Chapter 24
ELARA
Iwas pissed.
The kind of pissed that made my hands shake against the chains, that made my teeth grind until my jaw ached. The kind that sat behind my eyes like a storm and dared anyone to call it fear.
The wagon hit a rut so deep it threw my shoulder into the boards hard enough to make my vision flash white.
I hissed, sucking in a breath that tasted like frost and blood.
“Careful,” one of the soldiers muttered from the front, like I was a sack of grain that might spill.
I yanked the chain as far as it would let me and leaned toward the canvas opening. “Careful?” I laughed. “You’ve had me in irons for three days. I think we passed ‘careful’ somewhere around the first mile.”
Silence.
Then a voice, colder. “Save your breath.”
“Oh, I will,” I said sweetly. “For the part where you all pretend this is justice.”
A boot scuffed in the snow outside. Someone pulled the canvas tighter as if my words were contagious.
Good.
Let them be uncomfortable.
By the second day, I’d realized something simple.
I was going to die.
No one dragged a chained woman across a kingdom that was mobilizing for war just to give her a lecture and send her home. The trial was a costume. The ending was already decided. I could practically hear the axe being sharpened every time the wagon stopped.
Which meant I had options.
Not good ones. But options.
The wagon lurched again. The chains clinked. My wrists burned where the cuffs had rubbed skin raw. I shifted, testing the slack, and for one moment I pictured it.
Throw myself out.
Let the wheels take me.
Let the cold finish whatever the impact didn’t.
No court. No queen. No crowd to cheer while I bled.
Just snow swallowing sound.
My throat tightened with something that felt almost like relief.
I pressed my forehead to the wooden slats and whispered, barely audible, “If you’re marching me to my execution, I should really stop cooperating.”
A laugh drifted from somewhere outside. Not amused. Dismissive.
“Princess thinks she’s funny,” someone said.
I turned my face toward the crack in the canvas, voice flat. “I’m not the princess.”
That shut them up faster than any insult could have.
Because it wasn’t funny anymore when I said it like a fact.
The wagon creaked forward again, the road carved up with deep grooves from supply caravans and troop transports. I watched the world pass through narrow gaps, watched Icespire bracing itself like a body preparing for impact.
Burn pits still smoked at the edges of villages, black stains on white land. Watchtowers flew fresh banners, crisp and bright, like fear needed decoration. Patrols passed in tight formations, hands never far from weapons, faces hard with readiness.
Icespire was mobilizing.
And apparently I was the emergency.
Flattering.
They fed me just enough to keep me conscious. Bread so dry it turned to dust on my tongue. Broth so thin it felt like mockery. Water rationed in small sips, like thirst was another chain they could tighten whenever they felt like reminding me who owned my body.
It wasn’t starvation.
It was discipline.
And the worst part was that it worked. Not the way they wanted, though. It didn’t make me meek. It didn’t make me quiet. It hollowed me out until there was nothing left inside me but rage and survival.
Every night, when the wagon stopped, the soldiers talked around the fire like I wasn’t there.
The imposter.
The fake princess.
The seventh wife who wasn’t.
I listened with my eyes open, staring into dark canvas while the cold pressed in from every side.
And every time someone said the word imposter, my mind betrayed me with Rhydian’s hands.
His mouth.
His voice in the cave, rough and reverent.
I swallowed hard, anger rising so fast it made me dizzy. “Rhydian,” I whispered into the dark, like saying his name might summon him.
It didn’t.
Men like him didn’t appear when you needed them. They appeared when it suited them. They held you like you mattered, then turned you into a lesson before the sun was fully up.
The wagon hit another rut. Pain bit up my spine.
I grabbed the chain and yanked again, harder this time, until the cuffs cut and the sting grounded me.
Fine.
Drag me home in irons.
March me to a trial that was really an execution.
But if they wanted me dead, they were going to work for it.
Because I wasn’t going to die quietly.
And if I went down, I was taking something with me.
By the time the towers of Icespire rose out of the white horizon, black against a sky the color of old bone, I was hollow.
The citadel loomed like a verdict already decided, its walls etched with runes meant to keep enemies out and truths buried.
War banners snapped violently in the wind, their colors stark and unforgiving.
This was not a place bracing for siege. This was a place preparing to sacrifice something to survive.
They dragged me down corridors carved from ancient ice and stone, the walls breathing cold like a living thing.
The castle felt awake in the way predators do—alert, watchful, patient.
Servants flattened themselves against the walls as we passed.
Guards avoided my eyes. No one spoke to me directly.
I was already a lesson, already a cautionary tale.
The cell they threw me into was small and clean in the way execution chambers often were.
No blood. No stains. Just restraint. Iron rings set into the walls, polished from use.
A narrow cot bolted to the floor. A single slit of a window that let in light without offering hope.
Somewhere above me, the castle hummed with purpose—strategy councils, troop movements, whispered decisions about borders and bodies.
The cold stripped the hours of any meaning, reduced everything to sensation. The ache in my shoulders where the chains held me upright. The slow burn in my wrists. The way my body learned, increment by increment, how much pain it could carry before thought simply… slid away. I slept in fragments.
Woke unsure if I had dreamed or simply dissociated long enough to mistake it for rest. Sometimes I counted my breaths. Sometimes I forgot to.
When the door finally opened, it did so without drama.
No rush of guards. No barked orders. Just the soft, inevitable sound of authority arriving.
Queen Marisella entered first.
She wore pale blue, the color of old ice beneath fresh snow.
Her gown was immaculate, untouched by the grime of travel or the inconvenience of war.
Every fold was intentional. Every jewel caught the light in a way that felt rehearsed.
The air shifted around her as she moved, the cold bending inward, attentive.
It was not that she controlled it. It was that the world understood who she was and adjusted accordingly.
Power like that never announced itself. It did not need to.
Rhydian came in behind the others like a shadow that thought it still had rights to me. Like he could trail after my ruin and call it duty. Like the last moments we spent together hadn’t been him taking everything soft I had left and grinding it into the snow.
He didn’t look at me.
Not when the door opened. Not when he stepped inside. Not when the faint sound I made, some involuntary hitch of breath, some stupid, traitorous hope, escaped my throat.
That, more than anything, was how I knew.
Because Rhydian didn’t do silence by accident.
Silence was his choice. His weapon. His favorite way of pretending he was honorable while he did something unforgivable.
I watched him out of the corner of my eye and felt my stomach turn over, hot and sick.
He stood like he always did, shoulders squared, jaw locked, hands controlled at his sides.
The perfect Warden Lord. The perfect soldier.
The perfect man who could touch me like worship one night and deliver me like cargo the next morning.
He looked immaculate.
The queen stopped a few paces away, close enough that I could smell the faint trace of winter on her skin.
She regarded me the way one might assess damage to property.
Not with anger. Not with cruelty. With calculation.
As if she were already deciding what parts could be salvaged and which would need to be discarded.
Her gaze flicked to my wrists, the bruising there, the way my shoulders sagged despite my effort to remain upright.
“You’ve been difficult,” she said mildly, as though we were discussing a recalcitrant child or a delayed shipment. “But difficulty is not the same as irredeemable.”
I said nothing.
She took a step closer anyway.
The pressure came without warning.
It was not the sharp agony of breaking bones.
Not yet. This was subtler. The precise tightening of my ribcage, the gentle, horrifying compression that stole air from my lungs without cracking anything visible.
My breath shuddered out of me in a thin, humiliating yelp as my chest constricted, muscles screaming in protest as my body fought a losing battle to inhale.
Marisella watched me the way someone watched a crack spreading through fine ice.
With polite interest. Mild curiosity. Like I was an experiment that had surprised her by surviving.
“Still alive,” she observed. “Good. We’ll need that.”
Her gaze flicked to Rhydian.
“Rhydian informed me of your… condition,” she continued smoothly. “It seems Aeliana is still somewhere inside that weak body of yours.”
She said it like an insult.
Like the dead girl was rot under my skin.
Marisella hummed, thoughtful. “I haven’t decided what to do with that yet.”
Then her eyes returned to me, and her smile changed. Less clinical. More amused.
“What interests me more,” she murmured, “is the Dragon King’s fixation on you.” She let the words hang in the air. “And I find myself wondering,” she added softly, “what exactly you did to make a monster like Valen want you.”
I spat at her feet.
It wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t dignified. It was pure instinct, pure disgust, the only violence I was still allowed to commit.
The spit hit the ice with a soft, ugly sound.