Chapter 14
Kieran
Her taste was still in my mouth.
Copper, heat, want. A poison that didn’t weaken me but set fire in every vein.
Her blood coiled inside me, wild and alive, a brand I couldn’t spit out.
I’d left her because I had to—because staying would have burned us both to ash—but the memory of her curled in my bed, scar bare, wrapped in nothing but sheets haunted every step I took.
I hadn’t slept. Not really.
After the table had been cleared, after the shards were swept from the stone, after I’d set food on the table like some pathetic offering—I still couldn’t leave it there.
While she bathed, I made myself useful. While she ate, I stayed away.
But when the chamber quieted and the steam had faded, I came back.
I lay beside her long enough to hear her breathing slow, to see the tension bleed from her brow.
Long enough to pretend she was safe because I was near.
But I didn’t close my eyes. I couldn’t. Every time the scar at her throat caught the lamplight, every time her silence hummed like a tether, I knew staying was a cruelty. So when her sleep deepened, I rose.
The couch in the corner held me for the rest of the night but not sleep.
Only fits. Half-dozes shattered with every sound, every imagined falter in her breath.
My body begged for rest, but the taste of her blood burned too hot in my veins.
It was a drum in my chest, steady, merciless, daring me to forget her for even a moment.
And now the lack of rest amplified everything—the ledger’s words, the stink of ink and bloodwine, the hollow cadence of names read like debts. It made me dangerous in ways linen and titles couldn’t soften.
The chamber smelled of bodies and worry.
Long oak tables stacked like pews, faces set like stone, each pair of eyes a small tribunal.
The Hunt’s ledger lay open where the clerk had left it, a thin river of names and short, bureaucratic notes: who’d come, who’d bled, who’d lost their lives to the game.
Solis had been right: they loved lists. They loved the cadence of accounting for death as if it were a tidy debt. The clerk in the center of the room read with a precise, almost bored cadence that made the whole thing feel like a mundane business meeting rather than the tallying of lives.
“House Daren—Lord Mavren, pierced through the throat by his companion’s hand. House Hollen—two men, snapped necks, possibly a misstep near the bramble line. The Baron of Gesset—fall from a bank: shattered skull.” The clerk’s voice flattened the horror, reducing deaths to inked lines.
They swallowed the names of the fallen like a Sunday roast, with practiced ease, lacking even a hint of guilt.
I kept the prince’s mask in place, but each entry was a pin struck into the map I’d thought I knew. Mavren—dismissed as a drunk, never a threat. Hollen’s boys—green hands who thought the Hunt a boast. Gesset—soft and careless. All of them dead by design.
The ledger did not say how many of the killed had been used as pawns. It did not say “compelled.” It did not say hands turned on companions under orders. It never wrote the inside work. Nadia’s warning thudded in my skull: inside. At the center.
A line in the clerk’s list caught my eye and tightened something in my gut: “Ravik—mutilated, throat and side.” “Jolan—mutilated, crushed sternum.”
They’d been cataloged like any other casualty, but I remembered them clearly.
Ravik had lunged for me at the tree line, a knife, bright and greedy; I’d ended him with a clean twist that left blood and nothing poetic.
Jolan had come for Merrit—he’d meant to tear her throat open—and I’d snapped his neck between a trunk and my elbow before he could scream her name.
Those two were not innocent. They were the tools who'd been shaped and sent. I had put an end to them before they completed what they’d been paid to do. I had not been the passive spectator the ledger implied; I had been the executioner’s axe.
The clerk went on: “Companion Hest—throat torn, probable ambush. Solnik—blunt force to skull, accidental fall indicated.” He flipped pages like a surgeon turning charts. The glib cadence made violence an administrative task. A man in the gallery laughed, too loud, brittle as bone.
Tobias lifted a finger to point at a map. “Most casualties fell in the Southeast grove. That suggests—”
“—a failed pincer,” Solis finished, grin wolfish but the steel under it real. “Or someone meant to leave a message.”
“The message,” I said, and the chamber stilled because a prince’s voice had weight whether I wanted it to or not.
I kept my eyes on the ledger as if it were the only thing I cared for, then raised them until the room could only meet my gaze.
“Whoever did this knows how to reach into places we thought safe. They corroded the inside. That changes the game.”
They looked away from the ledger then and toward me, hungry for the ritual of vows and investigations. They wanted show. They wanted a prince who performed grief and promised retribution in tidy phrases. Fine. I would give them performance.
I’d give them teeth, too.
A lord at the back, fat with certainty and the stink of bloodwine, let his words drop like stones into still water. “You drag a Divide whore into the Hunt and wonder why the forest bleeds? Standards rot when princes scrape the gutter for their playthings.”
It wasn’t the first insult, not the worst, but it chose to wear its venom loud in my presence.
I rose slowly and closed the distance in three silent strides.
My hand came up, and the man’s jaw folded under the force.
A mouthful of blood erupted, hot and sudden as teeth clattered across the marble, one popping free like a rotten stone.
He slid to the floor, dazed, eyes blown wide in a stunned, insipid question he already knew the answer to.
And I didn’t stop. My fists fell, hard and precise at first, then with a growing, controlled fury that refused to let me go.
Bone gave, cartilage collapsed, his nose crumpled into a wet smear.
I kept going until his face was a ruin—cheeks mashed, mouth a ragged hole, a grotesque, pulpy shape on the floor that barely passed for a man.
The chamber went deathly quiet, every eye fixed on the wreckage at my feet.
That, for some, should have been the end. A private lesson against public mockery.
But other mouths opened. A baron, heftier from long dinners and the luxury of arrogance, leaned forward and spoke with the confidence of someone who’d never had a hand come down in anger. “A bold performance, Prince. If you break men for a word about your whore, how long before you break a house?”
He had the wrong sort of bravado for the moment.
I moved with cold precision. My dagger slid free from my belt with a whisper, and I stepped in.
The blade found the curve of his gut as if it were a path I’d walked a hundred times; steel sank home to the hilt.
He made a sound like a struck animal, eyes bulging, color draining from his face in a quick tide.
For the briefest second, he stared at me as if the world had split and I was its new, terrible truth. Then he crumpled to one knee, hands clawing at the hilt at his middle. Blood wetted his palm, hot and bright, and he teetered—a man astonished to discover his own mortality.
The chamber folded inward, somewhere between outrage and relieved curiosity—the way crowds reacted when a performance became real.
“Remember this,” I thundered, loud enough to echo off the walls. “You want to whisper about me, fine. But you put her name in your mouth again, and I’ll carve it out with your tongue still attached.”
Silence crashed through them all, solid and absolute.
Solis let out a short, savage chuckle that cut the tension like a knife. “Well done, Your Majesty. I’ve always liked carnage with purpose.” His grin was a scar splitting wider, the kind that promised he’d savor every drop of the fallout.
Tobias’ hand fell on my arm, steady and blunt. “Don’t make this a show, Kieran. Contain it; don’t let it feed the wolves.” He met my eyes with that curt appraisal he always gave when a thing needed wrapping in usefulness, not spectacle.
I shrugged him off. “It stopped being a show the second they spat her name like rot.” My voice carried, deliberate, meant for every ear in the chamber. “This isn’t theater. This is consequences. And I stopped being a frightened boy in this Court a long fucking time ago.”
Silence rippled, taut as a drawn bowstring. I let it hang a breath, then severed it with steel.
“Station men at the south wall. Double the roving patrols. Lock the eastern gate until dawn. The two you’re dragging out will live—but they’ll live with the scars they’ve earned.
Let the rest of the Court see them crawl and let it serve as a reminder: my patience has a limit, and they just reached it. ”
The guards obeyed without hesitation, hauling the groaning lords out in a trail of blood and silk.
Across the chamber, Solis leaned back in his chair, a grin tugging crooked at his scar. “Patience with teeth is more accurate,” he hooted, amused. “Saints save us, the prince finally grew his fangs.”
Tobias’ hand still hovered near my arm, but I shrugged him off and met his gaze. His expression didn’t crack, but the ledger in his grip went still. Not disapproval—just the quiet pause of a man who was used to steering the current, only to find the river had its own course.
The silence that followed wasn’t shock anymore. It was caution.
For the first time in years, the chamber weighed me not as ornament, but as danger.
But the ache for Merrit—left to stitch herself together without me—was a cold ache at the center of it. I would burn the rot from my Court. I would make sure no one ever called her prey in my presence again.
My list had already begun to form, names slipping into place like knives on a belt.
Who had access to the Hunt routes? Who could slip a note into a huntsman’s hand?
Which of the men I’d smiled at and dismissed had fingers already greased with other people’s blood?
There would be a ledger for them, too, and I would inscribe it in fire.
Find the routes. Check the suppliers. Watch the servants who exchanged favors for coin.
Ask about the late-night visitors to the northern lodges.
Keep the men who knew too much awake until they told me what they’d been paid to do.
The chamber was still vibrating with the echo of my threat when Tobias finally broke the silence, his ledger shut tight in his hands.
“Enough blood for one morning,” he said evenly, though his eyes flicked to the lords still groaning as the guards dragged them out. “There’s the matter of tonight’s gathering. The barons expect their supper, their toasts, their theater. Apologies, but you’ll need to bring your Divide guest.”
The word “guest” was measured, calculated like a surgeon deciding where to cut, and I fought off the urge to bury my fist in one of my oldest friend’s faces.
I didn’t answer, only flexed my hand where the baron’s blood still clung to my knuckles. Merrit in that room, ringed by the same mouths that had dared spit her name—saints, it would be carnage before the first toast.
Solis leaned back, scarred grin wide, unhelpfully amused. “Oh, I do hope you bring her. Court hasn’t had proper entertainment in years.”
Their eyes were on me, waiting. I let the silence stretch, then let the fake princely smile curl slow and sharp.
“If they’re hungry for a spectacle, they’ll have one,” I promised. “She’ll be at my side.”