By the time we reach the medical chamber, the place is already in motion. Iris turns from a worktable, takes one look at the prince, and starts issuing orders clipped enough to skin paint. Aeroth appears from somewhere behind a hanging screen with an armful of bandages and the expression of a male who had plans for a quiet afternoon and has just watched them die.
“On the table,” Iris says.
“That is not happening,” Aelith growls.
Kael dumps him onto it anyway.
The prince hisses through his teeth, claws scraping against the edge of the metal frame, and for a moment, I get a flash of what he must have been like before any of this, before Dawson, before the Crown started splintering under the weight of its own lies—beautiful, vicious, impossible.
Now he just looks hunted.
Iris cuts through the side of his tunic with efficient brutality. “Hold still unless you’d like to die making this more annoying than it already is.”
He bares his teeth at her. She bares her own right back and keeps working.
Around us, bodies pack into the room and spill into the hallway beyond. Varek stands near the end of the table, arms folded, gaze fixed on Aelith with a stillness that reads as dangerous even to me. Sonny edges up beside Kael, not touching him but close enough that it counts. Shanae positions herself near the door, keeping one eye on the corridor. Nobody relaxes.
Because Aelith is here.
Alone.
And nothing about that bodes well.
Under Iris’s hands, the prince’s injuries come clear in ugly layers. A deep cut along his ribs, not immediately fatal but close enough to matter. Bruising around his throat. Burns across one forearm, the flesh there angry and blistered in a pattern that does not look accidental. His whole body is one long declaration that whatever happened in that palace, it did not happen cleanly.
Still, he lives, which means he made it here for a reason.
The knowledge moves through the room before anyone says it aloud.
Varek is the one who finally does. “Where is Dawson?”
The question forms like a dropped blade, and Aelith goes utterly still.
Under the blood and dirt and fury, under the pain and the exhaustion and the stripped-bare edges of him, something changes. It’s not fear exactly. Well, not only fear. It’s the look of a male who’s been holding himself together around one single point and knows the moment he names it, everything else may come apart.
My own stomach drops.
Because if the prince is here and Dawson isn’t, then there are only so many possible answers, and none of them are good.
Iris’s hands pause over his ribs.
Kael leans in a fraction without meaning to, every line of him suddenly rigid.
Aelith drags in a breath that sounds like swallowing glass. Then he says, “With her.”
No one speaks.
No one has to.
The queen.
Dawson is with the queen.
The room seems to contract around those words until all I can hear is blood pounding in my ears and the faint rasp of Aelith’s breathing as Iris resumes stitching him up.
Varek doesn’t move. But through the bond, I feel the shock run through him like a hard flare under the skin, followed almost instantly by cold calculation. He’s already turning what he knows, weighing it, asking a hundred silent questions before the first spoken one arrives.
“How?” Shanae asks, and her voice is all knife. “What happened?”
