The realization sank in like poison, slow and absolute, spreading through every memory until it altered the shape of my entire life. Titus was never meant to be High Lord, I was. If I was the most powerful and had been all along, then every time I stepped back, every time I softened myself, every time I swallowed my anger and called it loyalty, it hadn’t been noble—it had been submission.
A strange calm settled over me, so complete it felt as though something inside me had finally stopped fighting. The loyal brother, the patient one, the “sensitive” Dragon Master who told himself he was above power did not shatter. He simply went quiet, like a blade drawn cleanly across the throat.
If Delilah had chosen Titus for power, then she had chosen wrong, because the power she thought she was clinging to was a crown built on stolen truth. And if Titus had been allowed to rule while my blood carried Ancient lineage and near-perfect magic, then the kingdom had crowned the wrong male—and I had spent my entire existence helping hold that crown in place.
I had thought Delilah was different.
I had thought she saw past titles. Past crowns. But then she chose him.
Titus.
The throne.
And now I understood. She did not want freedom. She wanted power.
She was just like the rest of them.
The Council and the Fire Fae who had bowed to Titus my entire life.
If power was what she worshiped… Then power was what I would become.
And when she finally looked at me again—she would learn that I was never the gentle one.
My gaze lifted from the report to Folliade, and I felt my expression shift before I even saw it mirrored in his eyes. This wasn’t jealousy anymore, and it wasn’t grief either. It was something quieter and far more final. Years of restraint condensed into a single choice. I could keep begging to be seen, or I could make the world look.
“They hid this,” I said, my voice low and steady, and when the words left my mouth I understood something with terrifying certainty: whatever part of me still wanted to be good, still wanted to be loved, still wanted to be the brother who held the pillars up with Titus and Cercies… was already burning away.
Because the truth didn’t make me feel chosen.
It made me feelowed.
They hadn’t made me second. They had buried me.
And I had thanked them for the dirt.
“Well?” Folliade pressed, and his voice sounded distant, like it was coming from down a long tunnel. “What is it?”
My heartbeat roared in my ears. “It’s a blood magic report.”
He scoffed, impatient. “Why would that be hidden?”
And that was when something inside me—something I’d spent a lifetime restraining—finally cracked open.
All my life I had been second: second to Titus, second to his power, second to his title, second to the story the kingdom told itself about who deserved the throne. I had been mocked, dismissed, and minimized until I learned to wear obedience like armor, and now I held proof that I had never been lesser—only buried, only sealed away beneath his crown like a dirty secret no one wanted exposed.
I lifted my eyes slowly, and the paper trembled in my good hand, not from fear but from the force of what was trying to rise through me.
“Because,” I growled, my voice no longer entirely my own, “it’s mine.”
And in that moment, Aurelius—the sensitive Dragon Master, the loyal brother, the male who still believed in honor and loyalty—died. I would make themallpay.
What rose in his place was not jealousy, and it was not longing, and it was not wounded pride.
It was wrath.
I WAS WRATH!
CHAPTER 35
