Kael’s lips lift into a smirk. He presses another indulgent kiss to Elyssara’s shoulder. “Of course, Rhae,” he mocks.
His hand never leaves her waist for long. Like some part of him is always checking she’s still there.
Kael strides across the room, easily navigating the tumbled fabrics, in the same way he strides everywhere: like he owns it.
He always does. He moves like a man who grew up knowing he’d be king. A man trained in the art of presentation and performance. For Elyssara, she feels just like she did in Virellin—a fraud pretending to be respectable.A thief pretending to be queen.
Kael wears royalty like a second skin.
Elyssara still feels like she stole hers from the grave.
“There’s no room for doubt in Maireth’s court, Elyssara,” Rhaema interrupts, her voice harsh and unforgiving.
Elyssara nods. “I know.”
“Then you’d better wipe that look off your face in a heartbeat, girl, because Maireth can smell the fear on you from the castle.”
Is she really that obvious?
Elyssara’s barely held composure fractures. “What do you think she’s planning?”
Rhaema lets out a heavy sigh. A defeated sigh. The kind of sigh built up from years of watching her network of rebels be defeated by the scale and efficiencies of massive political and military efforts. “Something you’ll never see coming,” she admits, her voice solemn. “Something diabolical.”
Irritation flares in Elyssara’s chest. “Like what, Rhaema? Prepare me!” she snaps.
But Rhaema doesn’t flinch, she takes a steady breath in, settling herself before answering. “I can’t. Not really. Wherever you’re looking, is exactly where she wants you to look. Wherever you’re not looking, is exactly what she wants you to miss. Maireth is calculated, cunning, the kind of woman the gods themselves fear.”
Somehow, hearing this unflinching woman so defeated, a knot forms in Elyssara’s gut. She swallows thickly. But Elyssara can’t crumble. Not here. Not now. Not when she’s so close.
“What kind of woman is she? What are her weaknesses?” Elyssara asks, pulling her shoulders back and forcing herself to stand a little taller.
Rhaema’s eyes settle sharply on Elyssara—so deeply they might bore a hole straight through her. “She is a woman so brutal she would have three-day long watching parties for captured rebels while they die of dehydration and sun-sickness in the desert. The kind of woman who would sterilize women on the Outside to breed out weakness. The kind of woman who would use her own son as a decoy in Thornewood, knowing hewould never survive Kael. She is the kind of woman who would do all of that and still sleep soundly.”
The words hang in the air, bitter and repugnant.
Elyssara’s stomach roils, knowing this is not the extent of Maireth’s brutality, but the very beginning.
But Rhaema keeps going. “She does not have weaknesses, Elyssara, for she has no heart. She is not human. She can’t be. She does not flinch in the face of death. Does not mourn in the face of loss. Does not react. At all. She is the picture of calculated calm. If she has a weakness, I have not found it in decades of looking.”
Holy fucking Stars.
Gods know Rhaema has spent half her life looking.
Elyssara’s mind reels at Rhaema’s words. Reels at the reality of what she’s walking into. The woman she will be meeting. But before panic sets in, the door to the backroom creaks open, and Kael steps into full view.
Black.
Not simply dark fabric, but the absence of light itself. Matte silk layered over structured leather, a long coat falling to his calves like a spill of midnight.
And above it—obsidian.
A narrow crown rests against his dark hair, its glass-black points catching the lanternlight in cold reflections. From it descends a mask carved in the same stone, sharp and angular, framing the line of his cheekbones.
Elyssara blinks.
A king.
Rhaema has dressed him like the Shadowweave King of Zerynthia.
