Chapter 54
Finnian
She doesn’t notice the crown. Not right away. But it is as inevitable as twilight.
And when she sees it…
Her face contorts into something I’ve never witnessed in my years of studying her. The mask slips.
Not the calculated crack she deploys for sympathy.
Not the theatrical fury she uses to keep courtiers in line. The actual mask, the one underneath all the others, the one that says I am in control of everything in this room.
It falls off her face.
For two seconds, Amarantha stares at the Crown of Destiny on my head, blood seeping from the thorns at my temples, and decades of certainty collapse behind her eyes.
Then the mask rebuilds. Fast. But not fast enough.
I saw.
“Well.” Her voice echoes around the broken space. “You have been busy, cousin.”
I bite my tongue.
“Kneel.” This time she pushes me to the ground with force.
My kneecaps crack against marble that’s still warm from the people she burned.
She circles me. Heels clicking against charred stone. The old rhythm I still hear in my nightmares.
Click. Click. Click.
The sound of a woman deciding how much of you to leave intact. I’ve seen her do it. Circle a Fae before she decides he isn’t worth the air she breathes.
Her favorite form is incineration, obviously. At least it’s quick.
“How long?” She stops in front of me. Crouches to eye level, her head tilting just so. Her perfume hits me wrong and I choke down a gag. “How long have you been hiding a Treasure of the Fae under my roof, Finnian?”
I can’t lie. She knows this but evasion is worthless right now.
“Since the night I left this court.”
Her features remain impassive. Her eyes? Unblinking. I’m not even sure she breathes crouched by me. But I feel her anger.
“The Crown chose a child?” She stands. Smooths her silk with hands that aren’t quite steady. Another thing I’ve never seen. I also was not a child. “An orphan with no court, no allies, no future beyond what I graciously provided?”
“Graciously.” I taste the word, she must be insane. Well and truly insane. “Is that what we’re calling it now?”
“Careful, cousin.”
“We’re past careful.”
Davis shifts beside the throne. The collar gleams at his throat. He watches me with the flat assessment of whether my death will improve or complicate his circumstances. Pure survival math. No loyalty in any direction. Not anymore.
“I made you,” Amarantha says in that quiet broken voice of hers.
That’s always been the worst version of her.
The loud Amarantha is performance. The quiet one believes what she’s saying.
“A boy with nothing. No family, no standing, no power anyone would respect. I gave you the Sword. I gave you purpose. I gave you centuries of protection that kept you alive when every other orphaned noble disappeared.”
“You gave me a leash.” She didn’t tell me about the Sword. And those orphans I’d bet my life she killed them.
“I gave you a life,” she snaps and her composure fractures for a beat. Sconces that are already dead somehow flicker darker. “And you spent it hiding crowns and chasing a woman who will never be enough for what you are.”
There it is. Not the treason. Not the hiding. Not the political betrayal.
Ash.
“You’re right,” I say, and something ugly flashes across her face because she wasn’t expecting agreement. “Ash will never be enough for what I am.” I hold her gaze. “She’s more.”
Amarantha’s hand moves before I register the intent. The slap connects with enough force to snap my head sideways. My vision whites. The Crown bites deeper into my temples and blood runs fresh down the sides of my face.
“Thirty years.” She’s breathing hard. The performance abandoned entirely now. What emerges from Amarantha is the Fae she is to her core. Ugly and cold not an ounce of warmth left in her. “I protected you. Promoted you. Made you the most respected scholar in Faerie.”
“Thirty years you summoned me to your bed and told me I should be grateful.”
She summoned me. Again and again. Shame burns through me as that reality roots itself in my present. I can’t hide from the truth of what she did to me all these years anymore.
But I never fucked her.
Davis looks away. Even the cockroach has limits.
“Everything I did,” she continues, as though I hadn’t spoken, and she genuinely cannot hear it. Cannot process the accusation as real. In her mind, she loved me. In her mind, I was lucky. “Everything I built for you. And you hid this from me.”
She reaches toward the Crown. Her fingers get within an inch of the thorns before the artifact sparks, gold light searing across her knuckles. She hisses, snatching her hand back with a pout on her face.
“It doesn’t want you,” I say.
And because I can’t help myself and I need to know. “How?” I ask her, looking for some semblance of the girl I once knew. She isn’t there not anymore. “How did you get me to agree?”
“Dreams,” she whispers, giving me a sacred truth.
It doesn’t soften how I feel toward her. Nothing ever will.
“Dreams,” I parrot. “You came to me in my dreams. And there you got what you wanted.”
I feel nothing anymore. Not surprise. Not from her. She doesn’t know any better and it’s past time that I keep expecting her to know better.
“The sentence for treason against the Seelie Crown,” she says, and her voice has gone formal again but the edges are ragged, “is death.”
I expected that.
“By your own hand.” Her smile spreads. Vicious and so gods damn proud of herself. “The Summer Sword will execute its bearer. A fitting end, don’t you think? The weapon I gave you, turned inward.”
She’s going to make me kill myself with the blade she carved into my chest in a fucking dream. That I don’t remember.
“I invoke the binding.” Her voice is cold. “Summer Sword, hear your queen. Draw forth.”
The pull starts in my sternum.
I know this the way you know a scar. The binding reaching into the place where the Sword lives and pulls. My hand rises without my permission. Fingers close around a hilt that forms from golden light.
I fight. For what it’s worth I fight.
“Don’t make this ugly, Finnian.” She watches my struggle with interest. Learning what causes me pain and getting off on it. “You were always so elegant. Let the ending match.”
The sword slides free. An inch. Two.
“Submit.” Her command, layered with binding magic, is pointless to deny.
My hand draws the blade further. Half out now. The pain is familiar and that’s the worst part. That this particular agony has been normalized.
“Strike.” She says it softly. Almost lovingly. “Strike true, Summer Sword.”
My arm raises the blade. Point against my own sternum. The binding screaming through every nerve.
I look at her. Still trying to see that girl I remember.
But she’s never going to be her. I need to let that go. Let go of the illusion of who I saw in her.
And then I think of Ash. Of every kiss and swipe of her tongue, to every laugh that lit up her whole face.
I want forever with her. Forever to learn what makes her gasp. Forever to memorize every millimeter of her skin. Forever to breath her in every morning and forever to listen to her exhale of moans every night.
Immortality. And yet, it still isn’t enough fucking time.
My Sword rests hovered above my chest. The binding holds my arm, and my arm carries the blade and—
Nothing.
The compulsion stops. Not fades. Stops. Like a rope cut clean.
There is nothing but silence where the binding used to hum. A ringing, a weightless silence. The absence of something that’s been there so long I’d mistaken it for a part of myself.
My arm drops. The Sword stays in my hand. My hand. I open my fingers. Close them. Open them again, just to feel them obey me and no one else.
My lungs pull deeper than they have in years.
For a long moment I kneel here, in a charred court, holding a Sword that is finally and only mine, and I don’t try to name what that feels like. Some things resist cataloging. This is one of them.
Amarantha’s face twists into an ugly sneer, her eyes scanning the court.
“That’s not possible.”
“You sure about that?” The voice comes from the servant’s entrance in the eastern wall. The one Amarantha sealed decades ago. The one she didn’t build. “Crazy you never once checked if the lock still worked on that door.”
Relief steals all the blood from my head and for a moment the world swims. I really thought I was alone. Stuck.
Tiana walks in slowly. Her chin high and excitement on her face. She showed up.
Traveling leathers stained with someone else’s blood stretch across her skin. Dark skin catches the guttering light from sconces that should be dead. The court she’s walking through should have been hers.
The walls know it.
What’s left of the Seelie magic, the deep foundation, the oldest wards, the ones Amarantha didn’t build and couldn’t burn, flickers. Sconces that died when she torched her own court gutter back to life. Barely, but it’s just enough.
“No.” Amarantha’s voice has lost its silk. “You’re dead. You’ve been dead for—”
“Thirty years in your walls. Your passages. Your servant entrances. I built half your wards, Amarantha.” Tiana stops far enough away from her but not because she fears her. “Did you really think I didn’t leave myself doors?”
Amarantha reaches for the court’s defenses. The desperate grab for magic that should answer a queen’s call. I can feel it like static in the air.
Nothing answers.
Because she burned it. All of it.
And it never even belonged to her in the first place.
“Davis.” Shrill now. “Kill—”
Davis is already running. Not toward Tiana. Toward the far corridor. The survival instinct of a gazelle, that one.
Tiana doesn’t stop him. Her eyes never leave Amarantha.
Amarantha’s gaze flicks between us. Me with the Sword she can’t command. Tiana with the blood she can’t outrank. The charred court that won’t protect her.
I’ve studied this woman for years. Every expression. Every calculation. Every micro-adjustment of her features when she’s changing strategy.
This one I’ve never seen before.
Not defeat. Amarantha doesn’t do defeat.
Reassessment.
She moves.
Not toward Tiana. Not toward me. Toward the wall behind the throne. Her hand finds something I can’t see, a seam in the charred stone, and part of the wall pivots inward.
A freaking hidden door. One that never existed before, I’d have found it, and by the look on Tiana’s face she didn’t know either.
Tiana lunges.
But I don’t think Amarantha has ever faced a single consequence. Not even before Tiana was born. She’s through the gap before Tiana’s hand closes on empty air. The wall seals behind her with a sound like a coffin lid closing.
Tiana hits the stone with both palms.
“She built that one herself,” Tiana says. More pissed off than defeated. “I didn’t know about that passage.”
“She always has one more door.” I should have known. She’s always been covert and deceitful. “She’s been building exits since the day she stole the crown.”
Tiana stands in front of the Seelie throne. Her eyes look like they want to burn through the door. Burn it down.
But it’s useless, Amarantha is long gone. We both know it.
“Go get your queen, Finnian.” She turns to me, “There’s nothing more here.”
Some endings, I fear, only end in dread.