Page 5
I don’t answer right away because time is the one thing we don’t have. The King is laid up in a hospital bed, cut open and stitched back together, and whether anyone here wants to admit it or not, that leaves a vacuum. Power doesn’t sit empty for long. It rots. It gets picked at. It gets stolen.
The Lords are out there, no doubt ready for some answers.
Arianette—
My jaw tightens.
Arianette is somewhere in the middle of all of it. Fragile and vicious all at once, and loyal to a man who might not be able to hold his throne much longer. She’s bound to us in ways none of us has even begun to untangle, and we won’t have time to, not with the target painted on her back.
And me?
I’m standing here, covered in blood, trying to decide if breaking another man’s bones is worth the effort.
“Sorrin.”
I blink, dragging myself back to the present. Whitaker’s watching me now, sharper than before. Not amused. Assessing.
“If he’s useless,” I say, “then dragging this out doesn’t get us any closer to the girls. Or the Guardian.” Pace nods once, like that confirms something for him.
“So what?” Lex asks. “You just gonna put him down?”
The question lands cleaner than anything else since I walked in here.
I glance at Mateo again, studying the way his fingers twitch faintly against the restraints. At the blood drying in uneven streaks across his skin. A dead end.
“Not yet,” I decide. “But we change the approach. No more trying to make him talk about things he doesn’t know.”
Pace tilts his head. “Then what are we looking for?”
“Truth,” I say. “About him. About Liam. Billy. How they got pulled in. Who they answered to—even if it was secondhand.”
Lex huffs. “You’re hoping he slips.”
“I’m hoping he wants to matter,” I correct. “Even if it’s the last thing he does.”
Silence stretches for a beat. Then Whitaker pushes off the ledge. “I’ll let Verity know we’re not done yet.”
The mention of the Princess, well, Queen, makes me want to get back and check on Arianette. Pace pulls the strip of cloth out of his pocket–the blindfold–and I turn around, letting him secure it behind my back.
Any other time, it would be unthinkable to be in the East End’s territory, unarmed and blindfolded, but I’m not in a position to argue. I just have to trust that they want answers as much as I do.
2
Arianette
Sometimes I feel like my story begins and ends like this–cold and sterile, a life hanging by a single thread
This is the place where I became someone new, the Baroness. It’s the place they brought me back to life, not once, but twice. It’s where he found me and gave me a home, made me his wife, claimed me as his own. That’s why I’m here, hour after hour, listening to the machines humming and breathing, steady and indifferent, like they don’t understand who we are–who he is. Like they don’t know what it means that he’s lying here instead of standing.
Instead of ruling.
I lace my fingers through his and press our hands on the edge of the bed, careful of the tubes, the tape, the bruising blooming beneath his skin like ink spilled under glass. “They’re doing it wrong,” I whisper. My voice sounds too loud in the quiet, so I soften it, leaning closer. My lips nearly brush his knuckles. “They should kneel–all of them. The doctors, nurses, and police. They know who you are. What you can do.”
The door opens and closes. Footsteps come and go. Voices murmur just outside the curtain. I don’t look up anymore. I tried at first–tracking them–but they blur together after a while. Then there’s the others: Graves, Hunter, Damon. Doctors with clipped voices and careful hands. They orbit him. They orbit us. But no one interrupts me. No one pulls me away. I think it’s because they don’t know how.
My thumb drags over his hand, tracing the veins there, the strength of him even like this. I focus on his fingers, on the strip of flesh that is slightly lighter from where his ring normally sits.
I didn’t handle it well when they removed it. There was screaming–mine–and I’d snatched the ring out of the nurse's hand. It’s in my pocket for safekeeping until he’s ready to wear it again.
