Chapter 29
Chapter
Twenty-Nine
Elara
The next morning feels like a throat after a scream—raw and swollen. The chill of the stone seeps through the soles of my shoes, biting into the skin of my heels, but I’m too numb to care. My legs move of their own accord as I turn toward Daron’s room.
Run, Kael had said.
And I did run. I ran until my lungs burned and the silk of my stolen gown clung to my sweat-dampened skin. I ran until the heavy oak door of my chamber thudded shut, sealing me in with one brutal truth:
There’s nowhere left to run to.
It’s fucking over.
I wipe remnants of tears from my cheeks while Kael’s threat echoes between my ears. I will hang you and your entire family from the portcullis.
My temples ache. I can’t decide what frightens me more: Kael’s willingness to say such a thing, or how easily those words came. Like they’d been waiting under his tongue the whole time, patient as rot. Should I be shocked?
There have been tells, scattered like bones in the grass.
The way he could roar and fling a table.
In the gardens, when he spoke of his father, the brutality not an accident of rage, but calculated precision.
When I tried to peer through a crack in his secrecy, his warmth turned to stone-cold warning.
So, no, maybe I shouldn’t be shocked. Maybe I should be furious with myself for thinking I could outwit a curse, a prince, and his king all at once.
Well, it’s over now.
All of it.
I reach the door to Daron’s room. At least Kael hasn’t chased us off the grounds yet. How long he’ll keep up that kindness, I don’t know, but I’ll take it. I’d rather have Daron die on a comfortable pillow than out there in a wet ditch, with—
Why is his door ajar?
A frown touches my brows. I always close it. To keep the drafts out, to keep the sound of his dying in.
I push the door open, the hinges giving a soft, familiar groan.
The room is still dim, lit only by a single tallow candle sputtering on the bedside table. The shadows it casts are long and jumping, distorted shapes that dance across the walls. But one shadow barely moves.
It hunches over the bed—tall, lean, still. One palm resting on my brother’s chest, five fingers splayed with a precision that gnaws a strange hollow into my belly.
My voice is a croak, raspy from the screaming match with Kael. “What are you doing here?”
Vale doesn’t jump, doesn’t snatch his hand away like a thief caught in a larder. He lifts it slowly, deliberately, his fingers trailing off the linen sheet covering Daron’s heaving chest. He turns to me, his face a mask of smooth, pale indifference in the candlelight.
“Checking on him,” he says softly.
For a breath, I can’t move. Probably because the sight doesn’t make sense. Vale has never been the type to check on anyone who isn’t useful. Vale is a man who counts outcomes, not heartbeats.
“Since when?” I ask, and I hate that my voice trembles on the edge of the question. “Why would you care?”
“Always so suspicious of me.” He sighs as if I’m being difficult over the weather. “Yesterday, you curled into me like you belonged there. Now, you’re acting as if I’m your enemy all over again.”
The words hit a place in me that’s already scraped, making my distrust lose its teeth. Because it’s true. I did curl into him. I did enjoy his fingers comb through my hair until the world stopped spinning.
I swallow hard. What if I’ve been wrong about him this whole time? Vale is cruel, yes—scheming, selfish, sharp as a blade—but he never threatened to hang my family.
Kael did.
“If anyone saw you coming to this room, they’d wonder, you know. As if things aren’t bad enough already.” I step fully into the room, the floorboards creaking under my weight as I nod at Daron. “He’s asleep?”
“Passed out,” Vale corrects. He tilts his head, studying me. “Forgive me for saying, but you look terrible.”
I shift my jaw, forcing the words into shape…but courage dies in my throat. How much do I tell Vale? Is there even still anything to gain by saying anything at all? Considering that, if I say too much, my family might full well lose their lives.
My teeth dig into my upper lip until it throbs, but I eventually say, “Kael won’t lift his crown.”
Vale’s expression stills.
Then he blinks. “Pardon me?”
“I went to his chamber,” I say, each word dragged out under strain. “I tried to…make him.”
Vale’s jaw tightens so subtly I almost miss it, the muscle jumping once beneath his cheekbone. “Make…him?”
“Sleep with me.” I don’t know why my gaze flicks to Daron’s ribs rising and falling as if I’m confessing disloyalty here. As if that hadn’t been the plan all along. “He wanted it. He had me on the table by the hearth, hands everywhere, ready to—”
“Uh-huh.” Vale's gaze drifts to the floor, jaw shifting once, as though he’s chewing something he’d rather spit out. “I don’t recall asking for details.”
I look at him for a breath too long, considering there’s no room here for the jealousy of a man who eagerly plots me toward my death, however it may come. “He stopped. And… and he got angry.”
Vale’s eyes find my face again, but something in them sharpens—green going darker, colder. “Angry.”
“Furious. We argued. I…I was desperate, and I just…” Heat crawls up my neck, ugly with shame. “When he realized I knew more than I should—when I begged him to feed the curse—he…” My throat tries to close, but I force it open. “He said the curse will end with him.”
Vale goes very still. Then he gives a soft, humorless laugh that contains no amusement at all. “How? How will it end with him?”
“I don’t know.” My mind goes back to when I asked Kael that very thing. How he looked at me. How his mouth opened and closed, but no explanation came out. No hope. “I saw it in his eyes, the helplessness. But…”
But the letter.
If he truly has nothing—if it’s all just stubbornness dressed up as nobility—then why snatch the page like that? Why the secrecy? Why the threat? Is that the behavior of a man with no plan?
My stomach tightens.
I just… I don’t know.
“But what?” Vale’s gaze drops to my mouth, like he’s scanning it for bruises that aren’t there. When he looks back up, his voice is almost mild. “What else was said? Did you find out anything about the situation with the messenger? What they spoke of?”
The bruise on my hip pulses like a second heartbeat to the cadence of Kael’s threat. If I tell Vale about the letter, then Kael could make good on his threat. I stare at Daron’s slack face, at the shallow, rattling rise of his chest, and something in me goes cold.
We’re dead either way, aren’t we?
“I found out something.” I swallow, because there’s no un-saying it once it’s loose. “He was writing a letter. I saw a few lines before he snatched it.”
Vale’s gaze narrows slightly. “Saying what?”
My molars clench together once. Twice. “Hide her, and hide her well. Prepare the rite. He cannot find her, or—”
“Or what?”
“That’s it. It’s as far as I got.” Before he crumpled it as if his life depended on it. “It’s meaningful enough for him that he threatened to hang me and my family if I told anyone.”
His jaw works once, hard. He takes a step, then another, the room suddenly too small to hold him. He paces once along the foot of the bed, boots whispering over the boards.
The stove crackles.
The candle flickers.
Vale’s fingers flex and relax at his sides as if searching for a hilt that isn’t there.
“Hide her,” he repeats, quieter now, tasting the words like poison.
“Prepare the rite. He cannot find her. Heritage…” He stops.
His head tilts, eyes unfocusing as something slots into place behind them. “Original…translation.”
“Vale?” My voice cracks on his name. “What is it? What does it mean?”
His eyes widen—just a fraction, but enough to turn my stomach. Not anger, not shock, but in recognition. The kind that arrives with a cost. He looks at me, and for the first time since I met him, his composure slips into something like urgency.
“Stay here,” he says, too sharp. “Do not do anything, do you understand?”
“What—”
He yanks the door open, cold corridor air rushing in, and strides out as if chased. “I have to go.”
I lunge after him, skidding on the boards, the hem of my dress snapping around my ankles. “Vale!” I hiss, stumbling into the hallway. “Tell me what you—”
A sound cuts through my words—wet, strangled, wrong.
I whip around.
Daron.
He’s convulsing on the bed, shoulders jerking, mouth open as if trying to pull air through mud.
A gray-black blob slides from the corner of his lips, thick as paste, and dribbles down onto the sheet in a slow, obscene rope.
He makes a sound like a choke half-swallowed, fingers clawing weakly at the blanket.
“No—Daron!” I sprint back, dropping to the bedside, shoving pillows up behind him with shaking hands. “Breathe, you idiot. Breathe.”
I lift his head, careful, keeping him angled so whatever is in his throat can spill out instead of drown him. The smell hits—rot and iron and something sour that makes my eyes sting.
Behind me, the corridor stays empty. Footsteps don’t return.
The only sound left is my brother’s wet rattle. My hands are slick with gray filth, the stain spreading across clean sheets as if the palace itself is bleeding him out.