Ronan’s voice cut clean, snapping him back. “Report.”
Elysian clasped his hands neatly behind his back, soldier straight. “Six of them. All men from the rebellion.” His jaw worked, ready to shatter. “Andher. They had the Bright soldiers down in minutes. Recovered a few scripts, content unknown. Two slipped away with them. I stayed with her, as ordered.”
His eyes locked on Ronan’s. Movement shifted there, too subtle to name as raindrops began to fall—thin, splattered jewels sliding through the canopy, dotting leather and skin.
Ronan arched his brow. “And?”
Elysian’s mouth twitched, his glare dipping to Ronan’s wrist as he exhaled. “She ran into trouble. Had to mist her own weapon, along with all the ones they recovered. And in the end…” A pause, too long.
“Say it.”
Elysian’s jaw clenched tighter. “In the end, she poisoned him. Exactly as we knew she would.”
Ronan gave a short, bitter laugh.
For one breath, he’d allowed himself the cruelest hope. That the rumors were lies. That the woman fated for demise might yet be saved. That myth or fate would spare them both.
But the more he had followed her, the more he studied the way her sins bent to her will, the more he knew.
It would never be true.
“The only safe option is to kill her and end it clean. Letting her run free, letting her gather strength from that curse—” Elysian didn’t want to say it, despite his hatred toward what she brought upon his prince. “It’ll only doom us all faster.”
Ronan studied him in silence, drawing in a breath that he had to force out slowly.
“The moment you start believing she could ever be anything more, Ronan,anythingother than what the gods made her—”
“You think I don’t know what she is?”
Ronan glanced to his wrist, to where the worn leather band sat against his skin, darkened by age and sweat, the kind of thing no one would look twice at. But beneath it was the brand that bound him.
A promise carved in blood.
Elysian didn’t know. Could never know. If he did, he’d cut the scar from Ronan’s flesh himself.
His thumb brushed over the edge of the band, feeling the tether to his oath beneath it. To the one who had told him what he was fated for.
He could still hear the voice when she branded him.A curse for a curse, Dragon Prince. You’ll end her reign or burn in it.
Ronan exhaled, deeper this time, letting his hand fall away.
He hated lying to Elysian; his brother deserved the truth. But some truths were better starved. Especially when the rewards—freedom, resolution— felt so close.
Or maybe just the illusion of both.
“I think,” Elysian exhaled, “you’re suffocating in the same fire you think defines you. I see it. You want to be more than destruction, more than smoke. But by fang and frost, Ronan, stop trying to burn with her in this. Rise. Became more after she’s gone and Selvarra is saved. Become a fucking king.”
Ronan’s expression didn’t shift, but the flames in his eyes burned still.
He ignored the predictable report, ignored the echo of Elysian’s assertion as rain slicked down harder now, silver sheets blurring the forest, washing away the blood on their skin.
Proof of what they’d touched, what Ronan had done.
A killer. That’s all he’d ever be. He ignored itall.
“You’re the only one who can read the scent beneath the blood, so what lingers here, Ely? Unravel the air, tell me what the threads are hiding. What I’m missing.”
A muscle ticked, branches swaying against one another as if reacting, as if being pulled.
