A bolt of panic rips through me.
I know what he’s thinking. I know what he wants to do.
And I can’t let him. I can’t lose him.
Not here. Not like this. Not when I need him to live.
I move without thinking, grabbing his arm, anchoring myself to him as much as I’m trying to anchor him to me.
“No.” The word is barely a whisper.
Alder whips his head toward me, eyes blazing. “She needs help.”
“I know.” My voice breaks, but I don’t let go.
His body vibrates beneath my hands, a live wire barely restrained. He’s seconds away from throwing himself into the fire, from charging headlong into death.
I suck in a breath, steadying myself, gripping him tighter. “But you can’t.”
His shoulders jerk, his breath stutters, eyes flicking to mine, searching.
The truth lodges in my heart like shrapnel—too small to kill me, but sharp enough to hurt with every breath.
I need him. Not just now. Always.
But right now, there’s more at stake than just us.
The young woman wrenches free, her body twisting violently, a last, desperate bid for escape. Her head turns, her wide-eyed gaze swinging between the guards and the forest beyond—prey realizing too late that there’s nowhere left to run.
The man in white doesn’t hurry. He closes in on her with terrifying calmness.
She barely makes it a handful of steps before his hand lashes out, catching the back of her maid’s uniform. He yanks hard. The force rips her off-balance, her body snapping back like a marionette.
She crashes to the ground. Her scream splintersthrough the air—not just a cry, not just terror. It is a plea, wrenched from the deepest part of her, from the part that still believes someone might come.
Alder moves, instinct driving him forward. Every muscle flexes, prepares.
I tighten my grip on his arm, digging my nails into his skin.
“She’s not the only one.” My voice is low but urgent, thick with the weight of everything we’ve seen, everything we can’t ignore as I nod toward the girl. “There are others. Others like her.”
Images slam into me like waves: the woman in the castle who was consumed by the machine, Clara in the bathing chamber… One death after another, all dismissed. All forgotten.
Alder’s fists clench then unclench as he looks at me, his expression darkening.
I see the fight in him. The same persistence that made him chase me down this beach, that won’t let me go, that makes him succeed at whatever he puts his mind to. But this focus is different. He’s never been the type to risk himself for someone else.
“We save her, and what?” I continue, voice rising. “We get thrown out of the kingdom? Or worse—we die trying. And it won’t stop anything. They’ll just replace her.
“If we want to stop this, really stop it, we don’t do it by charging down there and playing the hero. We do it by going after the ones responsible. The Queen. This man. The guards and whoever else knows and looks the other way.”
His fingers twitch, and his chest rises and falls in oneslow, measured breath as my words settle. Then he nods, just once, his only sign of surrender.
Down on the beach, the girl cries out.
The man in white rears back and slaps her. The crack of his knuckles against her cheek is brutal and merciless. Her body jerks with the impact, head snapping to the side, blood spraying from her mouth before she crumples.
The guards close in. They scoop her up like discarded cloth, her unconscious body dangling between them.
