Mallory walked out into the fading afternoon light with her heart pounding.
They suspected. They always had. They just couldn’t follow her where she was going, and that was okay. She would go alone.
She pulled out her phone once more and stared at the message from the unknown number. She only had one option.
Even if it meant returning to the mountains she’d left behind and even if it meant she had to face the man who had undone her. Even if the truth changed everything.
She would find Meg.
CHAPTER 13
Jakob
Six months did nothing.
Jakob had tried everything from exercise to extra duty as if the right combination of restraint and exhaustion might cauterize a wound that refused to close. He buried himself in council meetings and border patrols, in trade disputes and ceremonial nonsense that once bored him to tears and now barely registered at all. He signed orders without remembering the content they contained. He nodded through arguments that he barely heard and barked instructions for tasks he had no recollection of.
When all that failed, he turned to violence.
He hunted beasts in the high mountains until the cold gnawed his bones raw and pain became a language he could almost understand. He flew to heights unknown before and roared until his throat was raw.
None of it dulled the ache caused by Mallory’s absence.
At night, when the palace fell silent and the corridors echoed only the moans of a drafty castle, his dragon paced endlessly beneath his skin. It was a vast, coiled presence thatscraped against his ribs and snarled at shadows and half-remembered scents that clung to the air like a taunt. It remembered her. Remembered her warmth and laughter that did not belong to him.
It demanded the one thing Jakob refused to give it.
Find her.
“I won’t,” Jakob said through clenched teeth as he stood alone in the palace training chamber. Sweat slicked his skin despite the cold stone walls and his breath came too fast and shallow. “She deserves a life untouched by us.”
He drove his sword into the practice post with a roar with the blade sinking deep enough to split the reinforced oak. The impact shuddered up his arms, jarred his shoulders, and rang through his bones. The post cracked with a sound like a breaking rib. His reflection wavered in the polished steel. His eyes were too bright, his jaw clenched too hard, and his control stretched so thin it trembled.
He wasn’t sleeping. And when he did, he dreamed of her laughter echoing through stone halls that had never known joy. He dreamed of reaching for her and finding emptiness instead. He would wake with her name burning his tongue and nothing would quench the flame.
His reprieve from her memory came in the form of trouble throughout the town.
It had started after Mallory’s departure. Little things like broken lanterns along the outer roads, livestock found stolen, and crude graffiti scrawled on buildings had popped up, but Jakob had dismissed it as trivial vandalism, the sort of nuisance that flared and died without the need for royal attention.
Bells rang at odd hours now, not for ceremony, but for chaos by sounding false alarms. There were sabotaged pulleys on the gates and then poisoned wells discovered just in time. Someone had released a pen of mountain boars into the farmer’s market during peak hours and turned a day of shopping into screaming panic. Then, three nights ago, one of the guard barracks had been set on fire, not enough to destroy it, but just enough to make a point.
Now, standing amid the most current wreckage, Jakob recognized the arrogance of that mistake. The Ruecrags were no longer content with simple acts of vandalism.
The western tower of his own castle now bore fresh scars where stone had been blackened by crude explosives. The ancient masonry had cracked like bone beneath the blast.
His scouts’ reports confirmed what his instincts already knew. The vandals were a splinter faction of the Skelvarns from a nearby province, who were a rebellious group with the sole mission to destroy the monarchy. They had recently been ousted by King Sven of Stagholt.
The Skelvarns, and now the Ruecrags, were men and women with nothing left to lose and a hatred that dated so far back they most likely had no idea what it was about. They were the most dangerous kind. They were desperate, organized, and unafraid to provoke a king if it meant being seen.
Jakob stood on his balcony and stared down at the vandalized courtyard, his jaw clenched so tightly it ached. Guards scrubbed at symbols of chaos spraypainted on the garden walls below, the same walls he had admired during the ball. Their movements were tense and their eyes darted around as if they expected another attack at any moment.
If she had still been in Onyxheim, Jakob would have brought Mallory to the castle for her own safety. While damage had been done to his home, it still provided a level of protection that he could defend. He would have wrapped her in walls and guards and promises he could not fully keep, whatever it took to keep her safe.
He turned away sharply as he tried to wipe the thoughts from his mind. He had made his choice. He would not call her. Would not beg her back. Would not place a human woman at the center of a kingdom that had survived by devouring weakness.
Even if every instinct in him screamed that the world was safer when she was near. The truth settled heavy in his chest, unwelcome and unavoidable.
He could crush the Ruecrags with force alone, but it would cost lives, loyalty, and time he no longer had. And there was only one man who knew how Skelvarns operated, how they hid, and how they bled.
