23. The Day the Fox Forgot, the Dove Was Stolen #2
Before Melodie could react, still numb with shock and exhaustion, he pulled her into an embrace.
Her body went rigid. His arms tightened around her, holding her there as one hand came up to cradle the back of her head in a grotesque parody of comfort.
To anyone watching, it would look like a brother-in-law consoling his traumatized sister.
But his lips brushed her ear, and his voice dropped to a cold and poisonous murmur.
"You sang so beautifully that night at my court," he whispered, each word deliberate, savoring.
"Do you remember? How you stood before all my peers and made me look the fool?
" His fingers tightened in her hair, just shy of painful.
"I promised you then that actions have consequences. That you would pay for your insolence."
He pulled back just enough to look into her face, watching her with dark satisfaction.
"I told you that you would pay, Allora."
Her eyes flew open.
The memory crashed over her like ice water. That night. The song. His rage barely concealed behind a pleasant smile. His whispered threat afterward as the court applauded her performance. Her cocky response, chin lifted in defiance, daring him to try.
And this... all of this...
His revenge.
The rage ignited like wildfire, white-hot and all-consuming.
She lunged, her hands fisting in his hair, yanking hard enough to tear strands free. Her nails raked down his cheek, leaving angry red welts in their wake. Surion yelped, stumbling backward as guards rushed forward to separate them.
"You COWARD!" Melodie spat, struggling against the hands trying to restrain her. "You better watch your back, Surion! I'm coming for you! I WILL come for you!"
She spat at his feet, her chest heaving with fury.
Surion pressed a hand to his bleeding cheek, his expression shifting to wounded innocence. "She attacked me! I was only saying goodbye?—"
Kael stepped between them with quiet authority and gathered Melodie with firm care, his arms closing around her flailing body as he lifted her toward the carriage. “Calm yourself, mina,” he murmured, his accent thick around the words. “He iz not worth it. I will take care of zis.”
He placed her inside, where two Zaharein maids caught her gently, murmuring soothing words she didn't understand.
Kael closed the door, the lock clicking into place.
Her muffled screams continued to beat against the glass.
Then, slowly, he turned back to Surion. His steps were measured, deliberate.
He stopped directly in front of the king, his pale blue electric eyes cold as winter ice.
“You provoke her on purpose,” Kael said quietly, his voice smooth but edged with warning. “And zat was after I warn you.”
Surion dabbed at his scratched cheek, his smirk returning. "I only wished her well in her new life. She's the one who attacked?—"
“Do not insult my intelligence,” Kael said, his voice still soft, though a lethal edge lay beneath the calm. “I see what you did. I hear ze tone you used.”
Surion opened his mouth to protest, but Kael continued, his words less a courtesy and more of a proclamation. “Ze border war is finished. I 'ave what I came for,” Kael said, his voice cool and final. “And I want nothing more to do wiz you, Surion. Ever again.”
Surion blinked, his smirk faltering. "Kael, don't be dramatic. It was just?—"
"Goodbye."
Kael turned his back on him and mounted his horse in one smooth motion. The stallion shifted beneath him, eager to move. Behind him, the carriage door showed Melodie's tear-streaked face pressed against the window, her hands flat against the glass.
The gates swung wide.
"Kael!" Surion called out, uncertainty creeping into his voice. "Kael, wait—are you serious?"
The Western King did not look back. With a quiet lift of his hand, the procession stirred to life. Banners cracked in the wind as hooves struck the stone in a rising thunder, and the carriage rolled forward, carrying Melodie away from everything she'd fought to build.
Surion stood in the courtyard, his hand still pressed to his bleeding cheek, watching them leave. The smile lingered on his face for a moment. Then it faded as the reality settled over him.
Kael had meant every word.
"KAEL!" he shouted after the disappearing procession. "Are you SERIOUS?"
But the only answer was the fading sound of hooves and the distant echo of Melodie's grief.
No one noticed the small, golden iridescent dragonfly that clung stubbornly to the iron lamppost fixed at the corner of the carriage. Its wings shimmered in fractured hues, beating faintly in the sunlight. A silent stowaway, insignificant to the armored world around it.
The guest suite that had held their last moment of peace was quiet now—too quiet for a prince.
Hours had passed since the betrayal, yet the memory still clung to the room with suffocating clarity.
Surin’s hand against his son’s brow. Melodie’s screams tearing down the corridor as she was taken away.
The chamber still carried the faint scent of her, lavender tangled with salt tears, lingering like a ghost that refused to leave.
Surin sat beside the bed, his back rigid, hands folded neatly in his lap. The fire had burned low, its embers casting sluggish orange shadows across the stone floor. On the bed lay the one they no longer called Malec.
He slept without resistance. His chest rose and fell in a calm, steady rhythm that seemed to belong to another life entirely, one untouched by command or war.
The quiet breathing did not resemble the man who had led armies, who had held his newborn son with trembling awe, or who had loved a woman with a devotion fierce enough to ruin him.
The spell had taken. Surin had watched it anchor piece by piece, like iron rings locking shut.
Memories dissolved into nothing while the fire in his eyes guttered out, and the fury that had carried him through every battle collapsed into ash.
Surin would carry the truth of it with him until his final breath.
There had been no clash of blades, no moment of defiance worthy of a warrior’s end.
His son never even understood what was happening.
Malec had stood there content, softened by the presence of the woman he loved, savoring a rare pocket of peace in a life forged by war.
Then Surin stepped forward, laid his hand against his son’s brow, and murmured the ancient words that would unmake everything.
Malec’s mouth opened as though he meant to speak her name, yet no sound ever formed.
His strength faltered beneath him as his legs gave way and the light in his eyes slowly dimmed.
The fierce fire that had always lived within him guttered out, leaving only the hollow echo of the Awyan he had been.
In the end, he was undone with quiet precision.
The same way he had once undone her.
That irony dug sharp into Surin's chest as he sat watching his son breathe.
Platinum hair, cut shorter now, brushed across the pillow in pale strands.
Glamour softened his face, dulling the harsh cheekbones and blurring the hard line of his jaw until the genius commander became someone unremarkable.
When his voice returned, it would hold a different cadence. A different history.
Only the eyes, Surin could not bring himself to change, pale tan, the same shade that had once burned like molten steel in the heat of battle. He had left them untouched, though he knew it was a risk.
What if she saw him? What if she recognized those eyes?
The thought made his stomach turn.
Surin rose from his chair and crossed to the small table near the window.
The plain trappings of a different life lay arranged there: a dark cloak with no crest, worn gloves that had never known command, and a mercenary tag already stamped with a name that was not Malec's own. The mask of reinvention.
But it was the parchment beneath that mask that caught his eye. The marriage certificate.
The seal glimmered faintly in the firelight, its presence both binding and irrefutable.
It stood as legal proof that she had once been his, that Malec had lived a life filled with belonging and love, however brief it was.
The mark carried the quiet weight of everything he had been: a commander, a father, a husband.
Surin's hand hovered over it, then closed around the parchment.
Slowly, carefully, he folded it into a neat square and slipped it into his pocket.
He should have burned or buried it, erased every trace and left nothing behind.
But some stubborn compulsion pressed against his chest, an ache he couldn't shake. He couldn't let it go.
He couldn't bring himself to destroy it. To Surin, getting rid of the certificate would make the betrayal complete. Holding onto it was the only apology he could offer, however pathetic. Some part of him still hoped, against all reason, that one day this could be undone.
He looked back toward the bed and saw his son sleeping as though peace had ever belonged to him. But Surin knew better. Peace was the lie that bloomed just before the storm.
And when this storm woke, there would be no turning back.
He had prepared it all. Clothing without sigils, papers leading nowhere, a backstory built on sand.
A mercenary contract with any guild that would take on anyone willing to swing a sword for coin.
His son would wake with another name on his tongue and a past that no longer belonged to him.
The life waiting ahead would hold no trace of crowns, bloodlines, or the Canariae he had once sworn to cherish and protect.
Surin had done to Malec what Malec had tried to do to her: stripped away identity, imposed a new reality, forced transformation without consent. But the irony tasted like ash.
Behind him, the door opened without ceremony.
Surion never waited for permission.