Chapter 4
CHAPTER FOUR
Nakir Hasan.
The leader of the rebellion meant to overthrow the queen. Her mother’s enemy, which should make him her enemy.
He sighed as he stood over the desk, shuffling some of his papers around before turning to her. Alethea wasn’t bound in any way—she could take off, but the encampment was massive, not to mention crawling with his soldiers, and she knew she would never escape.
“Don’t worry, Princess,” he told her, turning and leaning back against the desk with crossed arms. “I do not plan to keep you long. I just need enough time to move my people far, far away before you return to your castle.”
Alethea gritted her teeth. She hated the way he said “princess,” like an insult. “Don’t call me that,” she finally said.
He stopped what he was doing, resting his arms on the edge of the desk. “Don’t call you what? Princess?” he asked, his tone softening. “Isn’t that what you are?”
She couldn’t argue with his point, but it still grated on her, especially the way he said it. “My name is Alethea.” She had little agency in this situation—in her entire life—but this felt like something she could control.
Something flashed behind Nakir’s eyes. Amusement? She bet he found this whole thing funny.
“Alethea it is. Would you care for something to eat?”
She shook her head.
“A drink, perhaps?” He gestured to the bedside table just behind her, upon which sat a decanter of amber liquid.
“No, thank you.” She wasn’t interested in being poisoned or drugged.
“Very well. Take a seat. I have a few questions.”
The only place for her to sit was on a small wooden stool—a stark contrast to the ironwood chair that had confined Goran Arranil in the castle dungeons. She lowered herself onto it slowly, wondering if this was how he had felt in those final moments before everything unraveled.
She did as he asked, taking the seat offered. No restraints, no threats. She silently wondered if this was some kind of trick, giving her the illusion of freedom so she would cooperate. There were many kinds of interrogation tactics... Perhaps this was one of them.
“I hear you were one of the last people to speak to Goran Arranil,” Nakir began. The way his voice thickened led Alethea to believe he’d been close to the late Great Lord, and the guilt for her role in his death settled even further.
She turned away and cleared her throat, desperately wishing she could dissolve into the floor rather than have this conversation. “I-I—” she stammered, her voice barely above a whisper. “It’s complicated.”
Her heart raced with the implications of how he’d even come to possess that knowledge. The only ones who knew about her exchange with Goran were the minister and a handful of guards.
“I’m listening,” Nakir said calmly, unruffled as he poured himself a small glass of amber liquid from his bedside table. He sipped at it lightly, his eyes never leaving her face.
Something about the stillness of him made it impossible to look away.
“I saw him when...” She searched for the words to speak on the subject without activating her curse.
Alethea could not lie—a fatal flaw in her mother’s eyes.
She had learned to speak in vague half-truths so she wouldn’t accidentally betray her queen with knowledge she shouldn’t have, but in this moment, it was proving a difficult feat. “When he was convicted of treason.”
“Treason.” Nakir spat the word out like poison, and Alethea tried not to flinch. “Treason is dictated by the whim of the ruling sovereign. What happened to my parents was also treason,” he continued, his words heavy with bitterness.
She remained silent, his accusations landing heavily in her core.
Nakir took another sip of his drink, still trained on her. “How did they do it?” he asked over the rim of his glass. “The execution.”
“Beheading,” she told him, barely above a whisper.
“Did you see it?”
She shook her head, avoiding his probing stare. “I wasn’t there.”
“Why not?” His question was sharp, laced with an intensity that caught her off-guard. Why did he care?
She chewed the inside of her lip, her heart racing. “I was... unwell.”
“But it was a court-attended event, as is every execution.”
She failed to see the point in his line of questioning, her confusion evident in her furrowed brow. This was so different from how the Crimson Queen ran an interrogation. She scrambled to keep her wits about her.
“Yes.”
Nakir watched her intently behind a cool, calm mask. “What does your mother know about our plans?”
The question startled Alethea, and she quickly searched for a way to answer it without committing treason herself—a task that seemed impossible given the circumstances.
The only option she had was silence. Answering questions about Goran Arranil was one thing, but any more and she ran a dire risk of exposing her mother’s secrets—or her own.
The silence stretched unbearably. She was dimly aware of muffled activity from the camp outside, murmured conversations, the faint crackling of fires burning into the night, but she didn’t dare look up.
Instead, she fixed her gaze firmly on a spot of carpet beside Nakir’s leather boot, as if that small patch of woven threads was the only safe place left in the world.
When the silence dragged on and it became clear she wasn’t going to fill it, he only gave a small, indifferent shrug and lifted the glass to his lips, the sip slow enough to feel intentional.
“Very well,” he murmured at last, his tone light on the surface but threaded with a note she couldn’t quite decipher.
Alethea frowned, which seemed to amuse him further.
“Something troubling you?” he finally asked.
Her brows knit tighter. This wasn’t how any of this was supposed to go. “You aren’t going to... keep asking me what I know? F-force me to answer your questions?”
He remained maddeningly calm, his cool demeanor disarming. “I’ve no interest in brutalizing an innocent young woman.”
But Alethea was hardly innocent. She was the reason Goran was dead; the reason Philip Rodion was rotting in those dungeons; the reason her father—
“But I know things,” she said, confusion pulling her mouth into a hard line.
“I’m certain you do.” Nakir’s smirk deepened as he regarded her over the rim of his cup, something glinting in his eyes that unsettled her further.
“Aren’t I... your enemy?”
Enemy. Funny, how the word rang hollow when she couldn’t stop tracking the glass at his lips or the thoughts that came unbidden with every swallow.
“Are you?” His tone didn’t waver.
She faltered, her confusion raw and fully on display. “Why aren’t you... interrogating me?”
Wasn’t that what men like him did? Wasn’t that what she deserved? He clearly knew about her involvement in Goran’s execution—why wouldn’t he also blame her for his fate?
“You mean torture? If you’re into that kind of thing, darling, all you have to do is ask.” The sarcasm curled off his tongue as a twisted smile tugged at his lips.
Alethea wished the ground would swallow her whole. Heat shot through her, mortification burning all the way to her toes. “No!” she cried, shaking her head. “No, I just...” Her voice thinned to nothing, embarrassment choking the rest.
Anger flashed across his face, sharp enough that she wondered whether he was finally about to snap and reveal the monster she assumed him to be.
His grip tightened around the glass, knuckles whitening.
“Thought I’d carve up a helpless princess who wasn’t even born when my parents were overthrown?
” His mask slid neatly back into place, that same smirk tugging at his mouth again.
“My reputation does precede me, doesn’t it?
You’ll have to keep this one between us.
” His tone was laced with dark humor, though there was an underlying warning in his words.
Alethea started to unravel in her confusion, anxiety gripping her chest. How could he stand there, unruffled, with someone like her dropped at his feet? After every interrogation Alethea had been forced to take part in, this felt wrong.
It felt like more mercy than she deserved.
“You don’t understand...”
Nakir got down on one knee in front of her, bringing their eyes level.
The movement sent her pulse skittering. He was close—too close—his presence a heat she could feel, as if the space between them had become charged.
She could reach out and touch his face if she dared, and the awareness of that possibility tightened something low in her stomach.
When he spoke again, his voice was a calm, intimate murmur, each syllable brushing along her nerves. “What don’t I understand, Alethea?”
Tension coiled tight in her chest, her palms damp as she clutched her dress, pinned in place by his gaze. For several long seconds, she wasn’t sure what to say. But then, as they often did, the words tumbled out of her.
“You were betrayed.” Her eyes glowed a faint white, and her vision blurred around the edges, but she could still see Nakir’s face in perfect detail.
That was unusual—her most powerful visions usually made her sight turn completely white.
“Goran Arranil shared his plans with another, a shadowed figure in the dark, who fed him whispered promises of a better world.” Her head throbbed as the prophecy spilled from her, each word weighted with destiny.
“He did it for you, the promised son of the promised daughter, who bears the mark of Aeshma’s curse.
He didn’t know he was taking part in his own undoing. ”
She somehow reined herself in, taking a steadying breath. She waited for the bile to rise as it normally did. Waited for the world to tilt, or for darkness to close in. But nothing came. She felt oddly steady, as if releasing the vision had anchored her more firmly in the present.
She hadn’t forced it; the vision had come unbidden. She couldn’t remember the last time that had happened, aside from the vision that had driven her to flee the castle in the first place.