Chapter The Hunt
The Hunt
COLSAR
“What the fuck?”
Colsar stands in the middle of the corridor, staring at the empty space where she had been only moments ago. He had invited her to tea. Not to serve it or perform, but to sit.
It had taken him the better part of the morning to decide that much. He had rehearsed half a dozen openings and discarded all of them until he had finally landed on the simplest truth he could manage.
I’m sorry.
That was it. No explanations, no defenses. Only the words.
He had gone too far the night before. At the ball, he had pushed her past the point of control. She had run straight into danger. Sevrin had told him how many Threns had swarmed her, how much worse it could have been. He had done that.
For weeks, he had been trying to control himself, forcing his thoughts anywhere but her.
Veiled, she had been intoxicating. Unveiled, she was something else entirely.
She fought better than most of his soldiers.
She was intelligent, observant, and unexpectedly kind.
Fuck, she had defended him to his mother when he had not deserved it.
In truth, she was everything he wanted, and he could not want her.
Not in any way that mattered. And yet she was all he could think about, and it was driving him mad.
He had known today’s apology was a risk.
After the wedding, after the ball, after the afternoon in the study with her father and brother.
He knew he had done damage. He simply had not expected her to vanish the instant he reached for her wrists.
He had only meant to tell her that this time he would pour the tea, not her.
The moment her hands began to shake, he understood. He had been there himself, when memory stopped being memory and became sensation, when the past came back as something that could still hurt. And he knew, with a clarity that made his chest ache, that he had caused it.
The goal had never been to hurt her. If anything, he had tried to make her hate him. That had always been the plan. A contract marriage worked best when attachment never took root. When expectations stayed low and when distance stayed intact.
Jessamy had helped with that. Or so he had thought. The look on Asharin’s face last night, when Jessamy leaned close and whispered whatever poison she had chosen, had nearly undone him.
He had sat there and allowed it.
Lies, of course. He had not touched Jessamy since long before Asharin came into his life, but lies worked just as well as truth when delivered at the right moment, and this time they had.
Perhaps it was all for the best. Asharin hated him now.
He was certain of it after the ball, after the tea with her family, after watching her kneel on the floor while her brother smiled.
The sight had filled him with a violence he had barely contained, not metaphorical or political but the simple desire to drive Mysin into the ground and keep going until there was nothing left to recognize.
Taking the man’s fingers had not been enough.
He should never have invited them. But once he saw Mysin strike her in the garden, once he understood the depth of that cruelty, his restraint collapsed. He needed to know how they treated her when they believed themselves safe, so he could decide how to end them.
He had not expected her father’s hatred, not like that. Colsar understood hatred. His own father had wielded it like a weapon. But Asharin was different, she was quiet and observant. There was nothing in her that invited disgust.
Watching the light drain from her face as her father spoke had been worse than the violence or the mockery. Colsar had stood there and allowed it, a failure he had not forgiven himself for.
He told himself, again, that she was not someone to want. Wanting was a weakness that invited loss, a lesson he had learned young and learned well. But even as the thought forms, he is already moving.
She is gone. He steps out into the open air, scanning the palace grounds, pulse quickening despite his efforts to remain calm.
Then he remembers the way she looked that morning: pale, exhausted, hungover, fragile in a way she would never admit. And with the memory comes his brother’s words: that there had been Thren in the forest last night.
Colsar swears under his breath.
If she is alone out there—
He exhales slowly, dragging a hand through his ash-blond hair. This is not a problem for a feeder. This is not something that can be handled with charm or hunger or blood.
Finding someone who does not want to be found requires something else, and the realization moves through him slowly.
His mouth flattens before he allows the rest of the world to recede, distractions thinning until nothing remains but instinct.
He turns inward to the form he has trusted far longer than any crown.
The forest should be the last place he expects her to go, especially with the Thren there only last night and her father’s estate bordering its edge.
The sky hangs low and gray above it, swollen with rain, the air thick and waiting.
She is not reckless, not careless enough to run toward danger without reason, is she?
Yet unease coils through him all the same, slow and unwelcome.
Colsar closes his eyes and draws in a slow breath, releasing the Prince, the politics, the careful restraint that governs daylight. He inhales not as a ruler, but as something older, something that has always known how to hunt.
His senses shift and the world rearranges itself into layers. The air separates into traces: sweat, silk, wine, fear.
Beneath it all he finds what he is looking for, faint but unmistakable. Gold and linen, and something colder that belongs only to Asharin.
He follows. The trail bends toward the Baron’s mansion.
“Fuck.”
He cannot imagine she would go inside, not willingly, not after everything. Still, he circles the outer walls, moving through the hedges and along the terrace paths like a shadow. The estate smells of arrogance and rot.
Then a crash sounds from within the house, followed by a shriek.
“Father, I must go over there!”
Fucking Yvara.
“I must.”
The Baron’s voice answers, thick with irritation. “No, you will not. You made a fool of me yesterday. Parading yourself about like a desperate whore. Especially after Prince Tamal pointed it out.”
She is a desperate whore, Colsar thinks to himself. Tamal had been a nuisance, but he had not been wrong.
“But Father,” the whore insists, “today is that wretch’s birthday. What if they plan to spoil her?”
Colsar goes still.
Birthday.
Inside, the Baron laughs. “I have never even fed her bread on her birthday. In fact, most birthdays I sent her to sleep outside with the vermin,” he says. “Dear child, I doubt she even remembers it is her birthday. And if she does, she likely shudders.”
“As the daughter of a fallen woman should,” the whore answers primly.
Colsar feels something then. Rage, yes. It would be so easy to crash through the window and tear them both apart.
But another emotion, stronger than the rage, begins to take hold of him entirely.
An intense, unwanted awareness that she is alone today, and that she has likely always been alone on this day.
For some reason, that bothers him.
He does not care for birthdays. He never has. They are markers of survival, nothing more. But he wonders, briefly, whether she has ever had one without punishment attached to it.
He moves on. She is not inside. He knows it before he reaches the steps. Her scent does not cross the threshold but bends away from the mansion, toward the woods.
“The forest,” he growls to himself.
It is riddled with Thren, soul-hunting creatures that should not even be this far inland, and she runs straight toward them. Even after getting attacked last night, she runs straight toward them.
The fucking forest. She is more trouble than she is worth.
Thunder cracks overhead, low and rolling. He usually loves the rain, but not like this. Somewhere out there she is alone, hungover and exhausted, raw from memory. And if the nightmares that plagued her at tea time have found her again, if her hands are shaking and her breathing shallow—
Rain. Cold. Thren. Really, Ash Princess? The fucking forest?
Fuck.
The truth is, he will always be more predator than prince.
He breaks into a run.