“I do think he has found his mate,” she continues. “That much rings true. But I am quite certain the species is human.”
There it is. A test thrown soft as silk and clean as a blade.
Every part of me goes still. I focus on breathing. On the ache in my ribs. On not letting my face do anything interesting.
She watches for the reaction anyway.
Maybe she gets one. Maybe she doesn’t. If she does, she gives nothing away.
Then her gaze narrows and returns fully to me. “But I am less interested in my son than in you.”
That drops badly enough that I feel it in my stomach.
She rises and crosses the room with unhurried grace. “I have heard another rumour,” she says. “One concerning the commander of the Riftborn rebels.”
I say nothing. This time silence feels dangerous whichever way I hold it.
“That you are his mate.”
Still I say nothing.
Denying it could be useful, if she truly doesn’t know. Denying it could also confirm I understand exactly what matters in the question. Silence might look stubborn. It might look guilty. It might look prudent.
I hate every option.
She must read something in me because she moves before I fully see it happen.
One second she is two steps away. The next her hand is around my throat, and I’m off my feet.
It’s so fast, my body doesn’t register the transition properly. My chair tips backward and cracks against the floor as she lifts me one-handed, not straining, not even breathing hard. My bare feet scrape empty air.
I’m not a small man. She doesn’t care.
Her face is close enough now that I can see the fine pattern of luminous veins beneath her skin, the faint pulse of that royal sigil below her collarbone.
“You need not answer,” she says conversationally, as though we’re still seated. Her grip flexes just enough to make stars gather at the corners of my vision. “I am less concerned with the truth from your mouth than with what your pain may provoke for him.”
I grab at her wrist on instinct. It’s like trying to pry loose forged metal.
“All a mate requires,” she says, eyes glowing cold and bright, “is incentive.”
Then the pain hits.
Not from the hand at my throat but from my left arm.
She seizes my forearm with the other hand and twists. There’s no warning. No chance to brace.
The sound is wet and bright and horribly intimate, a crack followed by the tearing grind of something that should not move that way. Pain explodes from elbow to wrist so hard, it blanks the room, blanks thought, blanks everything but the animal fact of damage. I hear myself make a noise I don’t recognise and hate it instantly.
She doesn’t stop there.
Her clawlike hand—because of course she has claws, neat and royal and very sharp—press in just below my wrist where the bones have shifted under skin, and she leans enough pressure into the break that the world goes white.
“Tell him,” she says distantly, from very far away and much too close, “that next time I will take the hand.”
I try to breathe and can’t.
Try to think and can’t.
