Chapter 4 #2
That one hit harder.
Dara saw it in the way her father’s mouth tightened.
There.
That was the real cost.
To cooperate now was to admit he had lost control of his own machine badly enough that it needed to be taken apart in front of him.
Still, after a moment, Regulus nodded again. “Of course, Your Highness.”
Valerius held his gaze for one long second, measuring perhaps whether the answer was sincerity or exhaustion.
Then he inclined his head. “Good.”
The room quieted.
Not settled. Just shifted.
A line had been crossed.
Not arrest. Not punishment. Not ruin.
But something real.
Ambervale was no longer merely under suspicion. It was under intervention.
And the intervention wore a crown.
Dara sat very still, absorbing it.
Her father was not immediately doomed. That mattered.
Silas had gone to ground. That mattered too.
And whatever came next would now move through the hands of the man seated across from her—the one she now had to call Your Highness without sounding as if she were personally insulting the monarchy.
A challenge, honestly.
Valerius turned his gaze to her then.
And just like that, the room changed again.
Not officially. Not politically. Personally.
“Lady Lynara,” he said, “your movements will remain restricted for the time being.”
There it was.
Dara did not move.
Not because she was calm. Because moving would have revealed too much.
She lifted her chin slightly. “Restricted,” she repeated. “What a graceful word.”
Leon’s eyes flicked away very quickly.
Valerius, curse him, remained composed. “Until the immediate threat is more fully contained.”
“Of course, Your Highness.”
There was just enough shape on the title this time to qualify as elegant dissatisfaction.
Her father cleared his throat. “Lynara—”
“No, it’s alright,” Dara said, still looking at Valerius. “I understand. Apparently attempted kidnapping now results in decorative confinement.”
Leon nearly died.
Edric looked at the far wall with all the discipline of a man refusing to participate in treason-adjacent amusement.
Valerius’s expression, to Dara’s increasing outrage, threatened amusement again. “This is for your protection.”
“Yes,” Dara said coolly. “That phrase has become very popular around me.”
A beat.
Then, because she was not stupid and because the truth was unfortunately the truth, she added, “I understand the reasoning.”
That mattered.
She wanted him to hear it.
She was not resisting because she failed to grasp danger. She was resisting because she greatly resented danger being allowed to redecorate her life.
Valerius seemed to hear exactly that. His gaze steadied on hers for a moment longer than propriety strictly required. “I know.”
That was worse than if he had argued.
Dara looked away first, which she resented instantly.
Regulus, perhaps deciding that enough of the room had already become intolerably specific, reached for the teapot and said, with the desperate practicality of a man trying to restore civilization through refreshment, “Tea.”
No one objected.
Grace moved at once to assist, and for the next few moments the room rearranged itself around cups, saucers, and the soft sounds of poured tea. The shift was small, but it broke the worst of the intensity.
Dara accepted a cup. Valerius did the same. Leon looked as though tea was beneath the scale of the morning but was willing to suffer through it. Edric declined with military finality.
After the first sip, Regulus said, quieter now, “Whatever else I have failed to do, I did not fail in being grateful she is alive.”
The room still held.
Dara looked at her father.
He did not say it dramatically. He did not say it well. But he meant it.
Valerius’s expression did not soften, exactly, but something in him acknowledged the sentence. “As am I.”
Dara took another sip of tea because otherwise she might have had to respond to that and she was absolutely not doing that in front of witnesses.
No. Not happening.
Instead she set the cup down carefully and asked, “And if Montrose resurfaces?”
Business again. Safer.
Valerius answered at once. “Then I intend to be informed before he has time to disappear twice.”
That was a Crown Prince sentence if she had ever heard one.
Dara narrowed her eyes at him over the rim of her cup. “Comforting, Your Highness.”
That did it.
The amusement returned—not broad, not careless, but unmistakable.
He knew exactly what she was doing with the title. And infuriatingly, he seemed to enjoy it.
Dara looked away before she did something rash, like throw a biscuit at the future of the kingdom.
For a moment, the room settled around the soft clink of teacups. Then Valerius’s gaze rested on her again.
“Lady Lynara,” he said, quieter now, “there is one matter I wished to ask directly.”
Dara looked back at him. “That sounds ominous.”
“It is merely incomplete.”
Which, coming from him, somehow sounded worse.
“Do you remember anything after the attack on the road?” Valerius asked.
Dara blinked once.
The road, the archmage, the spell—the sudden crushing exhaustion that had fallen over her thoughts like heavy velvet.
Slowly, she shook her head. “No.” Her brow furrowed slightly. “Once the sleep spell hit, I don’t remember anything else.”
Valerius watched her carefully. “Nothing from the holding site?”
“Holding site?”
“A temporary structure outside the city,” he said. “You were taken there before we recovered you.”
Recovered. Right. That.
Dara searched her memory anyway and found only darkness, fractured impressions of movement, and then waking safely back at the estate.
Nothing useful.
“I don’t remember any of it,” she admitted.
A brief silence followed.
Not tense exactly. Measured.
Then Valerius said, “When we arrived, the site’s interior had already been destroyed.”
Dara paused. “Destroyed?”
“One of the men holding you was found dead,” Valerius said evenly. “Others were missing. The interior had sustained significant damage.”
Oh.
That was—
Actually somewhat alarming.
Dara frowned slightly. “I assume that was your men?”
“Not entirely.”
Well.
That was a deeply unhelpful answer.
Dara kept her expression neutral. Cai.
He appeared on her shoulder. Mm?
Do you know what happened there?
A delicate pause.
No idea, Cai replied. Very mysterious. Extremely dramatic. Mortals are always exploding into problems when unattended.
Dara narrowed her eyes faintly at her teacup.
That sounded suspiciously like nonsense.
Unfortunately, it also sounded exactly like Cai.
The conversation moved on after that, though the question lingered unpleasantly at the back of Dara’s mind.
By the time the meeting ended, the shape of the world had become clearer.
Silas was gone. Her father was compromised, but not yet destroyed.
The deeper rot lay lower in the administration.
The estate would remain under royal pressure.
Somewhere in the middle of all that sat the deeply unhelpful mystery of whatever had destroyed the holding site before Valerius arrived.
And the Crown Prince was not going anywhere.
As Grace opened the door for her, Dara rose and gave one final impeccable curtsey. “Your Highness.”
Again, perfect.
Again, sharpened just enough to count.
Valerius bowed in return, eyes steady on hers. “Lady Lynara.”
She turned and left with all the dignity available to a woman whose home had been converted into someone else’s operations center and whose life was now, for reasons still personally offensive, entangled with a man too powerful to ignore and far too calm to be trusted.
Behind her, she could practically feel Leon trying not to laugh.
Dara kept walking.
Because one thing had become very clear over the last twenty-four hours: accepting reality did not mean she had to be pleasant about it.