Eryx dragged a hand over his square jaw. His posture squared, shoulders locking as if bracing for impact.
“That perhaps,” he said, his tone sharpening, “the Unseelie are more involved than we’ve been told.” He let the silence hang between his words. “Perhaps even… closer to the throne than is wise.”
Another crack of ice rang out. A crystal from the frozen chandelier fell and shattered on the floor near his feet, but he didn’t so much as flinch.
“To question their queen would be treason,” I warned.
“I am stating what the soldiers are already whispering. You asked for morale, Majesty.” A bitter curl tugged at the corner of his mouth. “This is morale.”
A dangerous quiet stretched between us.
When he continued, his voice was lower, warier. “They want reassurance. Clarity. Answers.”
“And you?” I asked.
Eryx went still. The movement was deliberate, soldier-trained. Light caught along the shaved sides of his head as helifted his chin, pale blue hair bound back in a tight topknot that spoke of order and restraint, not vanity.
“I want to know who I’m expected to defend this realm from. The monsters clawing at our borders… or the ones slipping under them in shadow.”
My mana snapped inside me—cold, violent. A territorial snarl just shy of breaking the room.
“Another word like that,” I said quietly, “and I will freeze the tongue from your mouth.”
His hands curled at his sides, but he didn’t step back.
“If there is nothing else, you are dismissed, Lord General,” I bit out each word.
Eryx flexed his jaw again, his nostrils flaring once before he added, “And what about the order to kill all Unseelie on sight?”
A spike of fury ran through me as I tried to discern his meaning.
Did he think I would rescind it based on his assumptions of who Everly was? Or did he dare to refer to harming my wife?
Something stirred beneath my skin, the bond alerting me that she was closer than before. Close enough to be listening in on this conversation. For how long, though, I didn’t know.
I thought briefly of every winged nightmare that had threatened our lands and threatened my wife. The female who showed up at her father’s estate. The males who tortured her in that cave. Her uncle, the head of the Skaldwing clan. Even her shards-damned mother with her murky intentions.
Every creature who might carve Everly open simply for existing.
My answer came out low and lethal. Final.
“I will keep any order that protects my peopleand my wife. The order stands.”
Chapter 15
Everly
The order stands.
It wasn’t like it was a secret, or even like he was trying to hide it now. He had pitched his voice to carry, had let me feel his resolution through the bond.
Kill on sight.
Still, the words echoed in my head, swirling with Zerina’s accusations the last time I had seen her, at my father’s house.
How do you even stand it?
“Everly.” Wynnie’s quiet tone told me she had heard as well.
