Chapter 13 #2
Because if the prince is here and Dawson isn’t, then there are only so many possible answers, and none of them are good.
Iris’s hands pause over his ribs.
Kael leans in a fraction without meaning to, every line of him suddenly rigid.
Aelith drags in a breath that sounds like swallowing glass. Then he says, “With her.”
No one speaks.
No one has to.
The queen.
Dawson is with the queen.
The room seems to contract around those words until all I can hear is blood pounding in my ears and the faint rasp of Aelith’s breathing as Iris resumes stitching him up.
Varek doesn’t move. But through the bond, I feel the shock run through him like a hard flare under the skin, followed almost instantly by cold calculation. He’s already turning what he knows, weighing it, asking a hundred silent questions before the first spoken one arrives.
“How?” Shanae asks, and her voice is all knife. “What happened?”
Aelith closes his eyes for one second too long. When he opens them again, there’s murder in them. “She knows,” he says.
And that changes the room all over again.
For a long moment after those words land, nobody says anything.
The silence doesn’t feel empty. It feels strained, packed with implication that breathing in it takes effort.
Iris keeps stitching Aelith’s side with steady, efficient hands, but even she is listening.
Around the room, every face has hardened.
Every body has adjusted without moving very much at all.
She knows.
Not suspects. Not worries. Not guesses.
Knows.
The distinction between those things is the difference between being hunted and being marked for execution.
“What exactly does she know?” Varek asks.
His voice stays even, but I can feel the bond pull taut around the words. Not with emotion. Not yet. Control sharpened down into an edge.
Aelith’s mouth twists. Whether in pain, anger, or humiliation, I can’t tell.
“That I was passing information.” He breathes in carefully when Iris presses near the wound. “That I was not returning to her court in good faith. That Dawson matters and can be used as a bargaining chip.” His jaw flexes. “That I matter less.”
The last line comes out dry and cruel enough to count as a joke if there were anything funny about this.
Kael speaks before anyone else can. “How did she discover it?”
Aelith’s one good eye cuts to him. “I am unsure which answer would please you more. That I made a mistake, or that your queen has become more competent than any of us allowed for.”
“She is not my queen,” Kael says.
No volume. No drama. Just fact.
Aelith’s face shifts in a way that might once have been amusement, then pain and exhaustion drag it elsewhere. “No,” he says, quieter now. “Apparently not mine either.”
Sonny folds his arms and leans one shoulder against the wall, all false ease wrapped around very real tension. “Can someone explain the bit where you turned up here half-dead and alone? Because from where I’m standing, that looks less like strategic retreat and more like spectacular disaster.”
“That is because it was both,” Aelith says.
Iris ties off the final stitch with more force than necessary. “If he keeps talking instead of lying down, it’ll become just the second one.”
He ignores her.
Varek doesn’t.
“You will answer,” he says, and there’s no room in those words for princely ego or badly timed sarcasm. “Then you will rest.”
Aelith stares at him for a beat too long.
The old version of him—the prince, the heir, the male who expected obedience as a birthright—still flickers under his skin.
But Dawson isn’t here, and he’s bleeding on a rebel table in a hidden settlement only because he had nowhere else left to run.
Some truths strip rank right out of a person.
Finally, he exhales. “She baited the trap,” he says. “I simply failed to see it before it closed.”
The room stays still.
“She let us believe we retained freedom of movement within the palace,” he continues, eyes fixed on the ceiling now as if the words are easier said to stone than to faces.
“Limited, watched, but still present. Dawson and I were… useful as spectacle. A sign that all was forgiven. That the prince had returned. That his human had been accepted.”
Sonny lets out a short, humourless breath. “Yeah, that sounds exactly like the kind of nightmare dressed up as a family reunion I’d expect from her.”
Aelith doesn’t respond to that. He’s beyond humour now.
“Messages began disappearing,” he says. “Small things at first. Notes that should have reached servants. Requests that returned strangely delayed. Doors that should have remained unlocked were not. Faces I knew all my life stopped speaking plainly in Dawson’s presence.”
“Surveillance tightened,” Shanae says.
“Yes.”
“And you kept sending messages anyway?” Kael asks.
At that, Aelith turns his head and actually looks at him. “I had to.”
It’s the first fully honest thing he’s said in this room, not because the rest are lies, but because this one comes out stripped to the bone.
Kael’s expression doesn’t soften, but his shoulders ease by a fraction.
“What message did she catch?” Varek asks.
Aelith’s mouth goes hard. “A route change. A guard rotation. Something small enough that it should not have mattered and large enough that, in the right hands, it did.”
“Dawson carried it?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Aelith’s gaze snaps to me so fast, I feel it like a strike.
“No.” The word is vicious.
For half a second, nobody breathes. Then he closes his eyes and drags himself back under control. “No,” he says again, quieter now. “He did not fail me.”
That tells me enough.
The prince did.
Or at least he thinks he did.
Aelith breathes through his nose and stares at the ceiling again. “She summoned us together after the evening meal. No audience. No court. No witnesses beyond her inner guard. She spoke to Dawson in English.”
That catches my attention.
“She asked him if he was comfortable,” Aelith says, the words turning to acid in his mouth. “Whether I had treated him well. Whether he had chosen me freely.”
My skin goes cold. Because I know exactly what kind of weapon polite questions can become when asked by the wrong person.
“When I objected, she told me to be silent,” he continues. “Then she repeated the information from the intercepted message. Every word. She asked whether I wished to revise my understanding of my relationship with Dawson.”
Sonny mutters a curse.
Aelith laughs once, low and broken. “I declined.”
That, I can believe.
“So she had you seized,” Kael says.
“No.” Aelith’s fingers flex against the table. “She had Dawson seized.”
The words hit the room like a blast wave.
I know it because I feel the reactions before I fully see them. Rage from Sonny, quick and hot. Horror from somewhere behind me, maybe one of the younger fighters clustered in the hall. Varek goes colder, not hotter, which is somehow worse.
Aelith keeps speaking because stopping now would probably kill him.
“She wanted me still enough to listen. She knows me too well to think threats against my person would do much. Against him—” His jaw works. “—that proved more effective.”
The room is silent except for the drip of blood into a basin beside the table and the distant movement of fighters in the hall.
Then I say the thing no one wants to say and everybody is already thinking. “What does she want in exchange?”
Aelith turns his head slowly and meets my eyes. “She wants Jamie.”
There it is. Not abstract danger. Not future possibility. Not one more thing on the long list of ways the world is broken.
A twelve-year-old boy has become a bargaining chip in royal hands.
“She named him?” Shanae asks.
“She did.”
Jack is going to lose his mind.
Caly, too, quiet as he can pretend to be. And Jamie—Christ, Jamie, with all that bloody determination and none of the caution age is supposed to bring. I dread to think how Solan is going to react.
“Why?” Sonny demands. “Beyond the obvious flavour of evil, I mean.”
Aelith’s good eye closes briefly. “Because she believes he matters to the storms.”
I scrunch my brows, confused.
Varek shifts his attention. “Explain.”
“She has fragments of my father’s records,” Aelith says. “Not all. Not enough. But enough to know that particular human arrivals coincide with particular atmospheric events. Enough to know some are more… responsive than others.”
A memory sparks in the back of my mind—Jamie standing under strange light, all angles and stubborn certainty, saying he thinks he’s meant to be here. The thought turns my gut.
“She thinks she can use him,” I say.
“Yes.”
Sonny pushes off the wall. “That’s not happening.”
“No,” Varek says, and there’s iron in the word. “It is not.”
Aelith drags himself up on one elbow despite Iris’s noise of protest. “But we can exchange him.”
The room stops.
Not metaphorically. Not internally.
Actually stops.
Even the noise in the hall seems to recede under the weight of those five words.
“You can’t be serious,” Shanae says.
Aelith looks at her like she has asked whether blood runs red. “My mate is with her.”
Sonny’s face hardens instantly. “So your plan is to hand over a kid?”
“My plan is to get Dawson back.”
The answer cracks through the room raw and immediate, all princely mask gone. For the first time since he arrived, Aelith doesn’t sound entitled. He sounds terrified.
That should make him easier to stomach. It doesn’t.
“Not happening,” I say.
Aelith swings his gaze to me, fury flaring so fast, I almost admire it. “You would let him die, then? He only went to the palace to save you, or have you forgotten?”