My heart pounded, rage and fear wrestling inside me.
Because she was right.
Zander wouldn’t.
But Theron had just lit the fire.
And now the whole court was waiting to see who would burn.
“No,” I said, loud enough for the whispering to still.
Dozens of eyes turned toward me, but I didn’t falter. I held Elara tighter, her face still pressed to my chest as I met Theron’s gaze across the blood-soaked grounds.
“Zander would never betray us.”
Theron huffed, the sound too smug to be anything but rehearsed. “Of course you’d say that. You’re helping him.”
Gasps rippled again, but he raised a hand as if to silence them.
“But I have no proof of your involvement,” he admitted. “Only that your dragon—” he nodded toward the skies “—is the one holding the king in stasis. A spell she will be ordered to relinquish… soon.”
My heart dropped, cold flooding my limbs.
“You’re going to remove the stasis,” I said slowly, “before we find a way to save him?”
Theron didn’t answer me directly.
Instead, Inderia stepped forward, her heels clicking like daggers on the stone as she moved to Theron’s side. She angled herself toward him, head tilted just slightly in calculated submission.
He looked at her, and there it was.
Something like affection.
“Inderia has shared a lot of information,” Theron said, his voice smooth, heavy with implication. “She didn’t want to go against her future husband, of course. But things… changed.”
Her gaze flicked to me, sharp and satisfied.
The crowd erupted into low whispers, a current of sound that swept across the Ascension Grounds like a tide of suspicion. Even some of Theron’s own looked unsettled.
Because everyone knew.
Zander had refused her.
Had humiliated her. Politely, publicly, and definitively.
And now here she was, smiling at Theron’s side, her arm brushing against his like a woman already claiming her next title.
Was this her revenge?The thought twisted in my stomach.
I couldn’t read every face, but I saw the shift—small, but real.
The poison. The papers. The accusations.
But now they’d brought Inderia into it.
And with that, Theron had turned his neat little story into a court scandal.
Because no matter how many lies he fed them, everyone watching knew this?—
