself look as pathetic as possible. "Especially as I was pregnant at the time of my abandonment."