Chapter
Thirty
Elara
wo days bleed into one another, gray and suffocating.
They’re long, dull stretches where the sun doesn’t quite rise andT the clocks in the palace seem to tick slower, as if the rot in the walls has infected time itself. I move in a daze between Daron’s room, Mother’s, and my own, a ghost haunting a corridor of dying things.
Two days of not seeing either man.
My nerves are frayed ropes, snapping with every shadow that shifts.
The pot I brought Daron earlier is empty—eaten or spilled, I don’t know. So I go back down.
I carry the empty pot through the twilight of the lower hallways. The servants I pass keep their heads down, eyes averted. They know. Everyone
knows that something is wrong—a tension that has all our spines straightened.
I push open the heavy oak door leading to the kitchens, but the usual clamor of pots and pans is gone. It’s late, the fires are banked. I get the broth, ladle it out, head back.
My path takes me past the greenhouse. The glass structure looms in the gathering dark, condensation weeping down the panes, blurring the twisted shapes of shadows.
I grip the pot tighter, the ceramic hot against my palms, and quicken my pace. I just want to get back to Daron. I just want— Metal clanks somewhere.
I jolt, nearly dropping the soup as a figure stumbles out of the humid dark, silhouetted against the moonlight. He sways, catches himself on the frame, and then lurches forward. Toward me.
“You!” The roar is slurry, thick with rage and liquor.
He looks like a ruin all over again, his white shirt unbuttoned halfway down his chest, stained dark with wine or dirt. His hair is a tangled golden mess, and his eyes…his eyes are bloodshot pits of fury, burning with a frantic, unhinged light.
“Kael?” I take a step back, fear prickling up my spine. “Your Majesty, you’re—”
“You ruined it!” He lunges at me, closing the distance with terrifying
speed for a man who sways.
I gasp, stumbling backward.
He’s faster.
Kael grabs my upper arm, his fingers digging into my flesh. The pot slips from my hands, hitting the stone with a wet, heavy crack. Pottery shatters. Hot broth splashes over my boots and the hem of my dress, but Kael doesn’t even flinch.
“You ruined everything!” he bellows, shaking me. His breath hits my face, a noxious cloud of sour wine. “Everything I laid out. Everything I held in place. Everything I was about to—”
“Let go of me!” I struggle, clawing at his hand, but his grip is iron.
“Kael, you’re drunk!”
“Drunk?” He laughs, a harsh, jagged sound that scrapes against the
glass walls. “You stupid harlot!”
He shoves me backward.
I stumble, my back slamming against the metal frame of the greenhouse so hard the glass panes rattle in their casings. Pain flares in my shoulder, but fear eclipses it instantly. I’ve seen him angry before, but this is different.
This isn’t the rage of a king; this is the flailing violence of a drunk.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about!” I cry, pressing myself against the glass.
“Liar!” He slams a hand against the pane beside my head. “I know where you’ve been. I know what you’ve been doing.” He leans in, his nose inches from mine, his eyes swimming with a toxic mix of hatred and tears.
“Under the sheets with that…that bastard!”
The blood drains from my face.
I don’t understand. Is he accusing me of plotting with Vale? That’s high treason. Or did Miss Hampshire report what she saw at the bottom of the tower? That’s disloyalty. I don’t know which one it is. Between the two, I’d rather defend myself for the latter.
“It…it wasn’t like that,” I stammer, my heart hammering against my ribs. I have to fix this. I have to talk him down, or this will end badly.
“Kael, please, listen to me. I went to him, yes, but—”
“So you admit it?” He looks at me with wide, horrified eyes, as if I just confessed to murder. “You admit you let that bastard…corrupt you?”
“I didn’t let him corrupt anything!” I cry out, desperate to calm him. “I went to his tower to ask him about the curse!”
Kael stares at me. He blinks once, twice, the information processing slowly through the haze of alcohol. “Tower?”
“Y-yes,” I stammer. “He…he kissed me, but I pulled away! Kael, I swear to you, nothing else happened.”
His expression twists. The horror deepens, liquefying into a nausea so profound he looks ready to retch. “Repeat that.”
“Nothing else happened! I swear—”
“Not that!” he roars, his voice trembling. “He kissed you!?”
“Just once!” I plead, the lie spilling out, desperate to save my skin. “I swear, Kael, nothing more happened! I wouldn’t betray you like that. I
pushed him away immediately!”
Silence stretches thin and taut.
Then he starts to laugh.
It starts low in his chest, a rumble of disbelief, before erupting into a full-blown, hysterical cackle. He throws his head back, laughing at the dark
sky, at the glass, at me.
It’s a chilling, broken sound.
Loud. Unhinged.
The fine hairs on my arms stand up. “I swear, I rejected him immediately.”
He laughs even harder. His head tips back again, throat exposed, crown glinting cruelly in the moonlight. Then he drops his chin and looks at me again, and whatever is in his eyes makes my blood freeze over.
“You…told…him.” His face contorts, rage snapping his features tight.
“You told him about the letter!”
“I didn’t!” The denial flies out before I can think.
“Liar!”
He lunges. This time, there’s no clumsy stumble. He slams me back against the greenhouse glass with a force that squeezes my lungs, one pane cracking. His hands clamp onto my shoulders, fingers digging past the cotton, bruising the muscle.
“Where is she?” he bellows, his face twisting into jagged lines of pure aggression. He shoves me again, my head thudding painfully against the metal frame. “Where did he take her, huh? Tell me!”
“Take who?” I’m sobbing now, terror replacing confusion. “I don’t know who you’re talking about!”
“Don’t play the fool!” He releases one shoulder, only to grab my jaw, forcing my head up, his thumb digging into my cheekbone hard enough to bring tears to my eyes. “Did he hurt her?” His voice cracks, fracturing on nothing short of panic. “Answer me! Is she dead?”
“I don’t even know who she is!” I shriek, my hands flailing uselessly against his madness. “Kael, stop! You’re hurting me!”
He draws back his other hand, looking like he might strike me, but instead he slams his fist into the glass beside my ear. Crash! Shards rain down on us, glittering and sharp as he screams, “Where is she?!”
I scream, cowering away, covering my head. “I don’t know. Your
brother never said!”
Kael freezes. “My what?”
“He told me everything,” I whimper, the words tumbling out of me as my mind claws for the nearest rope. “That Maeryn was his mother. How you stole his crown—and I don’t blame you! I don’t!” My voice cracks, a sob threatening to spill, and I seize it, turn it into something sharper. “That’s
how he got to me, alright? He made me pity him, but I swear, the kiss meant nothing!”
Kael just stares. His mouth hangs open slightly, releasing a single scoff before he gives a slow shake of his head. “The audacity of that bastard.”
Then he starts laughing again. But this isn’t the hysterical laughter of before; this is darker, sharper. It sounds like bones snapping.
“He stole my misery!” Kael spits, voice shaking with rage. “He took my mother’s blood, my childhood, my nightmares—just so you’d open your goddamn mouth for him!”
His last shout has me jump all over again. “What?”
“I have no brother!” Kael steps closer, eyes blazing, blue turned almost black in torchlight. “My father had one son. Me!”
“But…Maeryn…” No. None of this makes any sense. “He told me that the curse went to the wrong person, that the bloodline was no longer intact.
He told me that Maeryn was his mother.”
“Maeryn was my mother!” Kael strikes his chest, the sound hollow and hard. “She never held me, never kissed me. Never even fucking looked at
me, but yes, that bitch birthed me.”
My breath hitches. “No…that’s—”
“I watched her die!” His voice shatters on the last word, then hardens again. “I watched as my father cut her throat in the royal chamber. Ran to her. Tried to make her look at me. And then…” He shakes his head, laugh turning ragged. “Then my true mother came to the palace.”
My veins freeze over. Not the one who birthed him—the one who finally showed him love.
“Ophelia,” I whisper, voice snagging on that name like cloth on a nail.
“They brought me to the painter’s chamber.” His voice is soft, nothing but a whisper. “Told me to sit still. Told me to smile. Told me to take her hand so we’d look…like a family.” He drags the back of his hand across his mouth like he can wipe the memory off. He can’t. “I wouldn’t. I didn’t know her. I didn’t want her touching me. I thought—” Kael’s gaze goes unfocused, like he’s seeing that sunlit room again: dust in the air, paint on cloth, the smell of oils and old wood. “She reached into her sleeve,” he says, and his mouth trembles. “And she pulled out a stupid little toy— boxwood, carved into a horse. Blue thread at its mane.” His breath breaks on a sound that might have been a laugh in another life. “A ridiculous thing.
A child’s thing. She held it out like it was treasure.”
The memory of that diary entry slams into my chest, heart cracking clean down the middle. “Kael…”
“She smiled at me. Not a polite smile for court, not a painted one. A real one.” He squeezes his eyes shut, and when he opens them again, they’re drowning. “And she looked at me—really looked. So, I stole a rose,” he says. “From the greenhouse. Thorns bit me, and I didn’t care. I carried it to her room like I was bringing her a treasure, too.” His eyes squeeze shut again, tears spilling faster now. “And when I held it out…she sneezed. God, she sneezed so damn hard I thought she’d shake the walls down.” A wet laugh slips through the sob and dies immediately. “She thanked me, and she put that stupid rose in a vase in her room and just…kept sneezing.”
The pieces of the puzzle clash together in my mind, pressing into alignment. The painting. How he refused to take Ophelia’s hand at first.
How could I have missed this?
“I tried to save her. I interfered. I begged. I threatened.” Kael looks back at me then, and the devastation in his gaze is so naked it feels like a wound.
“And after I watched her die, too, I erased Maeryn from my lineage and put Ophelia in the place she deserved.” Kael steps in close again, breath hot and bitter. “And I swore I would break this curse.”
Kael’s face twists, the softness of memory snapping. The tears on his lashes don’t dry; they sharpen, turning into something that looks too much like hate.
“And I was close.” He jabs a finger at my chest, hard enough that it thumps my ribs through the fabric. “Until you ruined everything!”
My chest curls in on itself. “I don’t know what I did.”
“Oh, I know.” Kael steps closer, breath sour with drink and fury, eyes bright with a manic, terrible clarity. “From the beginning, I suspected that he sent you, albeit a bit more delicately than how he tried to shove that kitchen girl into my bed. I let him think I’m smitten with you…and perhaps I am.” The cold tip of his nose presses against my temple, letting a shudder pebble my skin with how he’s inhaling me. “I needed him sure that his plan was working. I needed him distracted. Because I had it laid out!” His voice fractures into a shout so violent, it makes the torches tremble. “And then you—” He grabs my shoulders and shakes once, hard enough my teeth click. “What did he do with her?!”
My stomach drops through the floorboards. “Kael, I don’t know who you’re talking about. I don’t know what he did with—” My voice breaks on
a shake of breath I can’t control. “I swear, I thought Vale was your brother.
Who is he?”
“Vale? Is that what he calls himself?” His chuckle vibrates through those fingers he still clamps around my shoulders with bruising strength.
“Oh, you stupid, stupid girl.” The whites of his eyes gleam in the torchlight, red-rimmed and wild. Then he leans in, his sharp breath scraping my skin as he whispers, “There is a place every soul goes to eventually, the low ground where gold means nothing and blood means everything. He owns that place; he rules it. And he waits for us there, in the valley of death.”
For a heartbeat, I don’t understand those words. They’re nonsense.
Noise. They slide past my ears like water past stone. Until the last one
lands.
Death.
The air leaves my lungs in a thin, useless pull. My stomach turns as if the floor dropped out from under me, and for a moment, I swear I can feel the imprint of Vale’s hands all over again—warm on my waist, fingers in my hair, his mouth at my throat—only now the memory curdles, wrong in a way I can’t name.
“No.” No, that’s impossible. “You’re…you’re drunk. You’re angry, and you’re drunk, and you’re trying to scare me.”
But then why is my skin prickling everywhere? Why is cold sweat licking my spine? Why does my throat tighten until swallowing hurts? And didn’t the entry of Ophelia’s coronation mention Death? If he appeared in his divine form…doesn’t that indicate there’s another?
No. It can’t be.
“It’s not true.” My knees threaten to fold, so I brace a hand against the greenhouse frame, fingers trembling so hard they scrape glass. “He’s a man.
He… he cried.”
Kael’s grip doesn’t loosen. If anything, it steadies, like he’s holding me up just to watch me break. “Did he?” he murmurs, and the softness in it is cruelty. “Or did he show you water, and you called it tears?”
My vision blurs. I blink hard, but it doesn’t clear. It only makes the torchlight smear into streaks, like blood on stone. I shake my head because that’s all I have. Denial. Stubbornness. The desperate need for this not to be
true.
Because if it is…
If it is, then I didn’t just make a mistake. I didn’t just betray Kael.
Didn’t just ruin whatever plan he had.
I opened my body to Death.
“He is a bastard,” Kael spits. “But not of blood. He’s a bastard because he feels no love. No guilt, no sorrow. He feels nothing at all because he… has…no…heart.” Scoffing, his fingers finally ease their grip, arms falling uselessly by his sides. “Lure him into the moonlight.”
My breath stumbles. “What?”
“Your…lover.” He smiles too wide, a grotesque stretch on a mouth that twists from amusement to rage and back again. “Let moonlight touch him and show you what he really is.”
He looks down at me. The drunkenness seems to settle over him again, a heavy blanket weighing down his limbs. He blinks, his eyes glazing over.
Then he drops hard against the greenhouse frame and slides down, hair falling across his face.
“You ruined it,” he mumbles again, softer now, almost like a child repeating a grievance into a pillow as I step back.
Step back further.
Turn. Run.
