Chapter 34 #2
“You were nothing,” Rhydian said. “A footnote. A name they would have forgotten even if you lived to be old.” I swallowed hard, forcing air into my lungs like it was something I still had a right to take.
“And that’s why you don’t deserve this,” he finished, brutal and certain.
“No one should die for a war they were never allowed to understand.”
Silence stretched between us, taut as wire.
“There should have been a simpler life for you,” Rhydian said, and for the first time, something almost human flickered through his expression, gone as quickly as it appeared. “Something small. Something safe. Something forgettable.”
My hands curled at my sides. “Safe,” I repeated, like it was a myth. Rhydian didn’t flinch at the sarcasm. He deserved it. He knew he did. “In another life,” he said, “I would have given that to you.”
My breath caught. “You promised me,” I whispered. “I remember that much.”
His gaze held mine, unwavering.
“I know,” he said. “Perhaps there was a version of me that wanted to give you that escape.”
I laughed. “Then why aren’t you doing it now?”
This was the part where men always found the excuse. Because this was the part where loyalty became holy and cruelty became necessary.
Rhydian’s voice turned quieter, almost reverent in its coldness.
“Because there are greater goods at play.”
Betrayal was seldom a collision; often, it was an articulate quiet.
It fell from the mouth of a man who held your gaze and promised your unraveling, speaking your destruction in the very same breath he used to issue orders—as if your life were nothing more than ink waiting to be scraped from his ledger.
I stared at him, and my voice went quieter, steadier.
“Did you know,” I asked, “when you arrived in Ashenveil, that you were still going to deliver me to her?”
Rhydian’s jaw flexed.
“Yes,” he said.
I laughed, soft and cracked, because it was either that or I was going to scream.
“Then why be gentle at all?” I asked. “Why touch me like I was something worth saving?”
“With you,” he said slowly, “gentleness was not kindness. It was strategy.”
I tilted my head.
“Go on,” I murmured.
Rhydian didn’t look away.
“You think cruelty is the only weapon,” he said. “You think if someone hurts you, that is the only way they can control you. That is why you keep confusing pain with truth.”
My throat tightened.
“And what is gentleness?” I asked.
Rhydian’s voice went lower, the torchlight carving his face into hard lines.“Gentleness is a leash one doesn’t feel until they’ve already accepted it,” he said. “It is how you keep someone from biting. How you make them stop fighting long enough to walk them into a blade.”
The air felt cold enough to crack.
I stared at him.
“That is disgusting,” I whispered.
“Yes,” Rhydian replied, calm as stone. “It is.”
I pulled in a slow breath and asked the question that had been sitting in my chest like a live coal.
“Tell me about the queen,” I said. My voice didn’t shake, which felt like its own kind of miracle. “Tell me what she is to you.”
I watched his face, the way he held himself like a man built out of duty and denial, and I let the bitter humor curl in my mouth because it was either that or scream.
“She made a spectacle of it,” I went on. “Marking her territory like I was a trespasser who wandered too close to her favorite weapon.” My eyes narrowed. “Is that the root of your loyalty, Rhydian? Fear? Devotion? Habit?”
I swallowed, forcing the next words out even though they tasted like rust.
“Do you love her?”
The silence that followed was heavy enough to bruise.
“Do you love her enough,” I asked, “to take a handmaiden you knew didn’t stand a chance in this world, warm her in your bed, and then drag her to your queen like an offering?
” I tilted my head. “Or was I just convenient?” I murmured.
“A brief illusion of control before you went back to the woman who actually holds your leash?”
For the first time since he arrived, Rhydian hesitated. It was not much. Barely a pause.
But it was there.
His eyes went distant, like he was looking at something that wasn’t in this corridor.
“I was eighteen,” he said.
I waited.
Rhydian’s voice stayed steady, but the words felt older than his years.
“I had nothing,” he continued. “No name that mattered. No power. No protection. I was skilled, yes, and hungry for purpose, but hunger makes you reckless. It makes you easy to catch.”
My fingers curled.
“And she caught you,” I said.
His mouth tightened.
“She saw me,” he said. “Not the way people say that to make love sound romantic. She saw me the way a queen sees a blade on a table. The way she sees something useful and decides it belongs to her.”
I held his gaze.
“Did you want her?” I asked.
Rhydian’s answer came without hesitation.
“I wanted to live,” he said.
The bluntness of it stole the air from my lungs.
“I didn’t love her. I understood survival. I understood that her attention was the difference between being nothing and becoming someone. So I let her take what she wanted.”
He paused, and the silence that followed felt heavier than the chains on my wrists.
“And now?” I asked.
“When she calls for me,” he said, “I go.”
My throat tightened.
“When she touches me,” he continued, “I do not flinch. I do not refuse. I do not pretend I have the right to be anything other than what she decided I am.”
His eyes held mine, unblinking.
“I have served her since I was eighteen,” he said. “I built my body into a weapon for her. I built my mind into a cage that holds every emotion she does not want me to have. I built my loyalty into a religion because it was the only thing that kept me alive.”
My breath left me in a slow, shaking exhale.
“And me?” I asked. “What was I supposed to be in that religion?”
Rhydian’s lips pressed together.
“You were blasphemy,” he said.
His voice stayed steady, but there was something faintly raw beneath it now, like his truth was scraping him too.
“I wanted a body that did not own me. I wanted the illusion of a choice. I wanted to feel like a man, not a weapon kept on a leash. Pathetic, isn’t it?
I broke you because I wanted to forget, for one night, that my life belongs to her.
That my loyalty is not a vow, it is a chain.
The queen saw me when I was eighteen, and she has never stopped seeing me since.
She is not love. She is gravity. She is power with a pulse.
She is the kind of woman who does not ask, because she does not have to.
And I have been orbiting her ever since, because surviving Icespire requires devotion, even when devotion is just fear with better posture.
So yes, you were someone who did not hold my life in your hands, and for a moment, I wanted to know what that felt like.
I wanted to take instead of be taken. I wanted to touch something that did not come with consequences carved into law.
And then I was reminded that everything in this kingdom comes with consequences, especially you.
“You are going to die tomorrow, and it will not be poetic, and it will not be fair, and you will not be remembered as anything except a cautionary tale they tell the servants to keep them obedient. That is what I mean when I say you do not deserve it. You deserved something simple. You deserved a small life. Warm bread. A quiet room. A name you did not have to steal to be allowed to exist. And if I were capable of love, if there were any part of me that still knew how to reach for something clean, I think I might have loved you. But I am not. I am loyal because I have to be. I am alive because I learned early what it costs to disobey her. And you, Elara, were never going to survive a world built by people like us.”
The torch crackled.
I leaned forward slightly, chains clinking softly. “Ancestors,” I murmured. “You really are the worst kind of man.”
I stared at him and felt something ancient in me settle into place, something colder than fear.
He spoke of chains like they were holy, like captivity could become character if you wore it long enough, and I realized that was the lie men like him survived on.
That if they were obedient enough, useful enough, emptied enough, the cage would start to feel like a home.
He looked at me and told me I had deserved warmth, simplicity, a quiet life, as if he were offering mercy instead of spitting on everything I had clawed my way through.
As if being small would have saved me. As if my suffering was not the predictable outcome of a world built to reward predators and punish the prey for bleeding.
And I wanted to laugh, I really did, because it was almost poetic in its cruelty that he could stand there and confess he broke me for the illusion of choice while insisting I never had one.
Rhydian’s expression tightened.
He turned toward the door, hand closing around the latch.
Before he left, he spoke without looking back. “I do hope your death is painless, Elara.”
I felt my defiance rise, tired and stubborn and ugly as a bruise that refused to fade.
If I was going to die tomorrow, it would not be as his lesson.
It would not be as the queen’s warning. It would not be as a servant’s cautionary tale whispered in corridors.
If the gods were cruel enough to let this be my ending, then I would make it mean something they hadn’t planned.
I would make it inconvenient. I would make it remembered.
And somewhere beneath the frost and fury, beneath the ache of hearing I might have loved you like it was a kindness instead of a blade, I understood the final, simplest truth of betrayal.
It wasn’t the act. It was the way they looked you in the eye afterward and expected you to be grateful they admitted it.