He saw the way her breath caught, the small flinch she couldn’t disguise, the way her fingers grazed her collarbone as if some hidden part of her had answered his call.
She sees power. Power. Elegance. Mystery.
What does she see when she looks at me?
A brute. A war prince. A creature built for battlefields and blood.
Gods, she kept looking at him.
Fuck that.
She needed something real. Someone who could match her, stand unflinching before the fire she carried, see her as more than a weapon or a symbol. Someone who could bear her fury and her beauty and the innate defiance of her will. The way she never backed down from a challenge, never flinched in the face of danger or allowed herself to be lesser, even here in a fortress surrounded by enemies.
Somehow she’d broken straight through the walls he’d built around himself. A barrier no one else had touched. One he’d trusted to hold against kingdoms. And she demolished it with nothing more than that infuriating, intoxicating smirk.
He shouldn’t even be thinking about her, especially not now, when the whole of Dravaryn would be gathering in the capital by nightfall tomorrow, ready for elevation or devastation,depending on if he survived the rite. Not when his every move should’ve been weighed against the gods and the realm and the cost of failure. He should’ve been focused on getting ready for his Claiming. And yet, gods help him, all he wanted was to claim her, more than he had ever wanted anything.
He shouldn’t have been there.
He should have been in his war room, finalizing security protocols and preparing for the moment the kingdom would fill the arena in black and crimson, waiting to see if their prince would rise or fall. Instead, he stood in the shadow of a stone archway, silent and unseen, watching her as if keeping her in his sights was the only thing that quelled the urge to seize her.
Ella stepped into the infirmary like she owned it, barefoot and tousled and fierce, crossing the room with that purposeful glide he was beginning to recognize, and she’d made it only halfway before she threw the door open again and bellowed into the corridor, “Bryn!”
Jakobav tensed at the sound. A crash answered her, metal clanging hard against stone.
“Gods save me,” came the muffled reply.
Moments later, Bryn appeared, glitter-dusted and somehow sticky, a satchel of clinking vials in one hand and a half-eaten pastry in the other. “I’m glad to see you survived,” he said at once, brushing crumbs from his coat as if it were an infestation. “More than that, from what I heard. I knew I detected something different about you. Would’ve been a shame if you died. You’re the obsession of the castle right now, and life has been dull for far too long.”
Jakobav bristled, the word “obsession” settling in his chest like grit. It was a struggle to remind himself that Bryn had a knack for embellishment.
“I’m glad to see you too, Bryn,” Ella said, folding her arms. “But right now, I need answers.”
Bryn sighed, bit into the pastry, and chewed with theatrical misery. “By the seven sacred hemorrhoids, Ella, you’re always wanting answers.”
She laughed, soft and unguarded, and Jakobav’s stomach tightened as if the sound had hooked something low inside him and pulled.
“Shut up and tell me the state of everyone’s injuries and where they are. I want to see them,” she said. “Thane. Maeren. Savina. Soren. All of them. And don’t you dare pretend you don’t know how they’re doing.”
Jakobav went still, breath held without meaning to.
Bryn gave her a slow blink. “Excluding Jake, you do realize you just named the four most emotionally unavailable people in the entire kingdom, right?”
“They’ll let me in,” Ella said, her certainty was absolute. “Where are they?”
Bryn chewed and swallowed, the pause stretching, Jakobav’s patience fraying with it.
“You know,” Bryn said at last, “people don’t usually want to talk to Savina when she’s fresh out of a wound.”
“I’m not most people.”
“No,” Bryn muttered, “you’re the reason half of them were in the infirmary.”
Jakobav flinched. Ella did too, just slightly.
“I didn’t ask them to protect me,” she said, voice low.
“No,” Bryn said, softer now, “but they did anyway.”
