The line is so viciously elegant, it turns my stomach.
Sarcasm flares through me, hot and ugly.Last exchange. Right.Last time she traded one living person for another and then turned the knife after the fact anyway. I still have the memory of her grip on my throat, of waking in pain she curated for someone else’s benefit. Successful, my arse.
“She named Jamie specifically,” Aelith continues, voice roughening. “She said the boy has become an object of scholarly interest. She said Dawson would remain comfortable for as long as I remained sensible.”
Sonny swears in a way that sounds almost creative.
“She sent you back to make us do the work for her,” Shanae says.
“Yes.”
“And you came.”
At that, Aelith turns his head and pins her with a look full of exhausted contempt. “Wouldn’t you?”
No one answers that because the real answer is maybe.
Maybe every one of us would do terrible, indefensible things at the edge of losing the person we love. Maybe that’s what makes the edge so dangerous. The room hums with all the things not said aloud, and I’m suddenly, acutely aware of Varek at my back—not touching, not crowding, simply there, his presence a live wire through the bond.
I would tear holes in the world for him.
The thought arrives fully formed and is swallowed into my chest like a stone dropped into deep water.
Christ.
“Jamie stays hidden,” Varek says, cutting cleanly through whatever was about to bloom in everyone else’s head. “Effective immediately. No movement beyond inner settlement limits. Additional watches on all external approaches. No unscreened access.”
Shanae nods once and turns to the fighters in the hall. Orders start moving from her mouth to their feet almost before the final word leaves it. In the corner, Sonny angles himself towards Kael with obvious intent, and after one tense second, Kael shifts just enough to let his shoulder brush Sonny’s once. The contact is slight. The meaning in it isn’t.
Aelith watches all of this and says, “You’re already planning around me.”
Varek’s expression doesn’t change. “Yes.”
“Do you assume I will act without sanction?”
“Yes.”
I almost laugh because there’s no room in that answer for softness and no lie in it either.
The prince bares his teeth again, but the fury can’t hold. Exhaustion and pain drag at it from beneath, and beneath that is fear, great and ugly and bright.
“If you do not move quickly,” he says, quieter now, “she will break him.”
The room takes that in, and nobody argues. Nobody pretends the queen is incapable of it. I think that may be the single thing every person in this settlement agrees on.
Varek inclines his head once. “Then we move quickly.”
The promise in it steadies the room for a fraction, enough for breath to return, enough for planning to begin where panic nearly took root.
Aelith closes his eye again. “Find another way,” he says, but now it sounds less like a challenge and more like a plea dragged over broken glass.
Varek holds his gaze for a beat. “We will.”
For the first time since the prince arrived, I think he believes it. Not fully. Not enough to ease what has carved itself into him over the last however many hours. But enough that some final thread of resistance slips.
Iris notices first. “Oh no,” she says. “Absolutely not. He does not get to collapsenow.”
Aelith ignores her with all the remaining arrogance in his body and passes out cold.
