40. Chapter 40
Owain
Leaving Lunette at her apartment door was almost as painful as leaving her in Selmont had been.
I stood there a moment longer than I should have, hand still braced against the doorframe, straining to hear the soft sounds of movement within—water being poured, the gentle scrape of a chair.
She’d let me kiss her hand in view of the extra guards I’d had posted at her door.
To her, it was a sweet gesture. To me, it was yet another public claim.
Each tiny act was a brick in the wall I couldn’t help but build around her, fueled by my possessive fires.
The corridor smelled of burning tallow and cold stone, the first torches just beginning to be lit with the shorter days as winter approached.
The long shadows they cast danced across the guard’s faces.
Those outside my door had changed over after luncheon.
I noted the faces automatically, the way Reina had drilled into me since I was old enough to hold a sword.
Two I recognized from the outer garrison rotation. The third made me pause.
Reina’s perpetual shadow. Guilty of aiding my aunt in whatever she was up to. His gaze flickered to mine for a fleeting second.
“Richart.”
He stepped forward immediately. “My prince.”
“Guard Lady Lunette. Stay with her until I can join her.” I kept my voice low and easy, carrying no alarm.
His eyes flicked to my door. “But my prince, my post—”
“My aunt will be safe with me,” I insisted. “Since she’s already broken into my rooms.”
Reina’s voice, sharp and clear from within the room, commanded, “Go, Richart.”
He went without a second of hesitation.
I pushed open the door to find Reina sitting in the chair nearest my hearth with her ankles crossed.
She’d helped herself to the decanter on my writing table, looking entirely unapologetic about it.
The fire had been stoked recently, which meant she’d been here long enough to get cold, long enough to become irritated.
Too bad. I was the best kind of busy. I had to stifle a smile.
“This is payback for bursting into my room.” She lifted her glass in a small, elegant toast.
I stared at her for a moment. Then, because there was nothing useful to say to that, I crossed to the washbasin.
“Your hair…” she observed wryly from her comfortable throne. “On top of what my spies told me about where you slept last night…”
“Reina.”
She made a small, amused sound and said nothing further.
The water was cold, which was exactly what I needed.
I scrubbed my hands over my face, dragging my palms against my jaw, pressing the heels of my hands into my eyes until the pressure gave me something to concentrate on besides the memory of the way she tasted, smelled, gods, the sounds Lunette had made.
Cursed gods, Owain, you cannot think about that now.
When I straightened and reached for the towel, I caught Reina watching me in the polished surface of the mirror above the basin. One brow had climbed her forehead with a patient skepticism that suggested she was, despite everything, not entirely shocked and not at all judgmental.
I said nothing.
She said nothing.
I dried my face and turned around, refusing to blush.
Reina pointed one bejeweled finger at me. “Even though I’m quite cross that you didn’t tell me about this review of ‘foreign magical institutions,’ Owain…I’m proud. It was exactly the right move.”
It was my turn to raise one brow. “But that’s not the only reason you’re here.”
“Camrick should be here shortly,” she said evasively, and the pleasant edge was gone from her voice entirely. “He needs to hear about our findings.”
I looked at her more carefully. Her habitual composure was there, but something was straining it. “Have your spies been working on the Assembly conclave already?”
“What I have to share with you is from before they arrived.” Her mouth curved, brief and humorless. “It is rather ominous.”
The unease that had been quiet since my lips touched Lunette’s roused itself, shook off the warmth, and sat up straight.
“Come, sit with me before Camrick arrives,” she said. The chairs were angled toward the hearth. Its steady flames cast a warm glow across their leather cushions. Perfect for a conversation it seemed neither of us would enjoy.
I settled into the opposite chair, and my body felt good. My magic had quieted down like a sated creature, full of the contentment of spending time with its mate. But my mind wouldn’t stop circling the danger we were in.
Vaustin was here to build a case so he could take Luna. If he got his hands on her…
My Nocthel instincts flared at the mere thought, sending a shiver of anticipatory violence down my spine.
I scratched my beard and looked away from Reina to cover it.
That man had brought too much suffering to the world without having to pay for it just because of who his father was and what he could do.
Having that monster under my roof was intolerable.
I hated being my brother’s executioner, but Vaustin’s death would be one I’d be happy to deliver.
If only I could do it now, because I had no legal grounds other than a flimsy oath of citizenship and her duty to the king to keep Lunette from him. Not yet.
I needed her to be my wife.
The thought was a familiar echo of its dozen previous appearances since her arrival at the Tir, emerging as an instinctual, irrational urge, instead of something useful like a plan.
Even before Camrick had named us mates, a piece of me had already decided that I needed her.
Now I was simply waiting for her to see it too.
Reina set down her goblet and folded her hands in her lap. “Seeing how you’re fixated on that fire, nephew, I believe a direct approach would be best.”
“You’re always direct,” I said.
She looked at me steadily. “Owain.”
The quality of my name in her mouth stopped me cold. It had something in it I’d heard only once before—on the night she’d sat across from me and explained in a perfectly level voice that my mother would not survive the winter.
“First, an easier truth to swallow.” Reina took another sip of her wine and sighed heavily while placing it back down. “When you were born, you had pointed ears.”
I shot up from my chair. My hand went to the shell of my ear before I could stop it. My fingers found the same unremarkable curve I’d touched a thousand times without thought. I barely contained the shout of surprise. “What?”
The single word felt too insignificant to address the magnitude of what she’d just shared. I looked down at my hands as if they might confirm or deny it.
“They clipped your ears like a bloody dog.” She didn’t look at me, only stared at the flames. “A wizened healer from Wynth was brought in to make them look human. He’s long dead now. Neither Amara nor Gruffid wanted it, but…they thought it would hurt you more to leave them that way.”
The body I’d lived in my entire life had apparently been changed before I was old enough to know my own name. I’m supposed to look like Lunette.
Cursed gods, if that was the simple truth... “Gods below, Reina, what’s the harsher truth?”
“What? You’re not going to shout at me for not preventing it?” she asked.
“You were a teenager.” I shrugged, retaking my seat. “And my parents were probably right.”
A wave of conflicting emotions washed over Reina’s face as she shook her head. “Steady. Considerate. Patient. You’re already more capable of bearing the crown than you think, Owain. Look at all you’ve done!”
At first, the words felt misplaced, as though they belonged to someone standing behind me.
The image of a petition from a coastal village about flooded grain stores flashed in my memory.
I’d resolved it in an afternoon. A second dispute arose: two bannermen, their faces flushed and hands twitching toward their swords, were on the brink of bloodshed over a patch of land.
Both departed the keep with an agreement in hand and their pride sufficiently intact.
But also the quieter, thankless things. Nights with the stewards until the candles guttered, hands ink-stained, eyes burning, making certain winter wouldn’t starve us while Berian slept.
No riots. No shortages. The kingdom hadn’t crumbled. The people hadn’t suffered for the darkness in my blood. Gods, the Tir barely realized Berian was sick!
There had been no moment of becoming. I’d simply been doing it all—day after day—while waiting to be told I was failing.
The realization settled slowly: I’d spent so long cataloguing my failures, worrying over every shadow that moved beneath my skin, that I’d never once looked up to see all that I’d accomplished. Instead, I’d been waiting for proof that they’d been right about me.
It never came.
I wasn’t sure I was ready to call it proof of success. But for the first time, I couldn’t call it proof of failure either. It was the closest I’d come in a long time to feeling like I was enough.
The silence stretched just long enough for a new perception of myself to take root.
I looked over at Reina, really looked. She’d said there was more. Something in the set of her jaw told me she’d been carrying something unbearable—and it was my time to share it.
“Say it,” I said.
“I’m certain the Assembly murdered your mother.” She kept her eyes locked on me. Then took a controlled breath, but it didn’t entirely soothe her.
I heard her. I understood the words. The architecture of the sentence was simple enough: subject, verb, object. The Assembly. Murdered. Your mother.
My mother, who’d spent years half-alive after a pregnancy that should’ve been straightforward.
My mother, who’d been examined by dozens of Assembly physicians and declared, with great professional sorrow, to be simply too fragile for the heavy mixture of Fae blood running through me.
The woman who’d looked at me while I held her hand and told me I wasn’t the reason she was dying.
I’d held that absolution like a stone in my pocket for years. It was something to reach for when the dark thoughts came—when I couldn’t control my magic. The last thing my mother did was try to grant me a life free from guilt.
I’d never entirely believed her. Carried the guilt around anyway.
But they had taken her away from me. They’d taken her before she could give me anything else.
I found I’d sunk my back into the chair without realizing it, as if staying still was the only thing that could spare me from further pain now.
The best I could muster was a voice that was flat and functional. “How?”
She told me the lie that she and everyone else had believed: that too much Fae blood caused pregnancy problems. How Lunette had firmly and decisively dismissed that as a possibility.
Coming from anyone else, I might’ve dismissed it. But I trusted Luna completely.
Then Reina’s story jumped nearly thirty years into the past. She told me about a trip to the Assembly’s stronghold in Caervorn while I was still young.
Of a young blonde-haired empath with trembling hands, forced to use needle and thread to cover the Assembly’s crimes.
And of a mundane guard who’d held Reina at sword point for trying to take the evidence from them.
“They gave me the scrap of enchanted cloth your mother wore for their ‘treatments’ as evidence against the Assembly,” Reina said. “It was covered in Amara’s blood.”
They bled my mother. Did they have no limits to their barbarity?
But then I felt an unexpected jolt of recognition, so potent it threatened to erupt as an unmanly gasp.
“Aunt.” I sat forward. “Did the mundane man have a scar here?” I slashed across my cheek.
Reina blinked. For the second time in my memory, I’d genuinely surprised her. “How,” she said slowly, “could you possibly—”
“If I’m right…the empath and guard are the parents of Darreth’s new queen.” As I spoke, fragments of the truth began to coalesce. The serendipity was unbelievable. “I met Heleth and Taig at Emrys and Isca’s wedding.”
Reina stared at me. I watched her turn the coincidence over—looking for the angle, the implication, the politics beneath the thing. The silence stretched long enough that I could hear the fire settle in the grate.
The same thought was clearly sitting between us: that Fate, or something wearing its face, had been arranging pieces on this board far longer than either of us had been watching.
With visible effort, she set it aside. Some problems were too large to solve tonight. Or ever, for mortals like us.
“Owain.” She leaned forward slightly. “You must know that I had Thibault’s rooms searched.”
There were a million reasons she might do this, but I only needed one to act. “Why?”
“Lunette saw him using a magical device on Berian. The exact method I’ve suspected the Assembly used on your mother for years.”
Discovering the truth about Reina’s suspicions about my mother reignited the long-smoldering anger within me. But this made that anger grow far colder and more lethal.
“He wasn’t hiding it?” I heard my own voice from a slight distance.
A sudden restless urge to move sliced through me.
Thibault had been sloppy because he already believed she was under his power. I pressed my knuckles briefly to my mouth. “Why did she tell you this but not me?”
I wanted to hear what Reina had to say, but a faint unease tugged at me, joining the unpleasant urge to move. A moment later, unease settled in, a subtle yet persistent pressure at the fringes of my magic. It was as if my body and magic were rebelling against remaining in my room.
“Because I asked her not to. I needed to tell you about your mother first.” Reina’s eyes held mine without apology. “While we’re on the topic of confessions… I plan on stepping back from my duties to the Tir. Retiring to the family estate. I’ve found someone I want to spend more time with.”
Found someone. The words settled between us with the weight of two lives about to change forever.
I looked at the woman who’d been right beside me for every significant moment of my life before meeting Luna. Something heavy landed on my chest. I hadn’t known until this moment that I’d been counting on Reina always being there.
Then, from somewhere down the corridor, a piercing, broken scream tore through the air. “Owain—!”
My body reacted instinctively. Magic rose like a blade unsheathed. I was moving before my mind could even process the situation.
The door slammed open hard enough to crack against the stone.
Years of discipline fell away with each step. Each one shed another layer—restraint, propriety, everything—until there was nothing left but the need to reach my mate.