Chapter 16 #3
A bitter laugh tore from Ivan’s throat. “I don’t give a single, miserable fuck about Vredia or your men.
I didn’t spare your soldiers out of respect for some kingdom that spent ten years hiding behind wards.
I simply didn’t bother killing them.” He shrugged.
“I had other matters to deal with in the Pit. And I don’t bleed for cowards who discover their courage only after the war is over. ”
Dario stepped forward, eyes flashing. “That’s rich—blaming Vredia for a realm broken by men like you. Men who bent the knee to a tyrant king.”
Ivan lunged against the restraints. “Fuck your convenient morality. Fuck your arrogance and self-righteous stares. Vredia fled before the kingdoms fell—ran home, took Osin’s coin, and abandoned the rest of us to make hard choices just to survive.
” His chest heaved. “If you’re determined to assign blame, start at the beginning. ”
At last, he turned his gaze to Dominic. “If anything, your complacency made my work easier.” His mouth twisted.
“No misplaced mercy. No hesitation when the Lord Sovereign ordered your blood spilled. And yes—I hunted you ruthlessly. Not for Osin’s crusade to erase every trace of Sídhe culture from Latheria, but for myself.
For the reckoning owed to a kingdom that stood idle while the rest of the realm burned.
” His voice hardened. “I have never pretended to be anything other than what I am.”
A weapon.
And weapons were not asked what they wanted. They were lifted, pointed, bloodied. When the war ended, they were sheathed—or broken. They owed nothing to the hands that wielded them.
Dominic’s expression cooled by degrees. “There is much my kingdom must answer for; I will not dress it in prettier words than it deserves. But this is not the hour for confession, and we have squandered enough of it.” A muscle flickered along his brow. Something in him snapped. “Where is Godfrey?”
Ivan went still.
Godfrey?
The tent receded. The chains, the men—all of it dimmed beneath the sudden flare of memory.
Elara. Eyes alight with that infuriating, unkillable hope as the world collapsed around her.
Take me to Godfrey. Ivan exhaled around the ache the memory brought with it.
He had sworn he would. On bone and blood and breath.
I will. The vow flared now, hot in his blood, a living thing that refused to be smothered.
What did they want with the Druid? Ivan searched their faces and saw something he hadn’t before. Not curiosity. Not calculation. Desperation.
He lifted a brow. “Who?”
Dominic shook his head and glanced sideways. Yoni needed no further instruction. He reached into his coat and withdrew something small and pale. The sight of it split Ivan cleanly down the center.
A pearl pin caught the lantern light, impossibly delicate against the grime of the camp, and Ivan’s world narrowed to that single, fragile gleam. He had believed it lost in the Pit, ground to dust beneath falling stone. Yet there it was. He suppressed the urge to reach for it—Elara’s pin.
She had tried to take his eye with it once, feral and furious, all teeth and reckless courage.
He had taken it from her then, fingers threading through her hair as she fought him, stripping the pins free because he was tired of bleeding for standing too close.
She had gasped when he caught her wrist, and he had laughed, low and cruel, because that was what he was supposed to do.
Because mercy had never been part of the role carved into him.
But beneath it, buried so deep he hadn’t dared name it, something else had cracked open. Relief.
Pure and staggering and unwanted.
She hadn’t been broken. Even after the subjugation—the stolen memories, the slow erosion of everything she had once been—she was still fighting.
That was why he hadn’t thrown the pin away. He had stripped it from her hair with shaking fingers and told himself it was practicality, annoyance, necessity—anything but the truth—before slipping it into his pocket.
It stayed with him after that. Through shouted orders and spilled blood.
Through the slow rot settling deeper into his bones.
Sometimes he felt its shape against his thigh as he walked.
Sometimes he rolled it between his fingers when his thoughts grew too loud, or reached for it when the oath burned and the sickness began to whisper.
A reminder.
She was still in there. Fire, familiar and furious.
And somehow, it had lit something in him, too.
“An interesting trinket to keep so close,” Dominic said mildly, and Ivan’s eyes followed the pin as it passed from Yoni’s grasp into the traitor prince’s hand. He turned it between thumb and forefinger, and the scrape of Ivan’s teeth filled his skull.
Dominic’s mouth curved. “Bring her in.”
Ivan’s heart slammed against his ribs. Blood roared in his ears as the tent flap stirred—
And a Greenheart stepped inside.
Not Elara. Disappointment struck hard and cold. Idiot. Of course it wouldn’t be.
The Druid pushed back her hood, dark hair flecked with gray spilling free over wind-burned cheeks.
Ivan blinked.
Recognition followed a beat later. She was the Druid healer from the Pit.
Her gaze flicked from Ivan to Dominic. At Dominic’s nod, she moved closer.
“Do you remember me?” She didn’t wait for an answer.
“You sent for me when you found the Hallowed half-dead in the stones. And afterward, whenever she was hurt. By messenger. By raven. By coin. By threat.” Her eyes flicked over him.
“No other prisoner was given such care.”
“Your point?” Ivan bit out.
“My point is that I know you care for her. The Hallowed. The Druids speak of it. The servants, too. You weren’t nearly as careful as you believed. And I know the two of you shared a past once—long before Osin tore her memories from her mind for the last time.”
She turned and reached for the pin. To Ivan’s surprise, Dominic didn’t stop her. She set it in Ivan’s palm and closed his fingers around it. The cool pearl bit into his skin, and the relief that followed nearly buckled him.
“Help us. If not for the good of the realm…” Her gaze dipped to the pin in his hand. “Then for her.”
“Where is she?”
“Gone,” Dominic said. “All of them from the Pit. The Sídhe—vanished without a trace. She freed them.”
For the first time in days, hope stirred in Ivan’s chest. His mouth twisted, the sound that escaped him more crack than laugh. He shook his head once, dark hair falling into his eyes. “Elara.” His mouth curved faintly. “Always scheming.”
Dario stepped forward, fists trembling with barely contained rage. “Do not speak her name,” he snarled. “Not after what you did to her. Whatever trick or spell you had her under.”
Ivan turned his gaze on him. His dark current stirred at once, flickering like smoke in the lamplight, coiling restlessly around his hands. “You must think very little of her,” he said dryly, “if you believe anyone could manipulate her so easily.”
Dario lunged for Ivan, but a guard yanked him back.
“Enough.”
Dominic’s voice cracked through the tent like a whip. Both men froze. When he turned back to Ivan, the exhaustion was gone. Whatever desperation had clung to him moments before had burned away. Fury was all that remained. “I’ll ask you again,” he said, his voice tight. “Nicely. Where is Godfrey?”
Ivan’s oath once again stirred at the name.
It had never loosened its grip, not even when Osin’s compulsion had been ripped from his bones.
Elara’s blood had shattered one chain, but not the other.
That vow still lived in him, coiled tight around his ribs.
I will. He could never give her back what had been taken.
Never undo the years of cages, the pieces of herself stolen away. But this—this was something.
Ivan stared down at the pin. Proof that Elara had once burned. That she might yet still.
Godfrey had mattered to her. He was part of that fragile, stubborn hope she carried—the belief that something in this world could still be saved.
Ivan could do this one thing. One last act that honored who she had been to him, before the world hollowed them both out.
Not for Vredia. Never for Vredia. He had learned long ago that kingdoms were poor objects of loyalty.
People were different. And there had only ever been one he chose.
He lifted his gaze to Dominic, eyes cold and unyielding.
Helping them would not absolve Vredia. It would not redeem Dominic, nor wash the blood from Ivan’s hands.
This was no act of mercy—only a means to his own end.
He would give them what they needed, take what he could, and disappear before anyone thought to stop him.
“If he lives,” Ivan said, hoping he would not regret it, “he’ll be in Bravell. Within the ruins of the eastern kingdom.”