CHAPTER 2
“What? Why?”
He sets the tablet down on the table, and the screen on the wall flares to life, scrolling with half a dozen articles and obituaries.
Murdered Sovians throughout the charted systems.
“He isn’t waiting to see if someone is going to challenge him. He’s going to get rid of all of us, just in case.”
“Okay, so he doesn’t want you to try to take his crown from him.”
“It’s a collar,” he says, offhandedly.
“Semantics.”
They look at each other, and I know they don’t understand the word, but I don’t explain.
“How do we make you ineligible for that collar without making you dead?” I don’t care that it’s not how I should say it.
“There are ways,” Mooralan says, but Ferrok doesn’t look hopeful, and neither of them tell me what those ways are.
My mind shuffles through a dozen options I know aren’t right. And then one that might work.
“What if we get married? If you’re attached to a non-Sovian, surely that must mess something up, right?”
“It would, but…”
“But what?”
“As much as I would love to be yours, Sovian marriage is not paperwork and promises. It’s a surgical procedure. One you might think of as mutilation. One I don’t know if you’d survive.”
“And I definitely won’t,” Mooralan says, squeezing my hand. “So that’s off the table.”
“What then? What can we do?”
“I have to leave.” Ferrok says again. “I don’t think there’s any other option.”
“There has to be.”
Ferrok takes my head in his hand and brushes his beak across my lips. “I wish you were right.”