Hurstinal appears throughout the palace without purpose I can name. When I ask Uralish what his role in the palace is, he only says, “He is more useless than a pile of ant shit.”
It is not helpful.
Sometimes, leaving the library in the evenings, I would notice Hurstinal in the corridor. Never close enough to address. Just watching. The air always smells faintly wrong when he is near. His pale eyes following me until I turned the corner and he disappeared from view. I told myself it meant nothing.
CHAPTER 28
The Intrusion
One evening after the library, I return to my chambers and draw a bath. The chamber still holds the warmth of the steam when I step out, the air cool against my damp skin. My nightgown clings where the water has not yet dried, the fabric soft and thin, my hair heavy as it trails down my back. I move toward the table, reaching for the cloth I left there?—
The door opens. The sound is quiet, almost careful, but it does not belong. I turn just enough to see him before he reaches me.
Hurstinal.
His eyes are pale in a way that never softens, cold and flat as they settle on me. His hair falls dark against his face, too dark, a sharp contrast that makes the rest of him look drawn, almost hollow. His hands are already lifting as he steps inside—long, thin, the fingers bony and precise—and something about the way he moves feels practiced. Controlled.
He closes the door behind him without looking. The scent reaches me a second later. Damp, like cloth left too long in shadow, something that should have been clean, turned sour.
I don’t make it another step.
The force hits before I can speak, before I can fully turn. My back meets the wall, breath leaving me in a quiet rush, and at the same time something unseen closes through my body, threading into my limbs and holding them there. I push against it immediately, instinct driving hard through muscle and bone, but nothing answers. My arms remain where they were, my fingers still half-curled, my voice caught before it can form, trapped beneath the weight of whatever he is using.
A blade presses low against my stomach. Too low to be anything else. “If you move,” he says, his voice close, almost intimate in the worst way, “I’ll drive it straight through your belly.”
The point shifts slightly, marking the place. I strain against the hold again, harder this time, forcing everything I have against it, but it doesn’t give. The resistance meets something immovable, something that absorbs the effort and leaves me exactly where I am.
“You think you’re better than me,” he continues, the words uneven with something that has been waiting for this moment. “Just like the rest of them.”
His hand closes around my arm, fingers pressing in, as if testing what he already knows he can control. “But you’re not.”
He steps closer, his presence pressing in around me, his breath warm near my temple, carrying that same damp, stale scent.
“You walk through this place like you own it,” he says. “Like your blood makes you something.”
The knife remains where it is, never lifting, never easing.
I push again, trying to force even a single finger to move, trying to break through whatever holds me, but the effort dissolves into nothing, swallowed before it reaches my body.
“And you,” he says, his voice sharpening, “hold your head so high like you’re not what you are.”
His grip shifts. “A whore.”
The word lingers.
“I heard your father sold you to a dog prince,” he continues, almost idly, as though this is a story he enjoys telling, “and now you walk around with a bastard in your belly.”
“You’re nothing more than a worthless whore carrying a bastard,” he says, his voice low with something that has been building far longer than this moment. “And yet Uralish hands you an entire army like it means nothing.”
The knife presses harder against my stomach.
“I should have been the one they followed,” he continues. “I trained here. I earned it. And you walk in and take it without doing anything at all.”
Something in me surges against the hold, anger threading through it.
“My son is not a bastard,” I manage, forcing the words through the pressure that holds me. “And my husband will kill you for speaking to me this way.”
He laughs, low and disbelieving. “Your husband isn’t here,” he says. “He is either dead or has abandoned you. Everyone knows it, including you. Stop lying, whore.”
