Lord Bennett flinched from where he still knelt on the cold earth.
The echo of more hoofbeats filled the air. Seraphina glanced past Coreto’s shoulder, toward the midlands lords.
They were fleeing. Every single one of them, to a man.
Triumph swelled within her, forcing her to bite back a sudden laugh. Her ruse had worked. It had actually worked. No bloodshed. No battle. No slaughter.
Thank you, Lord. Thank you.
With an obvious effort, the duke kept his mount reined in. Despite his precarious predicament, his eyes still flashed with the promise of murder as he leveled his gaze at her once more. “You impudent wench. Do you truly think your little monster can protect you from what is to come?”
Some part of her pride smarted at the duke’s words. She didn’t need Aldric to protect her.
But still, she met Coreto’s gaze stare for stare and whispered, “I do.”
Aldric’s shoulders tensed. For a single moment, he spared a quick glance her way, his eye locking with hers. There it was again. That look he sometimes gave her. The one that always stole her breath. The one filled with heat and something else.
Something almost soft.
Her chest tightened. She forced herself to return her attention to Coreto.
As if utterly unbothered by the fact that he had very clearly lost this particular battle, the duke laughed while finally swinging himself out of his saddle. “Your hubris will be your downfall, girl,” he declared as if he were speaking prophecy. “You will be but a brief, humiliating mention on the pages of Elmoria’s history. What good is there in delaying the inevitable?”
His words sliced straight through her, as cutting as the wind still seeking to pierce the warmth of her cloak. Unbidden, a shiver danced down her spine. Through numb lips, she hastily quipped in the hopes of masking it, “I did not realize you were now an Oracle, Your Grace.”
Coreto smirked and extended his wrists to Olivia, as if expecting her friend to clap a pair of irons on them. “I do not need the gift of foresight to recognize a sputtering candle’s flame on the verge of being snuffed out when I see one.”
Seraphina forced her chin high. The duke had lost. She had won. He was just lashing out now to save face in front of his cowering son. “How fortunate, then, that the only flame I see sputtering here is your foolish rebellion.”
Carefully, she reined her horse backward and nudged the mare around Aldric’s stallion until she could come alongside her husband, close enough that his leg nearly brushed her own.
A part of her still wanted to scold him later once they were alone. To demand to knowwhyhe had gone against her direct orders. But with him sitting beside her—as solid as a shield, as threatening as a storm brewing on the horizon—her rebukes died in her throat.
“Your Majesty,” she commanded, “have Sir Easome send some men to pursue the fleeing lords. Give them a choice. They may come and swear fresh fealty to their sovereign and repent of this treason…or they may return to Goldreach in irons like the duke.”
Lifting her chin higher, she added, “And have a messenger dispatched to Threston Keep. Tell Anthony Threston that he is to remain within his own walls under honorable house arrest until summoned to his father’s trial, on pain of forfeiting his father’s life and lands.”
Aldric’s eye flicked to hers again, yet another unreadable emotion glinting there. But he inclined his head in obedience all the same and rumbled, “As my queen commands.”
My queen. Those words rippled through her, warming her from within in a dangerously satisfying way. She was sure the Crow was just putting on for the duke’s sake. And yet…
A sudden gust of wind whipped past, cold enough to freeze her breath in her lungs. Sharp enough to feel wrong. For the briefest moment—too quick to be real, too faint to be anything but memory—she could’ve sworn she heard that voice again.
The one from their wedding day.
The one from her dreams.
You cannot save him, child. He is already mine.
Seraphina’s fingers tightened on her reins. Nonsense. It was all nonsense. Just nerves. Just the aftershocks of danger and victory tangling in her thoughts.
The voice wasn’t real. It couldn’t be.
She forced herself to breathe. Forced her racing heart to settle.
Shoving the memory of that voice away, she allowed a spark of hope to bloom in her chest instead. A spark as bright as the rising dawn. Perhaps the tide had truly turned. Perhaps this victory marked the beginning of better days.
But the moment the thought dared to take shape, she found the duke watching her again. There he stood, looking up at her with a smirk still playing at the corner of his mouth even as Olivia led him and his son away. Bound. Her prisoners at last.
