CHAPTER ONE: THE PEACE OFFERING (4)

Ian looked unconvinced. Ian always looked unconvinced. It was his face’s resting state.

“…And if she pulls the thread first, Your Majesty?”

I looked back at the window, at the faint glow of light in her suite — the only warm thing in this palace of shadows.

“Then,” I said, “I’ll handle it.”

The lie tasted like ash. Because the truth was, I didn’t know what I would do. The truth was, three hundred years of loneliness had just walked into my throne room wearing a princess costume and a death wish, and my soul had stood up and screamed her name.

“My fate is chained to you,” I whispered to the dark, to the ghost of her scent still clinging to my skin, “whether I like it or not.”

And the terrifying thing was —

I didn’t know if I liked it. I only knew I couldn’t undo it.

I only knew that when the time came to drive a blade through the heart of the Light Court’s prettiest lie…

My hand was going to refuse.

EIRA

I didn’t sleep.

I lay in the absurdly large bed with my hand on my blade and my eyes on the door, replaying the moment in the throne room like a song I couldn’t get out of my head. The way he’d looked at me. The way my soul had screamed. The way he’d said not you like it had been torn out of him.

It meant nothing. It was a tactic. He was a monster playing games with his prey.

I knew this. I’d known this since I was twelve years old, standing in the ash of my family’s manor, holding my mother’s hand as she died.

“Eira,” she’d whispered, her voice a thread, her blood dark on the snow.“Promise me you’ll live. Promise me you’ll—” and then she was gone, and the Light Court’s soldiers had found me crying over her body, and the High Priestess had taken me by the shoulders and said:“The Shadow King did this, child. Remember his name. Remember it until it means nothing but ash.”

I remembered.

I’d written it in my skin a hundred times. Kaelen Thorne. Kaelen Thorne. Kaelen Thorne.

I was the verdict.

I reached for the letter I’d found under my pillow — a gift from a Shadow Court servant who “couldn’t sleep with the Light’s blood on her conscience.” A survivor’s testimony, it claimed. A witness to the massacre at the Vail Estate, begging the Light Court for justice, naming the Night Reaper as the hand that held the torch.

It was exactly what I needed.

It was also, I noticed, with the corner of my mind that never stopped watching, too neat. Too convenient. A confession signed in perfect script, delivered to the one person in the world who wanted to believe it, in the first hour of her arrival at the Shadow Court.

The thought flickered, like a moth at a flame.

I crushed it.

Tomorrow, the farewell banquet. One toast. One blade. Six years of nightmares, ended.

I was so focused on my plan that I almost missed the change in the air.

It came at the deepest hour of the night, when even the shadows seemed to sleep. A pressure, like a storm gathering. A cold, seeping into the room — not the cold of the Shadow Court, but something older. Something lonely. It wrapped around my heart and squeezed, and I gasped, sitting bolt upright in the bed, my blade in my hand before my eyes were even open.

The room was empty.

But I could feel him.

Not his presence — the guards, the wards, the watching things in the walls were all quiet. This was deeper. This was the bond, screaming across the distance between us, dragging his emotions through my veins like frost through a river. I felt his chest ache. I felt his jaw clench. I felt the desperate, clawing loneliness of a creature who had been alone for so long he’d forgotten what it felt like to be found.

And I hated myself, because for one terrible moment, I felt sorry for the monster.

No.

I shoved the feeling down, into the dark place, next to my mother’s laugh and my father’s voice and everything else I couldn’t afford to feel. I was the verdict. I didn’t get to feel sorry.

I lay back down. I closed my eyes. I kept my hand on my blade.

And in the shadow by the door, a figure I couldn’t see stood perfectly still, watching me sleep.

He didn’t move. He didn’t breathe.

His hand hovered over my throat — and then, impossibly, it fell, landing on a strand of my hair, brushing it gently away from my face, as if I were something precious he’d been forbidden to touch.

Neither of us slept.

And somewhere in the dark, fate laughed at us both.