The sound was wrong—too sharp. It echoed through the chamber, bouncing off the stone with unnatural delay. The dagger’s glow pulsed faster, as if thrilled by the tension.
“And I,” she said, lips brushing his ear, “am from a magic that is far older than your line,child. Far stronger than your king. And infinitely less merciful.”
Kay stiffened. “What do you want?”
She tilted her head toward me. “Release her.”
Two words. Absolute command.
Kay hesitated—calculating, still playing angles, even with the goddess of death at his throat. His fingers curled into fists, jaw clenching. He didn’t move.
Elenora applied the barest pressure of her blade. Another drop of blood welled up. The dagger shimmered with hunger and swallowed it.
“This blade has tasted kings. It’s drunk deep from men far greater than you. Your death would be… forgettable—a hiccup, but the blade is hungry, all the same.”
Still, he didn’t move.
Her smile shifted—losing all humanity. It became something malevolent, something ancient and powerful.
And in that moment, I realized something startling.
The room had gone still. Perfectly still.
No spinning. No nausea. The sickness Kay had forced into my blood was simply… gone. As if the magic inside me had uncurled at Elenora's presence, banishing his poison with a single breath.
The air itself felt suspended—thick, reverent, waiting.
Everything in that chamber bowed to her. The shadows. The silence.
And for the first time since stepping into Kay’s lair, I was no longer afraid of him.
“Or perhaps,” Elenora continued, her voice silk-wrapped steel, “I should tell Arthur about what you planned to do to the woman who has captured him so fully—simply to spite him.”
Kay tensed.
“Perhaps he would prefer to know your true feelings towards him? The resentment that’s festered within you since childhood. The jealousy that eats you alive. I wonder if he would find it interesting—the way you lie awake each night imagining his downfall. Should I describe, in exquisite detail, how his foster brother dreams of wearinghiscrown—and would slit his throat to get it? Shall I tell him how you used magic to thwart the Riddle of Blood in order to hide your regicidal thoughts?”
Kay went pale. The sickly white of old snow as I wondered—how in the world could she possibly have known that?
“You knownothing," he spat. But the last word cracked, thin and brittle. It shattered in the silence between them.
His fingers twitched at his sides, searching for a weapon that wasn’t there.
“I knoweverything, Kay. Every shameful desire to exist in your little, black heart. Every bitter, crawling thought you've ever had. Every fantasy soaked in betrayal.”
She stepped closer, her voice dropping to a whisper that filled the room like thunder.
“I’ve walked through your dreams. I’ve tasted the poison in your heart when you look at your king—the brother you bothneedanddespise.”
Kay backed away, and she allowed him. But the hatred in his eyes burned hot and helpless.
I scrambled to gather what scraps of clothing remained, clutching them to my chest with trembling hands. My legs wobbled beneath me as I tried to stand—barefoot, humiliated,but no longer helpless. The nausea had faded. The spinning had stopped. Only the weight of what had nearly happened pressed against my chest.
Elenora moved between us, her blade never wavering. Her back straight. Her stance coiled. I saw it in the set of her shoulders—she wasready. One move, and she’d bury that blade in his throat. And from the look in her eyes, she wanted to.
“If you ever attempt to force yourself on any woman again, what happens next will makeexecutionseem merciful.”
Kay stood there completely exposed, his braies pooled around his ankles like a fallen crown—a cruel mockery of the authority he'd wielded so ruthlessly just moments before. The sight was almost comical in its stark reversal of power: this man who had cornered me with such calculated menace, who wielded cruelty like a finely honed weapon and used his sharp tongue to cut down anyone who dared cross him, was now reduced to something pitiful and desperately small.
