“It’s not that simple.”
“Then make it simple.”
Moros looks up at his daughter. Mab’s daughter. The child he tried to sell and leverage and imprison. The woman who came back anyway.
He reaches for the bottle, but stops.
“Kill me,” he says. “And take the Unseelie throne.”
What?
I search his face for the angle, the hidden play, the cruelty disguised as surrender. I’ve studied this man’s micro-expressions. I know every tell.
There is no tell.
He means it.
Kestra doesn’t move. Her hand rests on the blade at her hip. Jadeve’s blade, the one the forest dweller gave her, the one she’s carried since the borderlands. Her fingers rest on the hilt. She’s shaking, not from fear but from the specific fury of a woman who prepared to topple a tyrant and found a tired old man offering his throat.
“This isn’t how I wanted this,” she whispers.
“No.” Moros’s smile is a ruin. “I imagine you wanted a fight. I’m sorry to disappoint.”
“Don’t.” Her voice cracks. Just once. “Don’t you dare apologize now. Not now. Not after everything.”
“I’m not apologizing.” He meets her eyes. “I’m giving you what I should have given your mother. A choice.”
Kestra draws the blade.
I can’t breathe.
Kestra’s arm draws back.
“No.”
The voice comes from the doorway behind me. Not loud. Not desperate. Not pleading. Just a single syllable uttered from a woman who made it her personal challenge to destroy everyone around her.
I turn.
Amarantha stands in the corridor. Ash and blood on her silk dress. Her hair is undone, laying in knots around her bony shoulders. Her eyes hold that unhinged brightness that started when she burned her own court and hasn’t stopped since.
She looks like she ran here. Like she crawled through passages and shadow-walked through ruins and clawed her way across Faerie to reach this room at this exact moment.
“How touching,” she says, somehow with confidence she shouldn’t still hold. “The family reunion.”
Kestra’s blade remains raised. Moros’s throat is still bared. And Amarantha stands between the doorway and every plan we made.
I look at my sister. She looks at me.
And in the corridor behind Amarantha, the shadows shift. Not my shadows. Not father’s.
Hers, somehow hers, the ones she dragged in from the burned Seelie Court, her personal reserves, the last scraps of power that don’t depend on a throne.
Enough to kill.
“Well,” I say, and my hand goes to my chest where the Spear sleeps. “This just got interesting.”
57
