45. Chapter 45
ERYNDOR
She left me in the stairwell.
The door clanged. The echo traveled up the stone shaft and came back changed—thinner, used up.
My legs gave first. Then my arms. I sat on the step where she'd stood and let the shaking have me because there was no one left to perform for.
An hour. The Wraith Root had bought her an hour of silence, and I'd paid for every second of it in the currency my body understood best. Pain.
The tether had blazed with it the whole time—shredding through my marrow in devastating waves.
I'd tracked her by following the worst of it.
Down corridors. Through the service wing.
Into the loading dock where a spear was waiting to punch through linen and rib and the only person she'd ever trusted completely.
The aftershocks wouldn't stop. My hands opened and closed against my knees, a spasm I couldn't override. Fingers that had gripped a cart wheel. That had dragged her into the light and called her guest in a voice borrowed from the King himself.
She'd chosen numbness.
She'd chugged Wraith Root down like medicine, and the thing she was medicating against was me. My awareness. My presence in her chest. The hum that said I'm here, I'm here, I'm here every waking moment.
She'd swallowed a vial to make it stop.
I leaned against the cold stone and counted my breathing the way the trainers had taught me. Four in. Hold. Four out. The rhythm of a body returning itself to baseline, and baseline was all I had left because everything above it belonged to her now and she didn't want it.
The blood on my lip had dried. I tongued the split—lower left, where I'd bitten through during the worst of the tether's recoil. My hands were still trembling.
I made them stop.
Then I stood. My legs held, barely. The corridor stretched ahead of me, torchlit and empty. By the time I reached my chambers, my hand was convulsing hard enough that it took me two tries to turn the lock.
The basin water was tepid. I cupped it against my face and watched the pink run off my chin—blood thinned to nothing, swirling down the drain.
My reflection stared back from the water's surface.
Pallid skin. Hollowed sockets. The architecture of a face built for endurance, stripped down to its studs.
Tomorrow I would stand on a dais beside a female I did not love and pour my Soulmark into a performance the whole kingdom would witness.
The golden thread would unspool between my hands and Vivienne's, and the crowd would weep, and the Veil would mend in a neat circle around us, and every person in that square would believe the prince had come home.
Amaria would be in the crowd. Grey dress. Suppressor at her back.
Watching.
And she'd see the thread obey Vivienne's Mark the way it had never obeyed hers—smooth and pliant, no snarl, no hunger, no terrifying undertow. Proof that the Soulbinder worked best when it wasn't trying to devour its other half.
The basin water settled. My reflection sharpened.
My father's jaw. My father's eyes. The same grey that had stared down generals and signed execution orders and never once looked away from the cost.
If she had made it past the walls tonight, my father wouldn't have sent guards to chase her. He would have simply sent a blade to the eastern tower. To a cell with no number, to slit the throat of a male with her eyes, her jaw, and her stubborn refusal to die.
She thought she was running from a cage. She didn't know she was leaving behind leverage. She didn't know her brother was breathing on borrowed time, and the only thing buying him tomorrow's sunrise was my obedience.
I straightened. Smoothed my collar. Watched my expression flatten into something acceptable.
My mother had taught me her battle braid. My father had taught me to wear his face. Both lessons were acts of love, delivered by people who believed they were preparing me for a world that would demand everything and return nothing.
They were right.
In twelve hours, I would heal the land and break the girl and keep a boy alive whose name I couldn't say aloud because the walls had ears and the King had a Truthshard and the only safe place for a secret that size was the cage behind my teeth.
Twelve hours.
I lay back. Closed my eyes. Did not sleep.