Chapter
One
“There’s no way he has a fiancée.”
The words tore from me, rough and sharp, too loud for the stone walls of Zander’s room.
Inderia’s smile was silk and venom as she turned toward the door, her skirts whispering with the movement as Zander entered. “Tell her,” she said, her voice syrupy sweet, a dagger hidden beneath each syllable.
The door groaned shut behind him.
Zander stood there frozen. Silent. His shoulders stiff beneath the weight of a thousand unspoken things.
Say something,I begged him silently, my heart stumbling.Tell me she’s lying.
But he didn’t. He didn’t say a godsdamned thing.
The air between us shattered like spun glass.
My lungs refused to fill properly, too tight, too broken, as Inderia slid a long, rolled parchment from the folds of her cloak. She let it unfurl with a dramatic flick of her wrist, the paper snapping and curling toward the floor. Her finger, pale and unyielding, landed on the wax seal pressed near the bottom, a dragon crowned with thorns. The royal seal.
Proof.
Real.
My vision blurred at the edges, a storm crashing into my chest. The betrayal seeped deep, poisoning bone and marrow alike.
“You knew,” I rasped, the words slicing my throat on their way out.
Zander’s mouth opened, but nothing came.
The room tilted. Kaelith rumbled low in the back of my mind, a warning or a promise, I wasn’t sure which.
Inderia tilted her head, pity dripping from her like a perfume too thick to breathe. “It was arranged long before you, lowborn.” Her voice dripped with honeyed cruelty. “He was promised to me three years ago. Sealed by blood and law. Unbreakable.”
“Zander...” My voice faltered, raw and small.Tell me she’s wrong. Tell me she’s lying. I asked through our bond.
His hands curled into fists at his sides, veins standing out starkly against his skin. “It was before you.” His voice fractured, then steadied like a blade honed too thin. “Before the Trials. Before Hein. Before us.”
Before us.
The words gutted me.
Every memory, every look, every stolen moment, all of it shattered in an instant.
Inderia stepped closer, her smile a blade as she drove straight into my heart. “He belongs to me,” she breathed, victorious. “By right.”
I staggered back, barely aware of my own movement. The hurt bloomed inside me, too vast, too violent to name.
I was a fool.
Kaelith’s growl thundered in my mind.You are not the fool here, little one.
But I felt like it. Gods, I felt like it.
“You were promised to her?” My voice cracked through the room like a whip, raw and furious and trembling with betrayal. “Three years, Zander? And you didn’t think to mention that?”
His face twisted in pain as he took a single step toward me, hands open like he could somehow catch the pieces of me already breaking apart. “It wasn’t supposed to matter,” he said hoarsely. “I’m the fourth son, Ashe. The treaty required a match to solidify the alliance with her kingdom, but it was ceremonial. An agreement meant to please old kings and restless courts. I was never meant to inherit. Never meant to need her.”
