Kaelen’s jaw tensed, but he released the handle and stepped back without another word.
Her fingers brushed the iron, and with a soft creak, she pulled the door open.
The cell was colder than she expected.
Annaïs sat on the edge of the narrow cot, framed by the thin shafts of sunlight seeping through the barred window, an open book in her hand. The drab black dress she wore was a stark contrast to the firebird costume Reiya had last seen her in.
She entered and closed the door behind her, but Annaïs didn’t look up from the pages.
“I was wondering when you’d come,” the woman said at last. “Here to gloat?”
The ease in her tone was a fragile mask—one Reiya recognized too well. The veil people wore when pride was all they had left.
“I’m not here to gloat,” she said quietly. “I’m here to see how you’re faring—now that your father has discarded you.” She paused. “I assume he’s the reason you did what you did.”
Annaïs’s composure cracked. Her smirk twitched, then settled back into place.
“He made his choice,” she said flatly.
Reiya’s eyes narrowed. “He certainly escaped before anyone could make him answer for it. Whatever happened, he left you behind to clean up his mess without a backward glance. Doesn’t that anger you?”
Annaïs’s knuckles tightened around the book in her lap, but her face remained still.
“I don’t know what you expect from me,” she said, her tone flat. “As I told the interrogators—I don’t know how he escaped. I don’t know his plans. Or Castiel Vaelmont’s.”
Reiya stared at her for a long moment. There was defiance in Annaïs’s eyes, yes—but underneath it, something else. Something uncertain. Abandoned.
The woman lifted her chin, forcing a smile. “But since Castiel is rotting in a cell a few doors down, why not ask him yourself?”
The thought left Reiya cold.
Castiel wasn’t a villain born from cruelty alone. His hatred of the system—the Crowns, the caste, the Alphas who shaped the world to their will—wasn’t without cause.
She could understand it, even sympathize with the spark that had driven him.
But understanding couldn’t change what he’d done.
It couldn’t erase the bruises on her wrists, the knife he’d pressed to her throat—or the door he’d left open, not as an escape but as an invitation to drown. It couldn’t bring back the lives he had bartered away or undo the damage he’d left in his wake.
His reasons, no matter how righteous, couldn’t absolve him of his actions—or the consequences that followed.
Reiya met Annaïs’s gaze squarely. “No reason undoes what’s been done, and no explanation changes who he is now.”
Annaïs’s smirk faltered, something flickering behind her eyes—recognition, perhaps.
Reiya’s voice dropped lower, steady and sharp. “Some things don’t deserve the comfort of justification.”
Silence settled between them. For Castiel—for whatever loyalty he had broken—that silence would have to be enough.
Annaïs looked away. “In the end, my father was weak,” she murmured, almost to herself. “So, who knows? Perhaps hedidescape simply to evade the consequences.”
“Even if it meant leaving you alone?” Reiya paused. “When you are the last of the Mezerins? There’s no one left in his stead to?—”
She paused, the thought echoing louder than she expected.
Annaïs would leave this cell one day. Not to execution—a highborn Omega like her was too valuable for death—but perhaps to exile, stripped of title, family, and the privileges that once made her formidable. Alone.
Reiya’s lips pressed into a thin line.
