“Messages began disappearing,” he says. “Small things at first. Notes that should have reached servants. Requests that returned strangely delayed. Doors that should have remained unlocked were not. Faces I knew all my life stopped speaking plainly in Dawson’s presence.”
“Surveillance tightened,” Shanae says.
“Yes.”
“And you kept sending messages anyway?” Kael asks.
At that, Aelith turns his head and actually looks at him. “I had to.”
It’s the first fully honest thing he’s said in this room, not because the rest are lies, but because this one comes out stripped to the bone.
Kael’s expression doesn’t soften, but his shoulders ease by a fraction.
“What message did she catch?” Varek asks.
Aelith’s mouth goes hard. “A route change. A guard rotation. Something small enough that it should not have mattered and large enough that, in the right hands, it did.”
“Dawson carried it?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Aelith’s gaze snaps to me so fast, I feel it like a strike.
“No.” The word is vicious.
For half a second, nobody breathes. Then he closes his eyes and drags himself back under control. “No,” he says again, quieter now. “He did not fail me.”
That tells me enough.
The prince did.
Or at least he thinks he did.
Aelith breathes through his nose and stares at the ceiling again. “She summoned us together after the evening meal. No audience. No court. No witnesses beyond her inner guard. She spoke to Dawson in English.”
That catches my attention.
“She asked him if he was comfortable,” Aelith says, the words turning to acid in his mouth. “Whether I had treated him well. Whether he had chosen me freely.”
My skin goes cold. Because I know exactly what kind of weapon polite questions can become when asked by the wrong person.
“When I objected, she told me to be silent,” he continues. “Then she repeated the information from the intercepted message. Every word. She asked whether I wished to revise my understanding of my relationship with Dawson.”
Sonny mutters a curse.
Aelith laughs once, low and broken. “I declined.”
That, I can believe.
“So she had you seized,” Kael says.
“No.” Aelith’s fingers flex against the table. “She had Dawson seized.”
The words hit the room like a blast wave.
I know it because I feel the reactions before I fully see them. Rage from Sonny, quick and hot. Horror from somewhere behind me, maybe one of the younger fighters clustered in the hall. Varek goes colder, not hotter, which is somehow worse.
Aelith keeps speaking because stopping now would probably kill him.
“She wanted me still enough to listen. She knows me too well to think threats against my person would do much. Against him—” His jaw works. “—that proved more effective.”
