I don’t need to turn. I know Finnian before I see him—that particular weight of his presence, his careful footsteps.
Tiana follows. I catch her in my periphery. Dark skin, cropped hair.
But it’s Finnian my eyes find first. I can’t explain the way my body swerves toward him, at just seeing him all right. Alive.
Tiana doesn’t look at me. Doesn’t look at Kestra or Moros. She looks at Amarantha’s hand on the king’s shoulder and she goes very still.
Tiana learned Amarantha when they were maids together. Serving Tatiana together. Tiana tilts her head, a frown wrinkling her forehead.
Right now she’s seeing something that makes her face drain of color.
“Show me your wrist, Amarantha.”
Four words. Quiet as a closing door.
Amarantha doesn’t move. For the first time since she entered this room, she has nothing to say. No quip. No deflection. No darling.
She cannot possibly mean…
“I said show them.” Moros reaches for a bottle that isn’t there. Gives up. Pushes up his own sleeve instead.
The ring sits against the inside of his wrist. Dark as a bruise, and very clearly a mate ring.
How? I look from his cold eyes to the ring, and back again before reality tells me exactly what I’m seeing.
“Kieran.” Finnian’s voice is careful, academic. He’s clearly just as shocked as I am. “That’s a mate mark.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought it was as well.
A mate mark.
On my father’s wrist.
A mark I have never seen in three hundred years of being this man’s son.
My shadows react before my brain catches up. The temperature in the room drops fast enough that Finnian’s breath fogs. The shadows on the floor stop spreading and start standing, rising off the stone like living things, filling the space between me and my father with darkness that tastes like rage.
“How long?” Two words. I barely recognize my own voice.
Moros has the decency to look away.
“Mother?” My voice shakes.
“Kieran,” he won’t meet my eyes.
Understanding arrives the way every bad thing arrives—late, and from the inside. This went on longer than I ever anticipated.
“Amarantha is as old as I am, as old as Finnian.” My palms sweat. “When?”
“Oh, for fuck’s sake.” Amaranth heaves. “A hundred years.”
I feel the shock first. Then the math.
He was mated to her during his bonding to my mother.
The next breath doesn’t come. Until I feel my lungs struggle and demand air. I take large gulps of breath.
“True?” My legs want to give way. This news shakes everything I thought I knew. How did I not know?
