Page 169 of Feralheart

Lady Severine’s face went tight. “Your Highness, there’s a knife sticking out of your shoulder. You need⁠—”

“Now.” His jaw locked. “Everyone out except Eradin.”

Vella stiffened, her eyes narrowing as they flicked from Fenian’s blood-soaked shoulder to my mud-caked bare feet.

“You would choose a commons stable hand over proper healers?” she hissed, the calculation in her gaze turning razor sharp.

“I’ve already spoken, Vella,” Fenian grated. “Get out of my tent.”

She turned to leave, but as she drew level with me, she didn’t just pass. She drove her shoulder into mine, intending to send me sprawling toward the tent pole. As I stumbled, her hand twitched in my direction.

A thin line of invisible pressure hissed through the air. My left tunic sleeve split open at the shoulder, the fabric parting with a clean snip. The magical cut stopped a hair’s breadth from my skin.

“Vella.” Fen said her name in a low, predatory growl that didn’t sound like it came from a human throat.

He’d surged upward despite the wound, his good hand gripping the edge of the mattress so hard the wood creaked. His gray eyes weren’t just angry; they’d gone feral, and a flicker of cold blue flame danced in the center of his pupils.

“If you lay another finger on her,” he said, his voice a deadly, quiet rasp that made the other riders at the entrance recoil. “Or if you so much as graze her with a spell again, I will kill you where you stand. I don’t care who sees. I don’t care about your family’s contracts or whatever they’d been negotiating between us. Touch her again and you are dead. Do you understand?”

Vella’s face went bone-white. The calculation in her eyes vanished, replaced by the realization that he’d stopped pretending to be the perfect prince.

She didn’t speak or even nod. She turned and swept out, the others scrambling to keep up.

The tent flap fell closed behind them.

I stood in place, my heart beating itself against my ribs, staring at the slice in my tunic.

Fen still vibrated with rage that seemed to hurt him more than the blade in his shoulder.

“You know,” I said, finally dragging air into my lungs. I stepped toward him. “I’m fairly certain threatening to murder the daughter of a great house is a violation of at least three royal protocols.”

His shoulders dropped, the blue fire in his eyes fading as he collapsed back against the pillows with a strangled groan.

“Four,” he panted, his face going gray. “Maybe five.”

I knelt on the bed beside him. “Try to stay alive long enough for the council to arrest you, alright?”

He looked up at me, a ghost of a smile tugging at his mouth before he winced. “I’ll add it to my list of priorities.”

“You’re wounded.” My hands fluttered above the knife.

“I’ll survive.”

“The blade needs to come out. You’re bleeding.”

“Help me. Please? There’s no one else I trust.”

It was all I could do to breathe with the feeling of a fist in my throat.

He trusted me. The crown prince, a man surrounded by elite healers who’d spent their lives learning how to tend wounds in ways I could barely imagine, was asking me, a commons who stole food from his kitchens, for help.

My hands were shaking for a different reason now.

“Of course.” My voice came out steadier than I felt. “Let me see.”

He moved on the bed, making room beside him.

“We’ll need to remove the blade.”