46. Adelina
Adelina
The words land like a blow.
Kaedryn’s face is taut with anger, but beneath it is something worse. Betrayal. I brought Dravaryn into his castle. I walked toward the trap. I burned the evidence. I said nothing.
He’s right. I gave my brother exactly what he wanted.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper as I finally drag a breath into my lungs.
He cuts a hand through the air. “Don’t!”
The command stops the next apology in my throat.
“I have spent weeks trying to understand whether your silence is fear,” he says. “Tonight, it became a weapon. Maybe Varek’s. Maybe yours. I do not know anymore.”
My heart clenches. All I can hear is failure. Liability. Burden.
His voice drops colder. “Until I know whether the threat is to you, through you, or because of you, you will remain in these chambers.”
There it is. The cage closing with my own choices used as the lock. I bow my head and try to keep breathing.
“You will receive no messages. No gifts. No unsupervised visitors. Every item brought to you will be inspected. Your balcony is warded. You will not enter the gardens, the court, or any public room unless I permit it. Meals will be brought here. Maelin may attend you. My mother may attend you. Your attendants will remain, but they will answer to the guards stationed at your doors.”
No garden.
The room presses in around me. I deserve it. That is the worst part. I’m confined to my chambers just like I was in Dravaryn reminds me that I was never my own person. Since the day my parents died, I have been a pawn.
“You may finish the wedding preparations from your chamber. If you cause further trouble, you will not like the alternatives.” He steps back. “Do you understand?”
My voice is small, steady, empty. “Yes, Your Highness.”
He flinches. I see it even with my eyes lowered. I think he might say something else. Something gentler. Something that makes this less final. Then his eyes drop to the bracelet again, lying beside the pressed flower, and something in him snaps tight.
“Why?” he asks again, quieter now, but somehow worse.
I shake my head.
His anger surges back. The shadows move before his body does. They curl around the legs of my chair, climb the arms, and wrap lightly around my wrists. I gasp.
Kaedryn takes one step toward me, and the shadows lift me to my feet. The chair scrapes back behind me as I rise without choosing to, my wrists held by darkness, my waist steadied by a band of shadow that feels too much like hands and nothing like them at all.
This is it. This is when he starts hurting me.
The thought is so clean and familiar that terror almost becomes calm around it.
My body knows what to do. It empties. My gaze drops to the center of his chest. My hands go still inside the shadows.
I do not pull away because pulling away makes it worse.
I do not cry harder because tears can offend.
I do not speak because the wrong word can become a lash.
Kaedryn’s face changes. The shadows loosen. “Look at me.”
I cannot.
“Look at me, damn it!”
I raise my eyes. The room narrows to darkness around my wrists. Rain pelts against glass. My pulse hammers in my throat. I feel the phantom bite of Varek’s fingers under my chin.
Kaedryn inhales sharply. Then the shadows suddenly release me. I stumble without their hold and fall to my knees. My wrists tingle where the darkness had been. I keep my head down and press my hands to the floor.
Don’t move. Don’t speak.
His shadows recoil from the walls enough that a sliver of firelight returns to the room.
I wonder whether his shadows will hurt me.
Will he use them like Varek used his whip?
Will it be worse? My back hasn’t healed from Varek’s last assault, and I know from experience that alone would make any punishment hurt more.
I try to focus on the ground beneath me, on the thin pulls of breaths I drag into my lungs.
“Get up,” he commands.
What?
“Get up, Adelina!”
My legs shake as I clamber to my feet. Then he steps closer again, slower this time. I don’t move. His hand lifts. I tense. His jaw flexes. He is close enough that I can feel the heat of him before he tilts my chin so he can see my face.
“Whether you like it or not, you are mine, Adelina.” His voice is low and possessive. “You belong to Varek no more.”
I see my future laid before me. The princess locked away until she’s useful, taken out to show to the world like a pet or a trophy. The girl who paid for the alliance with her body and soul. There is no escape.
You are seen. You are not alone.
Foolish hope. I was seen and surrounded by servants and guards and nobles in Varek’s hands, and it did not protect me.
Kaedryn’s eyes drop to my bare wrist where Varek’s bracelet had been. His expression hardens again. The shadows gather at his feet. “Give me your hand.”
My fingers curl against my palm. It is the smallest refusal even if resistance is futile.
His eyes lift to mine. “Now!”
I want to say no. The word rises somewhere deep and fragile, a thing with wings too damaged to fly. I hold out my hand.
Kaedryn’s jaw hardens as if the obedience displeases him, though he is the one who demanded it. He does not take my hand in his. Instead, his shadow curls upward, a thin ribbon of black edged in deep blue, and wraps around my wrist.
The shadow tightens into a bracelet. This one is made of darkness.
It lies against my skin cool and weightless, a band no wider than two fingers, smooth as silk and impossible to remove.
It pulses once, then settles, sinking just enough into the air around my wrist that I know it is not resting there.
“If your brother can still move you with a scrap of ink and a dead flower, then I will remove every path between you and him.”
I yank my arm back, but the shadow remains on my wrist. “What are you doing?”
Kaedryn looks at it, then at me. “My shadows are watching you now.”
The room goes utterly still. My throat closes.
“They will know before any guard if you try to leave these rooms,” he says. “They will know before any servant if you receive another message, before Varek can pull you toward another trap. The will know if you step out of line.”
Step out of line. My brother used to say that softly too.
Kaedryn’s voice lowers. “Do not test it.”
The shadow bracelet pulses once more, a cold ring around my wrist. The northern bracelet had been a command from the man who raised me to obey. This one is from the man who says I belong to him now.
The room disappears.
Dravaryn. Elyrion. North. South. Brother. Betrothed.
All of them become hands. All of them become walls. All of them become men deciding how far I may move before punishment follows. Regret does not free anyone. Only power does, and that is something I’ve never had.
Before either of us can speak, the outer door opens. Queen Elowyn stands there with Sylas at her shoulder, both taking in the room too quickly. The queen looks at me, then at my wrist, before her gaze snaps back to Kaedryn. Then to the shadows still sealing the edges of the room.
Something in her expression goes cold enough to stop the air. “What happened?” she asks.
Kaedryn steps back from me, breathing hard. “Varek sent a message. She burned it. She went to meet his agent at the lower moon gate. Rowan and Merritt caught him before he killed himself with poison.”
Queen Elowyn’s face pales. Sylas curses under his breath.
The queen steps into the room. “Adelina?”
I cannot look at her. If I do, I will break.
Kaedryn says, “Don’t ask her to explain. She won’t.” The words are quiet. They hurt worse than shouting.
Queen Elowyn’s eyes flash. “Enough, Kaedryn!”
“No.” His voice hardens again, though now there is something frayed beneath it. “It was a trap by her brother. She knew it was dangerous and went anyway. She destroyed the only written proof we had before anyone could see it. She took advantage of our trust and betrayed it.”
The queen’s gaze returns to me, and I know she sees too much. My wet hem. The dead orchid. The dark bracelet around my wrist. The way I stand.
“Who did he threaten?” she asks softly.
I close my eyes. Kaedryn goes rigid.
The queen steps closer. “It was your nurse and chambermaids from Dravaryn, wasn’t it?”
Everything in him seems to lock. Then his jaw clenches. “You should have told me.”
I almost laugh. It would not sound sane. “I couldn’t.” The words barely make it into the room.
“Don’t be stupid! Of course you could have.”
I lift my eyes then. “No,” I say. “I couldn’t.”
Something passes between us. A crack. A thread. A thing neither of us knows how to hold.
“Then I cannot trust what you will do when he pulls that string. You proved that tonight.”
He cannot trust me. I cannot trust him. Varek has made certain of both.
Queen Elowyn speaks, her voice low with anger. “Kaedryn, she was blackmailed.”
“And she hid it until she nearly walked into an abduction designed to fracture this alliance, and she remains silent.”
“She is terrified.”
“So am I.” The words silence the room. His anger falters the instant they leave him.
The crown prince of Elyrion is afraid. Of me. For me. Because of me. I do not know which is worse.
Elowyn’s attention returns to the bracelet around my wrist. “Remove it.”
Kaedryn does not answer.
“Kaedryn,” she says, colder now. “Remove it.”
His shadows stir. “She nearly walked out of the castle into a trap.”
“She is standing right here,” the queen says. “And you have marked her like a prisoner.”
His face hardens. “I have marked her like someone under royal protection who cannot be trusted to keep herself safe.”
“She was in an impossible situation and you know that,” Sylas says quietly from the doorway.
Kaedryn’s eyes cut to him. Sylas does not flinch. For one breath, the room feels like it may split open around them. Then Kaedryn turns back to me. The shadows around my wrist loosen by a fraction.
Hope flares. Small. Dangerous.
Then his jaw sets. “No.” Kaedryn’s voice drops. “The shadow remains.”
“Your father will hear of this,” Queen Elowyn says.