Chapter 13 #3
The question hits badly because I haven’t forgotten, and guilt is already gnawing at me, but would I let him die?
The answer is no and yes and impossible all at once.
I know what it is to have the person you love held in another’s hands.
I know what it is to go half-mad under the thought of what they might be suffering.
I know exactly how easy it would be to become ugly in that fear.
But Jamie is twelve. He’s also not currency.
“You don’t get to make that call,” I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I expect. “Not with someone else’s child.”
“He is not your child either.”
“He is under our protection,” Varek says.
Aelith ignores him. “You would choose one life over another because relinquishing the younger offends you more?”
“Don’t do that,” I snap. “Don’t twist this into arithmetic because you can’t stand the answer.”
His nostrils flare. Every line of him has gone taut and dangerous, though whether he has enough blood left to act on any of it is another matter.
“I would burn down the world for Dawson,” he says.
The confession tears out of him with enough force to leave a mark.
It’s not princely selfishness, arrogance, or even strategy.
Love, in its ugliest, most desperate shape.
For one terrible second, I understand him too well. That understanding blooms like a bruise.
While it doesn’t excuse anything, not remotely, Aelith can be frantic and in love and still dead wrong. Jamie can remain a child who deserves better than to be bartered by frightened adults. Both things can exist at once, and the room is thick with the strain of holding them together.
Across from me, Aelith’s chest rises and falls too fast, the effort pulling at the fresh stitching in his side. Iris makes a vicious sound and shoves him back down onto the table with enough force to remind everyone she may not outrank the prince, but she outranks his right to bleed on her floor.
“Lie down,” she snaps. “You can be unhinged horizontally.”
For one heartbeat, absurdity almost cracks the room open.
Almost.
Then Kael steps forward.
Until now, he’s held himself in a kind of rigid stillness that only looks calm from a distance.
Up close, every line of him is strained.
There are old loyalties in this room, old reflexes, old habits trained into bone.
He was Aelith’s guard once. Maybe part of him always will be.
Another part belongs elsewhere now, bound up in Sonny and rebellion and choices he made one by one until they became a life.
“Enough,” Kael says.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to.
Aelith turns his head, all that fury narrowing at once into a single line. “You do not command me.”
“No,” Kael replies. “But I remember the male you were before the palace taught you to mistake possession for love.”
The words hit like a slap. Aelith actually flinches. Not outwardly enough for anyone unfamiliar to notice, maybe, but I see it, and so does Sonny, whose expression shifts from pure outrage to something grimmer.
Kael plants his hands on the edge of the table and leans in just enough to make the distance between them unbearable.
“You do not hand children to monsters,” he says. “You do not offer them up because you are afraid.”
Aelith bares his teeth. “I am beyond afraid.”
“Yes,” Kael says. “I can see that. And still, you do not do it.”
The room holds still around them.
I’ve known Kael mostly as capable, reserved, occasionally exasperated in the face of Sonny being Sonny. This is different. This is the shape of command under grief, the hard edge of a male who has seen too much of the world and decided there will be lines, damn the cost.
“She has Dawson,” Aelith says, and for the first time there’s no bite left in the sentence. It comes out hoarse, almost wrecked. “If we do nothing—”
“We will not do nothing,” Varek says.
Everything in the room shifts towards him.
He’s let the argument run just long enough to expose all its moving parts. Now he steps into the centre of it with that terrible, infuriating calm that makes everyone else seem louder by comparison.
“No child leaves this settlement for the Crown,” he says. “Not for threat. Not for negotiation. Not for exchange.”
Aelith laughs once, a ruined sound. “Then you condemn him.”
Varek’s gaze does not move. “No,” he says. “I refuse her terms.”
There’s a difference, and he lays it between them like a blade.
Aelith closes his eye. For a second, he looks every one of his years and none of them at all. Not prince. Not political asset. Just a male on a medical table, trying not to drown in the image of someone he can’t reach.
“We may not have much time,” Shanae says quietly. “If she let him come back here, she wants us unsettled. Pressured. Split.”
“She succeeded,” Sonny mutters.
“No,” Varek says. “She revealed what her next move looks like.”
Aelith opens his eye again. “You think this is a game board.”
Varek’s expression shifts just enough for me to feel the heat of it through the bond. “I think your mate remains alive because she wants leverage,” he says. “That leverage weakens if she kills him.”
“She hurts what she owns.”
The sentence comes out flat, final, and so loaded with personal history that the room goes quiet all over again.
Varek doesn’t contradict him. He doesn’t waste time pretending certainty he doesn’t have. “Yes,” he says. “Which is why panic serves her.”
Aelith stares at him. “You ask for composure from a male whose mate is in her hands.”
“I ask for reason,” Varek says. “You may keep your fear. It is earned.”
That hits hard enough that even Aelith has no immediate answer.
Near the doorway, one of the younger fighters shifts and bumps a shoulder into the frame. The little noise breaks the spell just enough for the room to breathe again. Iris, perhaps deciding she has tolerated enough drama for one afternoon, starts wrapping Aelith’s side with ruthless efficiency.
“What exactly did the queen say?” I ask.
Every eye in the room flicks to me.
Aelith’s gaze narrows. “You want the phrasing?”
“I want the truth.”
His molars grind. For a second I think he might refuse out of sheer bloody-mindedness. Then he sags back against the table and lets out a breath.
“She said the last exchange was so successful, perhaps we should repeat it with a more useful child.”
The line is so viciously elegant, it turns my stomach.
Sarcasm flares through me, hot and ugly. Last exchange. Right. Last time she traded one living person for another and then turned the knife after the fact anyway. I still have the memory of her grip on my throat, of waking in pain she curated for someone else’s benefit. Successful, my arse.
“She named Jamie specifically,” Aelith continues, voice roughening. “She said the boy has become an object of scholarly interest. She said Dawson would remain comfortable for as long as I remained sensible.”
Sonny swears in a way that sounds almost creative.
“She sent you back to make us do the work for her,” Shanae says.
“Yes.”
“And you came.”
At that, Aelith turns his head and pins her with a look full of exhausted contempt. “Wouldn’t you?”
No one answers that because the real answer is maybe.
Maybe every one of us would do terrible, indefensible things at the edge of losing the person we love.
Maybe that’s what makes the edge so dangerous.
The room hums with all the things not said aloud, and I’m suddenly, acutely aware of Varek at my back—not touching, not crowding, simply there, his presence a live wire through the bond.
I would tear holes in the world for him.
The thought arrives fully formed and is swallowed into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.
Christ.
“Jamie stays hidden,” Varek says, cutting cleanly through whatever was about to bloom in everyone else’s head. “Effective immediately. No movement beyond inner settlement limits. Additional watches on all external approaches. No unscreened access.”
Shanae nods once and turns to the fighters in the hall.
Orders start moving from her mouth to their feet almost before the final word leaves it.
In the corner, Sonny angles himself towards Kael with obvious intent, and after one tense second, Kael shifts just enough to let his shoulder brush Sonny’s once.
The contact is slight. The meaning in it isn’t.
Aelith watches all of this and says, “You’re already planning around me.”
Varek’s expression doesn’t change. “Yes.”
“Do you assume I will act without sanction?”
“Yes.”
I almost laugh because there’s no room in that answer for softness and no lie in it either.
The prince bares his teeth again, but the fury can’t hold. Exhaustion and pain drag at it from beneath, and beneath that is fear, great and ugly and bright.
“If you do not move quickly,” he says, quieter now, “she will break him.”
The room takes that in, and nobody argues. Nobody pretends the queen is incapable of it. I think that may be the single thing every person in this settlement agrees on.
Varek inclines his head once. “Then we move quickly.”
The promise in it steadies the room for a fraction, enough for breath to return, enough for planning to begin where panic nearly took root.
Aelith closes his eye again. “Find another way,” he says, but now it sounds less like a challenge and more like a plea dragged over broken glass.
Varek holds his gaze for a beat. “We will.”
For the first time since the prince arrived, I think he believes it. Not fully. Not enough to ease what has carved itself into him over the last however many hours. But enough that some final thread of resistance slips.
Iris notices first. “Oh no,” she says. “Absolutely not. He does not get to collapse now.”
Aelith ignores her with all the remaining arrogance in his body and passes out cold.
That, more than anything else, breaks the room out of its suspended state.
Orders begin flying properly then. Kael moves to one side to give Iris space but stays close enough that his leaving is clearly not voluntary.
Shanae dispatches two runners to secure the inner routes and another to warn Jack and Solan without scaring Jamie into bolting.
Sonny catches my eye across the room and jerks his chin towards the corridor, silently asking whether I’m with him.
Before I can answer, Varek turns.
The moment his attention turns fully on me, the rest of the room dulls at the edges.
“You are armed?” he asks.
It’s the wrong question. He knows I can fight. He knows I’m useful. What sits under the words is different. Are you staying where I can find you? Are you about to do anything stupid? Are you whole enough that I can look away for one minute without tearing holes in the floor?
“I can be,” I say.
His gaze skims me once, taking in more than I know how to name. What shivers through the bond isn’t fear exactly, but there’s a vigilance so strong it almost counts.
“Get armed,” he says. “Then remain with Sonny or Shanae until we know whether this was a solitary breach.”
“And if it wasn’t?”
His face stills. “Then we defend the settlement.”
Simple as that.
No drama. No heroic flourish. No promise they will all survive.
Just the truth.
Around us, the room has become motion. Aelith lies unconscious on the table, royal and ruined and no less dangerous for being temporarily still.
Somewhere deeper in Dathanor, Jamie is either already asking too many questions or pretending he isn’t afraid.
Dawson is in the palace, breathing queen-owned air while all of us stand in a stolen pocket of peace, pretending time can be bullied into stopping.
It can’t, but maybe it can be used.
I nod once. “Right.”
Varek catches my wrist before I can turn away. The touch is brief—barely there. Still, it goes straight through me. “Pax.”
The way he says my name under all this noise, all this tension, all this risk, almost undoes me. “Yes?”
His thumb presses once against the pulse point inside my wrist. “Stay alive.”
A ridiculous answer rises first. As if I have other plans. As if I would dare die after all this and make him impossible to live with.
What comes out is quieter. “You too.”
For one second, his gaze warms. It’s gone almost before I can hold it for a second, folded back into command, into readiness, into the commander everyone else needs.
Then he lets me go.
By the time I step into the corridor with Sonny at my shoulder and the alarm still echoing in my bones, I know three things with perfect clarity.
Aelith came alone because love has made him reckless.
The queen wants Jamie badly enough to gamble.
And whatever happens next, this settlement has just run out of time to pretend the war is only still approaching.
It’s here.