Chapter 21
Chapter
Twenty-One
Elara
The gardens have corners I haven’t discovered yet—hollows between hedges where even the wind forgets to pass. I sit tucked behind a wall of half-dead hawthorn with a view of the fountain, the lowering sun refusing to touch the statue where heavy linen carved from stone cloaks Death’s face.
Of course, Vale was nowhere to be found. Not in the kitchens. Not in the galleries. Not in those hallways he always traversed with such unhurried ease, the steward.
Something scrapes under my breastbone. What a fool I am.
I draw my knees up to my chest and wrap my arms around them, but it does little to hide the utter embarrassment that laughs at me from beneath my ribs.
“I cannot say,” that jerk had told me when I asked him about what happened in the royal chamber, his voice as smooth as his lies. “I was not there.”
Oh, but he was. Wasn’t he?
My next breath tastes like old dust. I should go back inside. Lie down. Rest until he finds me. Isn’t that how it always goes?
God…how could I have been so stupid? How could I have brushed past the kitchen girl’s terror, or how Kael called him a bastard, or the way he desperately tried to keep me from finding any proof of an older prince like the scheming cunt he is?
A step scuffs the gravel behind me.
I don’t turn. My pulse remains annoyingly calm, nothing but a reminder of how foolishly at ease I was around this man who played me like a fucking pawn. But a pawn in what game? With what goal?
“I’ve been looking for you,” he says, his tone heavier than usual. “You weren’t in your chamber. Or in the corridors. Or with…His Majesty.” A pause. “Not that he’s receiving anyone after…well, whatever it is that happened between you two in that spring.”
My ears prick at the curiosity in his tone, at the spiked heaviness riding its undercurrent, but my gaze stays fixed on the distant fountain. The king is the least of my concerns right now.
“Elara.” When there’s no reaction from me, Vale exhales through his nose, a thin, tense sound. “There’s something I need to tell you.”
A humorless breath escapes me—half scoff, half laugh. Oh, is there? As if I need more of his damn lies…
I let the silence stretch for one beat longer before I say, “Bastard.”
More pebbles shift, crunch, then still. “Whatever did I do now?”
“Bastard,” I say again, slower this time, measured.
Only then do I turn.
Vale stands half-shadowed, half-sunlit, brushing a black curl from his forehead. His expression is politely blank: the kind of blank that means calculating.
“That’s what he called you.” Back when Kael upended the chess table. A word I’d taken for a simple insult spent on a steward…until the kitchens told me there was no steward to insult in the first place. “During the argument.”
A single brow lifts, arching over those olive eyes with a royal elegance I’d ignored this whole damn time. “Who?”
“Kael.” My voice doesn’t waver. I won’t give him that satisfaction. “Your…brother?”
The question is a hook.
I watch it sink.
Something flickers behind Vale’s eyes—a flash of steel, though quickly shuttered. Neatly tucked away as if it had never existed. Not confession. Not denial.
Just…containment.
“Pardon me.” I tilt my head the way he often does, letting the pieces arrange themselves where he can’t swipe them off the table. “Half-brother, then. Correct?”
He doesn’t move. He doesn’t even blink. He just watches me with that infuriating stillness of his, the kind that makes you feel like your bones are being counted.
“Well?” I snap. “Say something.”
“What,” he offers softly, “do you think there is for me to say?”
“Oh, plenty.”
His jaw shifts. “Indulge me.”
I push myself to my feet so fast that the dried leaves crack beneath me like knuckles.
“Fine. Let’s start small.” I jab a finger toward his immaculate vest. “You’re not a steward because there hasn’t been one in years.
So, what are you, Vale?” I step closer, the anger in me sharpening my breath.
“Other than a liar with good tailoring.”
His jaw tightens, just a little.
“The greenhouse plaque mentions an heir, a place gifted to the child’s mother,” I continue, unable to stop with all this anger in my throat.
“A queen who couldn’t possibly have been Ophelia, because the woman was apparently allergic to anything that grows.
It was a gift to Maeryn for the birth of her son. ”
Vale’s nostrils flare. “Elara—”
“I’m not finished.” Everything inside me shakes. “A son mentioned on the page that recorded Ophelia’s hysteria. A boy who watched his mother get slaughtered in the royal chamber, leaving behind a bloody handprint. Prince-sized.” My voice drops, and my skin prickles with the memory. “Yours?”
Finally, a reaction—a shifting of balance so subtle a blink could’ve erased it. But no confession.
“You’re slightly older than Kael, you told me yourself.
Said that, at least once, the curse went to the wrong heir.
Then you sat your ass right on that handprint, keeping it under you, hiding it like you hid away those missing annals in the trunk.
Presume that is why you requested five days to accomplish that task.
” I take a step closer without meaning to, rage pulling me like a tide until a new thought sweeps into my head.
“Oh my god, tell me the scribe wasn’t your doing. Did you kill him?”
My fingers go cold.
A liar is one thing.
But a killer?
Vale’s nostrils flare again, harder this time. “Don’t be stupid. We both know he was dying.”
My guts twist. My breath turns thin. I take a step back without meaning to. Then another. The earth shifts beneath my heels until bark presses against my spine. The tree stops me where courage cannot.
That’s not a no.
“Kael hated your father for the curse, hated him for killing his mother,” I manage, breath unsteady.
“But you? You hate your brother for claiming your birthright, don’t you?
He told me at the spring how he wouldn’t have given up a chance at killing him.
When Merrick passed on the curse, it was Kael who snatched the lifted crown.
Who slit your father’s throat before you could, costing you the throne. ”
Vale watches me with infuriating stillness.
“Well? Admit it!” I hiss. “Admit you’re the older prince, the rightful heir Kael tried to erase.”
A corner of his mouth twitches, like the prelude to a snarl he’s too well-bred to show. He chews it away.
“Spare heirs turn into useless ornaments when a crown gives invincibility,” he finally says, stepping toward me. One slow stride to shrink the distance. “The incident was hidden under words. Stories rewritten and birth ledgers burned.”
“May the crown live long and prosper,” I whisper back in his own words.
“Is it not all so very neat?” He looms over me, shadow melding into shadow. “How history denies my existence? How my brother’s hatred robbed me of my birthright?”
My mouth turns dry, his confession quickly buried under a new load of questions. Why come to me? Why play this game?
“From the very beginning, you lied,” I spit. “You deceived me. Used me like the stupid little puppet you needed to get…to get what? Huh? What grand scheme am I a piece of here?”
Vale tilts his head slowly.
“You tell me, Elara.” His voice is silk over steel as he inches closer.
Not fast. Not threatening. Deliberate. “What, pray tell, is my”—his warmth melds into mine until there’s barely any air left between us, his breath caressing my lips, the heat of him startling against the cold in my bloodstream—“…ulterior motive?”
My breaths scrape up, shallow and thin. What is his motive? Saving the realm? No, too virtuous for Vale. Save his brother from himself? Hardly. To get what’s rightfully—
Vale’s eyes drop to my lips, and my pulse staggers, his nearness making my thoughts slip and skid like wet stone. Why did I ever let him kiss me? Why did I ever let him put his hands on me, taste me, breathe into me like he did in the library?
Focus.
What motive?
Why would Vale, the brother cheated out of his birthright, orchestrate a plan that leaves his usurping brother with a healed, prospering realm?
He wouldn’t.
My pulse stumbles over the pieces arranging themselves in my mind, creating a mosaic of pure malice.
“You never wanted Kael to slit my throat,” I breathe, the words tasting like ash as the logic locks into place.
“Only for him to lift his crown on my coronation. So you can snatch it, slash his throat, and make yourself king.”
The air between us thickens, tightens, turns into something that crawls down my spine. I retreat on instinct, but the tree is right there, the bark biting between my shoulders. The jolt stops me with a small gasp I hate him for hearing.
Vale’s mouth curves. Not up, but down. “Are you afraid of me now?”
Any smart woman would be afraid of a man who killed a scribe to hide his identity—not that I would ever let him hear that. “Merely cautious.”
Another step closer, accompanied by how he lifts his arm and braces the trunk right beside me.
“Nothing has changed, Elara.” His eyes lower to my mouth again, the shift so slight it drags heat through every nerve in me.
“You will still seduce my brother. You will still wed him. Fuck him. Get him to lift that damn crown while I wait in the shadows. The only difference is that you won’t die…
at least, not for him. Isn’t that”—his head tilts more—“fortunate?”
My thoughts shear sideways. Fortunate? I came here with my death clutched like a dowry. This robs me of the only coin I had to pay!
“You promised me a chance to save my family!” I shout. “That was the deal!”
“And?”
“And now the curse won’t be fed! The rot won’t leave!” My voice cracks open. “I didn’t mind dying for that; I never did. But like this? My brother will die!”
He reaches over. Slow, certain. His thumb brushes my lower lip, letting stupid heat jolt through me. He watches the way breath shivers out of me before dragging his thumb back, the pad gleaming faintly in the half-light. His tongue touches it as if tasting the truth from my skin.
“I could solve that.” The words purr, low and dangerous.
“Once I’ve killed my brother and crowned myself king, I’ll take pity on his widow.
” He leans in, close enough that the warmth of his mouth brushes mine without touching.
“I will wed you myself.” A beat. “Fuck you.” Another beat. “And then I shall crown…you…dead.”
My breath doesn’t just stutter; it fractures, splitting down the center of me like a bone giving under too much strain. Everything I’ve held together with spit and stubbornness threatens to spill out of my ribs.
“There’s one problem with this, Vale.” I lift my chin, the words gathering sharp enough on my tongue to cut. “Once you put that blade to my throat, your heart is supposed to ache.”
His answer is low, almost a growl. “And what if I tell you that it will?”
The meaning of those words pours over me like a heated murmur—full of something that hits my chest with a violent thud, a pulse that puts a tremble on my lips before I can choke it down.
No.
I shove it away. Crush it. Deny it breath. What is it other than more of his lies? More scheming?
“As far as I can tell, Vale—” I slap his hand away from his mouth so hard the sound cracks like a whip. His fingers jolt aside, leaving a smear of spit and heat on the air between us as fury erupts straight up my throat like fire. “You have no heart.”
His jaw goes still.
His knuckles flex around nothing.
For one breath, Vale stands there—silent, rigid, breathing too slowly to be calm and too deeply to be unaffected.
Then he exhales a long, controlled, surgically even breath that wipes the rawness right off his face.
His expression resets into that infuriating mask he wears so well: bored, detached, unbothered.
Without warning, he leans in again. Fast, harsh. Close enough that I flinch back against the bark as if he were a blade himself.
“There was something I meant to tell you,” he says, and his voice is no longer soft. It’s a bite. “News…from the city.”
Everything inside me recoils. Tightens.
“No…” My pulse surges, crawling up my throat in a wave of nausea. “Daron?”
Vale watches me for a long moment. Long enough to torture. Long enough that I feel every second carve itself into my guts.
“Your father.” He pushes himself off the tree with a smooth, dismissive motion, turning away as he fixes the lapels of his impeccable vest. “He died in the early morning hours,” he says, tone flat as he walks back toward the palace. “Choked on his rotten blood.”