3. Chapter 3 #2
"The King knows." His eyes took on that hard edge. "About the prophecy. About what happens if we bond our Marks again."
"Then we do it. Right now. We bond and we fix this and—"
"He bound himself to me," he ground out.
For a second, the sentence refused to mean anything. Like it was in a language I almost understood but couldn't quite translate. Bound himself. To Eryndor. The King—my mind scrambled to catch up. To make it make sense.
I blinked.
"What?" I heard myself say it, but the word felt distant.
"A fail-safe," he said. "After the wedding. He used an Oath-stone to force me to bind to him as well as Vivienne—”
Of course he had.
First the command rune when he was the Crownforged. Then the Oath-stone that turned him into a weapon the King could point directly at me. Then marriage to a butcher in white silk. And now this—a leash stitched directly into his soul, because every other cage had failed to hold him.
Eryndor had clawed his way out of all of them. Driven a blade through his own chest to break the first. Knelt on marble floors and swallowed his name to survive the second. Walked into a wedding and said I do to buy my brother's life.
And every time he got free, his father found a new way to chain him.
I looked at him standing in the wreckage of the carriage, bruised and bloody and finally on the outside of those palace walls—and I understood that he had never once in his life been allowed to simply exist without a hand around his throat.
Before I could drown in the thought, his mouth curved into a delicious grin. “At least you solved the Vivienne problem.”
He glanced at the smoldering wreckage. At what was left of the princess who'd been his wife in name only.
"Thoroughly," he added, a glint of wicked satisfaction flashing through his eyes.
I snorted. Laughed. Cried. All three at once, which was a new personal low. My body didn't know what to do with any of this, so it was doing everything at once. Focus. Just keep your shit together.
"Just—keep going. What else did that bastard do."
Eryndor’s grin dropped.
“Now, if I ever bond with you again, he'll know. He'll feel it. And he'll be able to siphon the power directly into himself."
The meaning settled with sickening clarity. If we bonded, the King wouldn’t just find us. He’d use us. Use everything we were meant to be. The trap wasn’t around us anymore. It was inside us.
I had barely survived the truth of him. Barely survived learning he hadn’t betrayed me—that he’d bled himself dry to save my brother, that I’d been wrong, that I’d lost him for all the wrong reasons. And now this.
Umbra shifted behind me. A low rumble in her chest.
"So if we bond..." I started.
"We hand him the power to unmake everything." Eryndor finished.
I stared at him, waiting for the rest. The part where he told me the loophole, the workaround, the secret passage out of this particular hell. Nothing came.
"So we kill him first," I said. The words came out hard. Like I wasn't shattering inside.
Good. Keep it together. He doesn't need to see you fall apart.
Eryndor laughed. "Just like that? Walk into the palace and gut the most powerful fae in the realm?"
"Why not? The precious princess is currently scattered across a field. Seems like a good day for regicide," I shot back.
"Amaria." My name in his mouth felt like a command to stop.
To think. "He's mastered the old magic. I've watched him pull the life from a fae across a room without lifting a finger.
No incantation. No warning. Just... gone.
" His eyes held mine, steady and unblinking.
"That's before the army. The Enforcers. The Suppressors.
The Oath-bound who'd open their own throats before letting anyone near him. "
"So it'll be hard."
"It'll be suicide," he said with finality. "And I won't watch you die for a plan we made in anger."
A crack split through my chest, deep and mean, straight through the hard knot of rage and stubbornness I’d been using to hold myself together. Even now—even here, with her ash still drifting on the wind—his first instinct was still to shield me.
I wanted to scream at him. I wanted to kiss him. I wanted to burn the whole kingdom down and salt the earth so nothing could ever grow there again.
Instead, I started pacing. Three steps left. Three steps right. I was about three steps from losing my shit.
"I've survived impossible before. It bleeds like everything else," I snarled and kept pacing. The caged animal feeling building like a wildfire. "We have a dragon. We have Dreadscale. We have—"
"A handful of rebels and a death wish." He cut me off.
"We go in blind, he'll see us coming before we cross the threshold.
And he won't kill you, Amaria. That's not how he operates.
" His jaw tightened. "He'll use me to break you.
Slowly. He knows exactly what we are to each other now—that's why he chained himself to my power in the first place. "
I stopped pacing.
"He's using you as bait."
"And a battery. If we bond fully and he siphons that power, he doesn't just stop us. He becomes unstoppable. Everything we are—everything we could be together—feeding directly into the thing we're trying to kill."
The cruelty of it settled into my bones slowly. Like frost creeping across a window.
The King hadn't just separated us. He'd turned our love into a weapon. Every feeling I had for Eryndor—every desperate, aching, furious thing I'd carried for him—it was all ammunition now. Fuel for the enemy.
This is what trusting someone costs you, a voice whispered. This is what happens when you let someone in. I crushed it fast. No. That was the King’s poison, not mine. I would not let him win this.
"I hate him," I said quietly. "I hate him more than I've ever hated anything."
The words felt too small. Hate was what you felt for someone who cheated you in cards. This was something older. Darker. The kind of feeling that could sustain you for years if you let it. I planned to let it.
"Good." His eyes met mine—and there it was. The cold fire beneath the control. "Sharpen it. Hate is useful. Rage makes mistakes."
I looked at him—really looked. The bruise darkening his jaw. The way he held himself like he was afraid to take up too much space. Like he'd been holding himself together with wire and spite for weeks and the wire was starting to snap.
"You should have told me," I said. "All of it. The binding, my brother, the—everything. You should have told me instead of letting me think—"
"Think what?" His eyes hardened.
"That I'd chosen her? That I'd given up?"
He stepped closer. I could feel our Marks reaching for each other.
"If I'd told you, you would have fought.
" His voice was low. "You would have looked at me across that altar and held on.
And the Soul-Smith would have felt it. The bond doesn't release unless the soul lets go—truly, completely, no thread left to grip.
They told us that the first day. Willingness is a spectrum, and the soul cannot be fooled. "
His jaw worked.
"I needed you to hate me. Not perform it. Not survive it. Hate me down to the marrow, so when the blade came for the tether there was nothing left in you reaching back. It was the only way the severance would take. The only way Caden walked free."
He looked at me then, his eyes bright with grief.
"Telling you the truth would have killed your brother. So I built you a lie you could believe. And I made it as cruel as I could, because cruelty was the only kindness I had left to offer."
A long silence.
Then I laughed. It came out wrong — too quiet, too tired, the kind of laugh that wasn't laughter at all.
"And in the end it didn't even matter."
His head came up.
"The broom closet." My throat was raw. "We didn't make it ten minutes before the Veil started bleeding. A whole ballroom unraveling because we'd forgotten for one second that we couldn't be touched."
"Amaria—"
"I walked into that altar a willing participant, Eryndor. By the time the priest raised his hands, I wanted it. I wanted the severance. Not because of your performance. Because I'd seen the cost myself."
Something broke open in his face.
"All of it." My voice cracked. "The distance. The cold silences. The weeks you spent making sure I couldn't reach you. You could have told me the truth in the first hour and the ending would have been the same. I would have looked at that ballroom and consented anyway."
He closed his eyes.
"I know."
The two words sat between us like a body neither of us wanted to bury.
"Think about what we lost." My voice wouldn't steady.
"Not Caden. Not the bond. I mean us. Every night you sat in that room six feet from mine, performing a wall I could have been on the other side of.
Every breakfast I ate in grey wool while you smiled at a female you hated.
Every time I reached through the tether and you shut it down.
That was our time, Eryndor. The only time we were ever going to get. "
His throat moved.
"And you spent it on a lie."
"I know."