Chapter Twenty #2
But the king was inside the thorn barrier and the tower was welcoming him.
I crossed the balcony in three strides and went through the bedroom and hit the stairs at speed. Behind me, I heard Thane’s footsteps from above, heavy and fast, the storm above the tower dropping in intensity as he pulled his attention back to where it was needed.
I took the stairs two at a time.
Thane was four steps behind me.
Neither of us said anything.
There was nothing to say.
Aveline
Iheard the door open at the bottom of the tower.
I was already on the lower stairs when it happened, already moving, drawn by habit, by obedience, by the history that had shaped my life.
But also, drawn by the hope that I could finally have answers.
The knowledge that he was here, finally here, and that the conversation I had been building toward my entire life was standing at the bottom of a staircase.
I stopped on the last step.
He stood in the entry.
He looked the way he always had. That was the first thing that struck me, the disorienting ordinariness of his appearance—unchanged, composed, his posture immaculate, the gold of his crown catching the tower’s candlelight the way it always had.
So many years of visits, and he had never once appeared diminished or uncertain, or pressed by anything.
Despite the rain, the storm brought by Thane, he looked perfectly regal and imposing. As he always did.
His eyes found me on the stairs.
“Aveline,” he said.
Just my name, registering years of disappointment, anger, sadness.
Never anything else. And I used to fall over myself for one compliment from him, one nice word.
But this time was different. I didn’t react the same way.
I didn’t hunch my shoulder, look down, curtsey, and hope he would forgive me.
I had nothing to be sorry for. He was the one who owed me.
He stole from me. He imprisoned me. He lied to me.
I stayed where I was on the last step and met his gaze evenly, and saw a flicker of unease in his gaze.
“Father,” I said.
He looked at me the way he always looked at me. The assessment, the inventory, the attention that I had spent years interpreting as love, and now recognized as something colder and more functional. He was checking the condition of something he owned.
“You look well,” he said, choosing a new tact.
“I know what you did.”
No preamble. No managed approach. I had learned in the past several days that no matter how you plan something, it never seems to work out, and that the truest things landed best when they weren’t constructed.
Something shifted in his expression. Not surprise—he was not a man who allowed himself surprise—a recalibration.
“Then we won’t waste time,” he said.
“Why?” I came down the last step and stood on the ground floor, ten feet between us. “You had years to tell me the truth. You had years to tell me what I was, what you were doing, what you took from me.” I held his gaze. “Why did you lie?”
“I protected you,” he said. And the thing that made my stomach tighten was that he believed it.
I could hear that he meant it, the same way I’d always been able to hear it, his genuine belief in his own justifications.
“You were a child with power you couldn’t understand and couldn’t control.
The world is full of people who would have used you before you were capable of recognizing them doing it. ”
“So you used me first.”
“I managed you,” he said. “There is a difference.”
“You built a drain in the floor of the dining room. I ate over it every day of my life.”
“The array maintained stability. Your power without regulation would have—”
“You told me I killed my mother.”
The entry went quiet.
He froze, recalculating.
“You told me,” I said, and my voice was steady in a way I hadn’t known it would be, “that my power drained her. That she suffered. That you ended it.” I took one step toward him.
“You told me that when I was a child, and you repeated it every time I asked to leave, every time I questioned whether I was still dangerous, every time I reached toward anything beyond this tower.” My hands were loose at my sides.
“She built this tower. Not you. She built it to protect me from you, and she died doing it. You took her death and made it into a leash.”
Anger and annoyance flickered across his face.
Not guilt. I had hoped, in some private part of myself that I hadn’t fully acknowledged, that I would see guilt. What I saw instead was the expression of a man who had assessed a situation and found it more complicated than he’d expected and was adjusting accordingly.
“Your mother was idealistic. She didn’t understand what you would become, what the kingdom would face.
What you would need to be.” He moved, not toward me, but laterally, the way he moved when he was thinking.
“No alpha she could have chosen for you would have been adequate. Not for your power at full strength. Not for what you are.”
“Maybe not. But I found two.”
His eyes dropped.
To my neck. The left side first, Malric’s mark, still tender at the edges. Then the right, Thane’s. He looked at both of them with a narrowed gaze.
The silence stretched.
When he looked up, his face had changed.
“You bonded them,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Both.”
“Yes.”
The composure cracked along one fault line. Just one, quickly controlled, but I saw it. A flash of something behind his eyes that was not calculation and not strategy and was not the measured response of a man who managed things.
It was fury.
“I can break that bond,” he said.
The words were quiet. That was what made them land the way they did—not shouted, not heated, spoken with the flat certainty of someone stating a fact they’d already verified.
“A mating bond can be broken,” he continued, “with sufficient power and the right application. It is not reversible by the bonded parties, but it can be severed from outside.” He looked at me steadily.
“It will kill them. The severance backlash at their strength of bond will be fatal.” A pause.
“I am stronger than they are. I have been running on your power for years and I have resources they cannot match.”
I said nothing.
“I own you. That is not cruelty. That is the reality of what I built and what you are and what the kingdom requires. You were always going to come back to this tower with me. The only variable was the condition in which you arrived.”
His words triggered something deep inside of me—a cold rage, nothing like the heat that had flared in the dining room and set the runes glowing. This was quieter than that. More final.
“You no longer have power over me. The circle is broken. The array is gone. Your portal is blocked.” I held his gaze. “Everything you built here to contain me is finished.”
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he smiled.
It was the smile I knew best, the one he used when he was about to explain something he found gently amusing. The smile that meant he was not concerned. The smile he had used my entire life to signal that whatever I thought I understood, I had missed something important.
“My darling girl,” he said. “I don’t need the circle when I am standing right here.”
He began to speak.
Not words I recognized. A language older than anything in the tower’s library, syllables that resonated in the air, and his hands came up, before I’d registered what was happening—the pull.
The recognizable pull, the one he’d used my entire life in the dining room and attributed to his touch and his visits and never once to the floor beneath my feet.
He was doing it directly.
Without the array, without any infrastructure, just him and whatever years of collected power had built inside him.
My knees hit the floor.
It was not a decision. My legs simply collapsed, and I was down, one hand catching the stone, the other pressed to my chest where the bond was.
The bond.
I seized it with everything I had left.
Malric. Thane.
Not words. Something more direct than words, the full impact of what was happening, pushed through the bond like a signal flare, and then the pull intensified and my vision went gray at the edges.
I held onto the bond the way I’d held onto the nest furs three days ago, with both hands, with everything I had, because it was the only thing in the room that was mine and not his.
“Come home,” my father said, above me, his voice gentle, coaxing. “You’ll understand, eventually. You always do.”
The gray spread inward.
I held on.
Help me.