“Not happening,” I say.
Aelith swings his gaze to me, fury flaring so fast, I almost admire it. “You would let him die, then? He only went to the palace to save you, or have you forgotten?”
The question hits badly because I haven’t forgotten, and guilt is already gnawing at me, but would I let him die? The answer is no and yes and impossible all at once. I know what it is to have the person you love held in another’s hands. I know what it is to go half-mad under the thought of what they might be suffering. I know exactly how easy it would be to become ugly in that fear.
But Jamie is twelve. He’s also not currency.
“You don’t get to make that call,” I say, and my voice comes out flatter than I expect. “Not with someone else’s child.”
“He is not your child either.”
“He is under our protection,” Varek says.
Aelith ignores him. “You would choose one life over another because relinquishing the younger offends you more?”
“Don’t do that,” I snap. “Don’t twist this into arithmetic because you can’t stand the answer.”
His nostrils flare. Every line of him has gone taut and dangerous, though whether he has enough blood left to act on any of it is another matter.
“I would burn down the world for Dawson,” he says.
The confession tears out of him with enough force to leave a mark.
It’s not princely selfishness, arrogance, or even strategy.
Love, in its ugliest, most desperate shape.
For one terrible second, I understand him too well. That understanding blooms like a bruise.
While it doesn’t excuse anything, not remotely, Aelith can be frantic and in love and still dead wrong. Jamie can remain a child who deserves better than to be bartered by frightened adults. Both things can exist at once, and the room is thick with the strain of holding them together.
Across from me, Aelith’s chest rises and falls too fast, the effort pulling at the fresh stitching in his side. Iris makes a vicious sound and shoves him back down onto the table with enough force to remind everyone she may not outrank the prince, but she outranks his right to bleed on her floor.
“Lie down,” she snaps. “You can be unhinged horizontally.”
For one heartbeat, absurdity almost cracks the room open.
Almost.
Then Kael steps forward.
Until now, he’s held himself in a kind of rigid stillness that only looks calm from a distance. Up close, every line of him is strained. There are old loyalties in this room, old reflexes, old habits trained into bone. He was Aelith’s guard once. Maybe part of him always will be. Another part belongs elsewhere now, bound up in Sonny and rebellion and choices he made one by one until they became a life.
“Enough,” Kael says.
He doesn’t raise his voice. He doesn’t need to.
Aelith turns his head, all that fury narrowing at once into a single line. “You do not command me.”
“No,” Kael replies. “But I remember the male you were before the palace taught you to mistake possession for love.”
The words hit like a slap. Aelith actually flinches. Not outwardly enough for anyone unfamiliar to notice, maybe, but I see it, and so does Sonny, whose expression shifts from pure outrage to something grimmer.
Kael plants his hands on the edge of the table and leans in just enough to make the distance between them unbearable.
“You do not hand children to monsters,” he says. “You do not offer them up because you are afraid.”
Aelith bares his teeth. “I am beyond afraid.”
