Chapter 23
Chapter
Twenty-Three
Elara
It takes longer than any of us guessed.
Daron can’t sit the jostling anymore, a messenger came to tell me earlier. The roads have turned violent, forcing them to lay him flat on boards padded with blankets, stopping every mile when the breath won’t come, stopping when the pain overwhelms his senses.
The waiting is a physical weight, heavy and suffocating. It’ll take days…
Ignoring the restless whirl at my core, I turn to my hearth where it sulks in the corner. I kneel, my skirt catching ash, and coax a structure out of kindling the way Miss Hampshire had shown me works best inside these walls: cross, cross, patience.
I crack the flint. Sparks fly. One catches, threatens to die under a wobbly string of smoke, then takes—thin and stingy, but alive.
Kindling and wood are still plentiful at the palace. It’ll help Daron rest once they finally—
Knuckles rap on the oak.
Three times. Even. Unhurried.
The last of the kindling slips from my palm and taps the bricks, a cold roil raking through my belly. There’s only one person in this place who knocks like that—the nonchalant cadence in it more insult than decency.
I watch the flame flare and settle. Count one breath, then two. Steeling my nerves for what I must do.
Turn from pawn to queen.
With Kael pleading me to stay, the only thing keeping me from having my throat slit by him is Vale slitting his brother’s throat first. The only way to reduce that risk? Play Vale exactly the way he wants to play me.
Another knock.
Same measured cadence.
“It’s unlocked,” I call out.
The latch turns, and Vale steps in—shadow first, then embroidered silk and clean lines, the quiet arrogance of a man who never arrives anywhere by accident.
I rise from the hearth, wiping ash from my hands. “What do you want?”
He doesn’t answer right away, the silence echoing with what had been said between us in the garden—the low, venom-soft promise to kill me himself, my knife of a reply about his lack of a heart, the news that Father had choked on his rotten blood.
The little fire snaps.
Vale looks at it, then at the curtains I’ve drawn against the night before he pulls his gaze back on me. “What do I want?” he repeats at last, mild as a razor laid flat. The corner of his mouth almost tilts. Not amusement, but in habit. “To see whether you intend to finish what you started.”
Heat crawls up my throat, ugly and familiar. “What I started…” I echo. “You mean the plan you never meant to let me finish?”
His eyes don’t move from me, but something hardens behind them. He steps farther in and closes the door, the latch clicking with a finality that shrinks the room. “Let’s not waste either of our evenings pretending we don’t know why I’m here.”
Oh, I know exactly why he’s here. As much as my goal seemed out of reach mere hours ago, so does his. Without me, Vale is no closer to getting his brother to lift the crown than he was when he first appeared between my graves.
“Because you need me.”
“Precisely,” he says with the same enthusiasm as though he stated the temperature of the room.
“His Majesty himself left the palace this morning, or so the waitstaff says. Remarkable.” He folds his arms over his chest, leaning back slightly, casual only in the way a sword is inside its sheath.
“Whatever it is that is happening between you two…” A pause.
“It appears that his heart is softening toward you. Exactly as we hoped.”
I scoff. “We.”
His lips press together for a moment. “You will gain his heart. You will get him to lift his crown.”
“And then you’ll slit his throat,” I say. “Yes. I understood your poetry in the garden.”
“The realm needs a king who will act.”
“The realm needs a fed crown,” I snap. “Which your little fratricide doesn’t accomplish for me. Or for Daron. Or for anyone outside your vanity.”
“Vanity,” he spits. “I have every intention of feeding the curse as soon as possible. I’m not my useless half-brother, letting the realm rot itself thin because of his whiny, soft heart.”
That word… Heart.
His mouth tightens the instant it leaves him, as if he’s realized he’s just put his wrist beneath the very knife I handed him in the garden. Why did it upset him so?
I look him dead in the eyes and say, “At least he has one.”
“Oh yes, such a heart.” Vale’s laugh is vicious, a sharp sound that scrapes the walls.
“Sparing one woman and forsaking an entire realm to rot. He feeds his conscience while the rats feed on the dead in the streets. Is that what my brother made you believe, hmm?” His lips twist around the venom in his voice.
“Has he started to look like the golden-haired hero to you?”
“You’re twisting it.”
“I’m setting it straight!”
His shout sends a flinch through me. I never heard him shout like that before…
“You love to paint me as the villain, Elara,” he bites out, “but how precisely am I the monster when I’m the only one willing to claim what is mine and fix what he refuses to touch?”
My stomach clenches. Vale’s goal isn’t fueled by an urge to help, or empathy, or compassion. It thrives on entitlement and pride. And yet…does the sin matter if it leads to salvation?
“I never said you’re a monster.” And perhaps he’s only my personal villain. “It’s the way you used me that I despise. How you lied, Prince Vale.”
His head throws itself back, releasing a subdued laugh toward the ceiling that seems to twist with humor and hate in equal measures. Then it snaps forward again.
“There is…no…Prince…Vale,” he grinds out, each word a hinge ripped off its pin.
“I wear silk my brother shoved into my hands so I don’t shame his halls.
He dismissed most of the old staff the moment he crowned himself king.
I’m nothing but a rumor, but ask the current servants why I’m here—who I am to the king—and watch their mouths stall.
” His voice roughens, heat rising under each word.
“To the priests, I’m a smudge in the margin.
To the scribes, a line they skip. To the rabble?
The king’s right-hand one day, envoy the next—ghost by morning, haunting some godforsaken tower nobody bothers to visit. ”
“Vale, I—”
“Do you have any idea what it is to be raised for a crown, Elara? Hmm?” His mouth contorts, lips curling in nothing short of aggression. “Only to stand at your father’s funeral with…nothing?!”
I take two small steps back. I’ve never seen him like this—every ounce of practiced ease stripped clean, leaving only the anger that cords his neck and feeds the veins at his temples.
“I. Am. Nothing.” His voice trembles with the growl in it. “A shadow. A tale. A man without a title, who was gifted his own damn silk in charity, so he may walk these forsaken corridors with no position. No purpose. No”—the breath leaves him rough—“existence.”
His jaw locks, his shoulders set. The careful tilt of his head is gone; it’s just raw, masculine force now, poured into each stride as if he’s teaching the floor who owns it. He keeps coming. Not fast, not loud.
Just unstoppable.
“Yes, I want to kill him for what he took from me. Yes, I want to cut his throat.” The tip of his boot stops inches from my naked toes.
“Is it such a sin to want revenge when the blade also brings back harvests? When wells stop tasting of iron? When gravediggers have a season where they can put down the shovel and rest?”
“Like I said, I don’t hate your aim,” I say, and the admission costs me. “I hate the way you manipulated me.”
“Like you’re manipulating him?” His eyes keep mine hostage, and his head angles slowly, each degree adding a pound to the weight of his question. “Like how you lied your way into his chamber? Around his defenses?” His scoff scathes me. “And here she stands, the righteous one.”
My molars grind down on my cheeks. “Don’t call me that.”
“Why? It fits your mouth.” He leans his shoulder against the mantle, his gaze sharpening as it drops to my lips.
“Do my brother’s lips fit it better?” Those words drip acid.
“Tell me, did he win you with his suffering in the spring? With his shakes and his sighs and his groans and his sad, sad stories?”
My pulse is thrumming too fast, too frantic. “Stop.”
“Oh, how he endured our father’s cruelty,” he whimpers out in jest. “Oh, the curse is so heavy, the suffering so—”
“I said, stop.”
“Tell me, Elara, did his pain make a lover of you where mine doesn’t?
Are you under the impression that I did not…
suffer?” He lifts his hand—slowly, carefully—and sets his palm against my cheek, letting the warmth of his touch seep into my skin.
It burns. “Did I not put these fingers to my mother’s gushing throat and kneel beside her twitching, jerking body?
Do you think I did not call her name? Did not cry?
Did not grieve? Do you think I didn’t have nightmares my entire damn childhood, showing me how my father slit my mother’s throat? ”
The image slams up from the back of my skull—the small hand stamped in rust on old boards—and my breath goes thin.
Vale is that boy.
Only all grown up now. Taller, angrier, his old hurt rolling off him with a heat that matches the flames near my calves.
His thumb finds the seam of my mouth and drags once, light as breath, only for him to dig into my bottom lip, forcing it open. “Did you kiss him in the spring, hmm? Did my brother get to taste that mouth of yours?”
His voice is a whisper, as if his anger has simmered down to coals, but what’s left is worse. I feel it on my face—in the steady weight of his hand, in the way his thumb traps my bottom lip with a possessiveness that makes a spark catch low in my belly, tinder and traitorous.
I shake my head. “He tried,” I whisper against his thumb. “I…retreated.”