Chapter 29
ELARA
They fed me that morning.
Not kindness. Not mercy.
A heel pressed against the cage door, a guard’s laugh, and then a chunk of bread tossed onto the stone like I was a dog they’d almost forgotten they owned. Broth followed in a tin cup that sloshed when it hit the floor, most of it wasted, the steam curling up like it was trying to escape me too.
I stared at it for a long moment, because hunger had turned my brain into something simple and brutal. Eat. Live. Keep living out of spite.
My hands shook as I reached for the cup. The broth smelled like salt and herbs and something fatty enough to make my stomach cramp with want. I lifted it carefully.
“Slow,” one of the guards mocked. “Careful, little impostor.”
I ignored him, because ignoring them was the only kind of power I had left.
The first sip burned my throat. Not from heat. From contact. From the shock of something warm touching a body that had started to believe warmth was a myth.
I swallowed again and my stomach clenched so hard my vision flashed.
I forced myself to keep going anyway.
Half the cup. Then a mouthful of bread. Dense, stale, hard enough to scrape my gums. I chewed like my jaw wasn’t bruised. Like my tongue didn’t still ache from biting it. Like my ribs weren’t a cage inside my body, cracked and angry, every breath a negotiation.
When I tried to stand, my knees buckled.
The guards liked that part best.
The boot came out of nowhere, a casual kick to my thigh, enough to send me back down. Pain shot up my leg and my chains rattled, loud in the quiet.
“Up again,” the guard said, amused. “Show me you can.”
I stayed on the floor, breathing hard, waiting for the pain to stop sparkling at the edges. The bread sat heavy and wrong in my belly. The broth sloshed in my gut like it didn’t trust me.
“Up,” he repeated.
I pushed my palm against the stone and tried again.
The second kick landed higher, into my ribs this time. Blood shot out of my mouth with a grunt.
The guard chuckled. “There she is.”
They left after that. They always did. Like the performance was for them, not me, and once they’d gotten their entertainment, they had better places to be.
Time passed the way it did down here, slow and thick and unreliable.
The light outside my cell never changed enough to measure. The cold stayed constant. The smell of damp stone and old rot settled into my skin until I couldn’t imagine ever smelling clean again.
My body kept trying to count days and failing.
Sleep came in short bursts, stolen like contraband. Every time I drifted, pain yanked me back. My arm ached where it had been bent wrong last time. My shoulder screamed if I shifted too quickly. My head felt bruised from the inside, like my thoughts had been scraped clean and left raw.
I kept waiting for someone to come down and tell me when the trial was.
No one did.
Maybe there wasn’t going to be a trial. Maybe they were just going to let me rot until my body gave up and then call it justice.
The thought should have scared me.
Instead, it felt like relief.
A clean ending. No more questions. No more queens with polished smiles. No more kings who ate while I starved. No more Lyra’s blade hovering with promise.
No more blank spaces in my mind that I could feel but not reach.
I lay on my side and stared at the wall until the stones began to blur.
Then footsteps slammed through the dungeon.
Not the lazy shuffle of guards making rounds. Not the slow, bored pace of men who’d been assigned to watch suffering like it was a job.
These were fast. Furious. Purposeful.
Shouts echoed down the corridor, muffled but sharp enough to slice through the dungeon’s dead quiet.
“Move.”
“Open it.”
“And get out of my way.”
The last voice hit something in my chest like a fist.
Ciaran.
My eyes snapped open.
The corridor flared with light.
Not torchlight.
Not lanterns.
Light that spilled forward like a living thing, bright enough to make my eyes water. It poured through my cell, turning the damp air into glittering frost, casting harsh shadows that made the dungeon look even uglier.
Then the door at the end of the corridor slammed open so hard the sound shook dust from the ceiling.
Ciaran strode in like the world owed him space.
Light pulsed beneath his skin. Not a gentle glow, not warmth, but something furious, a solar flare wrapped in flesh. His hair was disheveled, gold streaks catching the brightness as he moved. His amber eyes were molten and wild.
Beside him, Queen Marisella moved with the calm of a woman walking into a room she already owned.
Her dark hair was coiled perfectly. Her lips painted deep red. Her expression carried polite interest, like she was attending a performance she’d seen before but still enjoyed.
And Lyra.
Lyra came last, stalking in with her knife already in hand, twirling it lazily as if she’d been bored all day and finally found something worth doing. Her eyes locked on me and didn’t blink.
The guards at the corridor snapped to attention. Two of them looked uneasy, like even they didn’t like being in the same space as this much power.
Ciaran didn’t slow.
“Open her cage,” he said.
The order cracked through the dungeon.
A guard fumbled with keys, hands shaking. The lock clicked. The cell door groaned open. I didn’t move. I couldn’t. My body was heavy and wrong, like it had forgotten how to respond quickly.
Ciaran stepped forward anyway, stopping just outside the threshold. He looked at me like he was trying to decide whether to kill me with his hands or his magic. His voice dropped, dangerously quiet. “Where is Therynne?”
My mouth was so dry it hurt to part my lips. “Good morning to you too.”
Lyra made a sound of disgust. “Can we kill her now?”
I dragged in a breath, slow, careful. “If you’re here to ask me what day it is, I’ll have to disappoint you. Time blurs when you’re treated like an animal.”
Ciaran’s jaw flexed. Light crackled under his skin like his power didn’t like being spoken to that way.
“I’m not playing,” he said.
I stared at him through lashes that felt too heavy. “Neither am I.”
Marisella’s lips curved, pleased. “Still spirited,” she observed. “Even half-dead.”
Ciaran didn’t look at her. His gaze stayed on me. “Therynne vanished. Her rooms were emptied. Her books gone. Tell me what you know.”
Something bright flickered through the fog in my skull.
Therynne escaped. The thought should have made me feel triumphant. Victorious. Clever. Instead it made my eyes sting with something dangerously close to relief.
Thank the ancestors.
Ciaran’s light flared again, brighter, hotter, as if my silence offended him.
And I looked at him, really looked, past the crown, past the gold threaded through his hair like a blessing, past the way he filled space the way fire filled air. I looked at the things I’d refused to name when naming them would have made me unsafe.
He had always called it generosity.
A king who gave women opportunity.
A king who offered protection.
A king who gathered the discarded and turned them into royalty.
It had sounded so beautiful when people said it out loud.
Useful even.
But now, on the stone floor of a dungeon, with my wrists chained and my bones still screaming from Marisella’s hands, the truth settled into place with sickening clarity.
Ciaran didn’t pick wives.
He picked assets.
He dressed it up like salvation and called it privilege, because men like him always needed a story that made them look like heroes instead of what they were.
Therynne wasn’t married because he admired her mind.
He married her because she was brilliant, and brilliance was leverage. Access. Strategy. A library he could lock in his palace and call it devotion.
He didn’t give her the right to study.
He used study as the excuse.
A gilded cage with ink and parchment instead of bars, and a ring meant to make sure she never belonged to anyone but him.
Maris wasn’t married because he wanted her softness, her empathy, her healing hands.
He married her because her family’s bloodline carried vitality like a birthright. Because a healer at his side meant he could bleed in battle and rise again. It meant he could push his body harder, his soldiers harder, his wars longer.
He didn’t want a wife.
He wanted vitality on tap.
Vivienne was a weapon too, just wrapped in silk. Telekinesis disguised as seduction. A former courtesan the world would always underestimate until it was already too late.
Lyra was a blade he wore openly. His warlord’s daughter. His shield. His threat. His reminder to everyone that his marriage bed was also a battlefield.
Selene was faith, packaged and obedient, a priestess he could point at the people like proof the gods favored him.
Isolde was the quiet one, the foreign one, the mystery he’d collected like a prize, thinking her silence meant compliance.
He hadn’t saved any of them.
He’d acquired them.
I’d thought Ciaran was an ally.
But I was learning, that he was just someone who pretended to rescue women by calling marriage a privilege when really it shackled them. Not with chains you could see, but with obligation, expectation, possession.
I swallowed, forcing my face into something blank.
“I know only what you’ve just told me,” I said hoarsely. “She’s gone.”
Lyra stepped forward, knife glinting. “You’re lying.”
I lifted my eyes to her, dead tired. “Lyra, I can barely lift my head. Do you honestly think I orchestrated a scholarly disappearance from a dungeon cell?”
Lyra’s smile was vicious. “I think you ruin everything you touch.”
“That makes two of us,” I said.
Ciaran’s light flared.
He took one step into the cell, and the air shifted around him, making my skin prickle even through the cold.
“Was she working with him too?” he demanded suddenly, voice cracking. Not in weakness, but in something fractured. “Was Therynne working with Valen?”
I understood the shape of his fear.
This wasn’t just rage anymore.
This was a king realizing his own house had started to rot.