Chapter 28 The Intrusion
The Intrusion
One evening after the library, I return to my chambers and draw a bath.
The chamber still holds the warmth of the steam when I step out, the air cool against my damp skin.
My nightgown clings where the water has not yet dried, the fabric soft and thin, my hair heavy as it trails down my back.
I move toward the table, reaching for the cloth I left there—
The door opens. The sound is quiet, almost careful, but it does not belong. I turn just enough to see him before he reaches me.
Hurstinal.
His eyes are pale in a way that never softens, cold and flat as they settle on me.
His hair falls dark against his face, too dark, a sharp contrast that makes the rest of him look drawn, almost hollow.
His hands are already lifting as he steps inside—long, thin, the fingers bony and precise—and something about the way he moves feels practiced. Controlled.
He closes the door behind him without looking. The scent reaches me a second later. Damp, like cloth left too long in shadow, something that should have been clean, turned sour.
I don’t make it another step.
The force hits before I can speak, before I can fully turn.
My back meets the wall, breath leaving me in a quiet rush, and at the same time something unseen closes through my body, threading into my limbs and holding them there.
I push against it immediately, instinct driving hard through muscle and bone, but nothing answers.
My arms remain where they were, my fingers still half-curled, my voice caught before it can form, trapped beneath the weight of whatever he is using.
A blade presses low against my stomach. Too low to be anything else. “If you move,” he says, his voice close, almost intimate in the worst way, “I’ll drive it straight through your belly.”
The point shifts slightly, marking the place. I strain against the hold again, harder this time, forcing everything I have against it, but it doesn’t give. The resistance meets something immovable, something that absorbs the effort and leaves me exactly where I am.
“You think you’re better than me,” he continues, the words uneven with something that has been waiting for this moment. “Just like the rest of them.”
His hand closes around my arm, fingers pressing in, as if testing what he already knows he can control. “But you’re not.”
He steps closer, his presence pressing in around me, his breath warm near my temple, carrying that same damp, stale scent.
“You walk through this place like you own it,” he says. “Like your blood makes you something.”
The knife remains where it is, never lifting, never easing.
I push again, trying to force even a single finger to move, trying to break through whatever holds me, but the effort dissolves into nothing, swallowed before it reaches my body.
“And you,” he says, his voice sharpening, “hold your head so high like you’re not what you are.”
His grip shifts. “A whore.”
The word lingers.
“I heard your father sold you to a dog prince,” he continues, almost idly, as though this is a story he enjoys telling, “and now you walk around with a bastard in your belly.”
“You’re nothing more than a worthless whore carrying a bastard,” he says, his voice low with something that has been building far longer than this moment. “And yet Uralish hands you an entire army like it means nothing.”
The knife presses harder against my stomach.
“I should have been the one they followed,” he continues. “I trained here. I earned it. And you walk in and take it without doing anything at all.”
Something in me surges against the hold, anger threading through it.
“My son is not a bastard,” I manage, forcing the words through the pressure that holds me. “And my husband will kill you for speaking to me this way.”
He laughs, low and disbelieving. “Your husband isn’t here,” he says. “He is either dead or has abandoned you. Everyone knows it, including you. Stop lying, whore.”
The blade presses again, a quiet promise.
“You’ll be alone,” he adds, softer now. “With a child. No one to protect you.”
His fingers continue their path. “I am not like them,” he murmurs. “I don’t get to walk in and out of these wards whenever I please.”
I push again, harder, driving against the invisible restraint until something burns beneath the effort, but my body remains exactly where he left it.
His hand leaves my arm and moves, unhurried, tracing along my side as though there is no reason to rush.
“Unlike you, I don’t have royal blood. I am bound here,” he continues, quieter now. “Same as I have always been.”
The knife shifts, a reminder.
“For years,” he says, “we waited for you to return. That was the story, wasn’t it? The lost heir comes back with the Thren at her side. A sealed bond and the wards would finally open again.”
His breath brushes my skin. “A way out.”
His hand drifts higher, slow. “And then you arrive with nothing,” he continues. “No bond. No control. Just a bastard in your belly and a claim to a legacy and army you don’t deserve.”
The blade presses harder.
“You were supposed to be my freedom,” he says. “And you couldn’t even do that right.”
His hand drifts higher. “They say whatever power you have is between your legs,” he continues, a note of curiosity threading through the words, “that the feeder king and the bastard prince of Thrykis both want it.”
A breath of laughter follows.
“And now the dog prince has abandoned his bitch.”
His hand closes over my breast. The pressure is immediate, painful, his grip tightening as though confirming something for himself.
I force everything I have against the hold, every instinct, every ounce of strength, but nothing breaks.
My body remains fixed, forced to endure the contact without even the relief of movement.
“So I want to know,” he says, quieter now, close enough that the words brush against my skin, “what it’s like.”
The knife presses again.
“Is it good,” he asks, “or is it nothing at all?”
His fingers catch the strap of my gown.
“I plan on making it painful,” he adds, almost thoughtfully. “I will fuck you so rough you’ll wonder if you’ve lost your precious bastard.” He sneers “Alarna’s future.”
He laughs. “Then I’ll ram myself into that tight ass of yours until it bleeds.” His hand is still on my breast, his fingernails digging into my nipple harsh enough to break skin. I can see the blood seeping through the white of my nightgown.
Part of me begins to panic. Of all the things I have endured, this has never been one of them. If this happens, it won’t just be my dignity. Every soft moment with Colsar I will think of this.
The fabric shifts beneath his hand. “Everyone will wonder,” he continues, his voice lowering further, satisfaction creeping into it, “why the queen heir limps.”
“Either way,” he says, “I’m taking it today.”
The strap slides.
“You’ll live with it,” he continues. “You won’t be able to look at me without remembering. You won’t be able to look at him when he finds out what you are.”
The hold on my body remains absolute. The blade stays anchored where it is. His hand does not leave me.
And still I push against his power, my nose begins to bleed, but I do not stop. The pressure of his hold twists through my power, forcing it back on itself until it spills out of me instead. I can feel it trickling down my cheek as it leaks from my eyes.
Nothing moves.
And beneath all of it, something in me shifts. There is more than one way to win. He thinks this is control. He thinks this is the moment that defines me. He does not understand what comes next.
Idiot.
I lift my eyes to him from beneath my lashes, letting the movement be small enough that it feels like surrender instead of defiance, something soft slipping through the space he believes he controls.
“If it’s any comfort,” I say, forming the words carefully through the pressure that holds me, “I happen to like it rough.”
His grip pauses, not releasing, not retreating, but shifting just enough for me to feel the crack in it.
“And since the moment I met you,” I continue, my voice low and unhurried, as though there is nowhere else I need to be, “I thought we might be… aligned.”
The knife remains pressed to my belly, its point marking the place with quiet insistence, but his attention lifts, drawn upward, caught between suspicion and the promise I am offering him.
“You can keep me like this,” I murmur, allowing the words to soften further, to curl around him. “I don’t mind it.”
A breath moves between us, thick and damp, carrying the sourness of him with it.
“I’m enjoying it.”
He studies my face, searching for something that would betray me, something that would give him reason to doubt what I’m offering, but I give him nothing except what he wants to see.
“Release my hand,” I say, just above a whisper. “Let me show you.”
For a moment, he holds me exactly where I am, as though weighing the risk against the reward he has already decided belongs to him, and then the pressure around one arm begins to loosen, slipping away slowly, inch by inch, until sensation finally returns.
I let my hand rise as though guided by him, as though it belongs to him, placing it against his chest where his breath moves unevenly beneath my palm.
The contact draws something from him at once, a shift in his body, a tightening that has nothing to do with control and everything to do with what he thinks is about to happen.
My fingers move downward, unhurried, tracing the length of him through the fabric, feeling the tension there, the anticipation he cannot hide, the weakness he mistakes for power.
His mouth parts, and the sound that escapes him is low and unguarded, the knife at my belly dipping slightly as his attention narrows to the path my hand follows.
I let it stretch, let him sink into it, let him forget the way he has me pinned, the way the blade rests where it does, until the moment belongs entirely to me.
When my hand reaches the edge of his trousers, I pause, lifting my eyes to his again, holding him there, suspended.
“May I continue, Highness?” I ask sweetly.
“Yes,” he breathes, the word falling from him without thought.
My hand slips inside. Warmth surrounds my fingers, heat and pulse and the fragile edge of him unraveling beneath my touch, his body leaning into it, his control thinning with every second he allows this to continue.
His mouth opens again. The sound that follows fractures before it can become anything else.
The scream tears through the room as I drive everything into that single point, light and force moving through me in a surge that leaves no space for hesitation. I close my hand and rip, feeling the resistance give beneath it, the moment breaking open in a way that cannot be undone.
His power collapses instantly.
The hold that bound my body vanishes as he falls, folding inward, his face draining as the pain overtakes him, blood spilling fast and bright across the floor.
I draw my hand back, his testicles caught in my grasp, slick and heavy, undeniable in what they are, the blood that follows warm against my skin as it streaks across my wrist and the pale fabric of my gown.
For a moment, I remain where I am, my breath moving through me, the trembling that had been held beneath his control now rising, not breaking me, only sharpening everything into something clearer.
Then I turn toward the door. “Guards.”
They come quickly, the sound of their boots carrying through the hall before they appear, the door opening wide as they enter and take in the room all at once—him on the ground, twisted and writhing, the blood, my hand, what I hold within it.
Shock passes across their faces, but it does not stop them.
“He attempted to assault me,” I say, the words cutting cleanly through whatever they might have asked. “Take him.”
They move without hesitation, binding him, lifting him despite the way his body fights against it, despite the blood that continues to pour, despite the broken sounds that spill from him as they drag him upright.
I watch it. I let myself see it.
“Bring him to the square,” I add.
The trembling has changed, no longer held beneath my skin or contained within me, but moving freely now, rising like heat and spreading through me with a quiet insistence that will not be stilled, carrying with it a clarity that feels clean and certain, as though something long building has finally taken its proper shape.
I am done enduring what should never have been endured, done allowing men who are less than me to reach as though I belong to them, as though I could ever be something they are entitled to take, and as their faces move through my mind—the Baron, Mysin, Hurstinal, all of them—it becomes something final, something that leaves no room for hesitation, no room for what I once permitted simply because I believed I had no other choice.
Whatever I once tolerated has been burned away, leaving nothing behind but certainty, the kind that runs deep and does not waver, the kind that changes everything around it without asking.
My fingers tighten slightly around what I hold, the weight of it grounding me, anchoring me in the present and in the choice I have already made, a choice that cannot be undone and does not need to be, because it is right, because it is necessary, because it ensures that what comes after me will not carry the same stain.
I turn to the guard next to me. “Go to Hurstinal’s chambers and bring me every bit of gold and coin in his room.”
The guard looks nervous. “Majesty—”
“All of it,” I cut in.
The rest of the guards stand in the corridor, staring at me.
“Move,” I say, my voice quiet, but carrying all the same.
And they do.