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“What... what was that?” I whispered, my voice dropping into a low register as the skin beneath my sleeves began to prickle.

The twin crescent markings on my wrists—hidden beneath the cuffs of my leather jacket—suddenly flared with a brief, phantom heat. It was a sharp, concentrated burn, like a hot wire pressing against my veins.

Manem didn’t look back at the empty tile. “Something we will deal with later,” he said flatly, his hand tightening on my leather jacket as he forcefully pushed me through the threshold doors and down into the lower corridors.

The heavy oak doors slammed shut behind us, cutting off the deafening roar of the battle, but the silence outside the throne room felt entirely wrong. It was a breathless, heavy quiet, like something volatile beneath the surface of the mountain was still moving toward us.

I violently pulled my arm free from Manem’s grip, my heavy boots sliding on the polished stone as I turned to face him. “Explain what is happening, Manem. Right now.”

Manem stopped. He turned slowly, his dark eyes sweeping over my form with rapid, clinical precision. He was measuring me as a liability to the crown. “Are you injured, Princess?”

“No.”

“Then we continue to move.”

“That is not an explanation!” I snapped, my green eyes flashing.

“You are not the priority right now, Tauriel,” he said coldly, turning his back to resume his relentless pace.

A sharp, disbelieving laugh cut through my throat. Of course. I was never the priority. Despite the royal blood running through my veins, I didn’t truly matter in the succession. I was spare parts, a placeholder kept in reserve just in case Aerynn failed in his primary duties to the court.

“Someone just attempted to violently overthrow my father’s throne the exact second my portal cleared the ether,” I muttered, rushing to step into his path, forcing him to halt. “I think I am at least adjacent to the priority.”

Before he could respond, a shadow near the corner staircase shifted.

The air in the narrow corridor warped, turning cold and heavily charged, as if the space itself had suddenly realized we were standing in it. The heat on my wrists flared once more—a silent, burning warning.

I gripped the hilt of my sword, my knuckles turning white, as a tall silhouette stepped out of the darkness.

It wasn’t another rogue.

The air shifted the exact second his boots hit the stone—becoming intensely, vibratingly aware. It was as if the space inside the castle noticed him, bending to accommodate a predator that demanded compliance without uttering a single word.

He wasn’t wearing the heavy, interlocking midnight armor of the Black Guards currently dying in the throne room. Instead, he was clad in dark, supple training leathers that hugged an impossibly tall, broad-shouldered frame. The leather was scuffed, stained with fresh, dark arcs of blood that weren’t his own, moving with him like a second skin. Every line of his body exuded a fluid, dangerous grace—an animalistic ease that suggested he could either catch you if you fell or break your neck before you realized he’d moved.

Caspian.

I knew exactly who he was before my brain could sort through the stories. Aerynn had spoken of him a hundred times during his rare, brief visits to Earth—the legendary Vanguard Captain, the shield of the northern borders. But every time I had returned to Nymeria for seasonal rotations, he was conveniently absent. Off handling a border crisis, checking the outer wards, suppressing a rebellion. Looking at the sharp, unforgiving line of his jaw now, the blond hair falling carelessly across his forehead, I began to suspect Aerynn’s scheduling hadn’t been an accident. They were my brother’s highly protective, deeply intentional attempts to keep his best friend entirely out of my reach.

His eyes found mine.

They were a piercing, unnatural blue—the color of glacial ice catching the first light of a winter sun. They anchored on my pupils and stayed there.

A sudden, volatile flicker sparked deep within his gaze. Recognition. But it wasn’t the polite recognition that comes from courtly introductions. It felt heavy and static, like a key turning in a lock I didn’t know existed inside my chest. A magnetic pull tugged at my center. The expression vanished so quickly I’d think I imagined it if the marks on my wrists didn’t pulse in response.

“Take her to the king’s private vault,” Manem commanded, his deep voice returning to a flat, militaristic cadence.

Caspian nodded once, his jaw tightening as he stepped fully into my path. “Understood.”

I didn’t nod. I didn’t move. My fingers tightened around the leather hilt of my sword. In that bloody throne room, the rules made sense. You parry. You strike. You survive. But the private vaults? Navigating the cold, measuring disappointment of my father and the suffocating layers of royal politics had never come easy. There was no pleasing the crown, and no winning over the high lords who viewed my half-human blood as a stain on the lineage.

“I can walk,” I said, taking a stubborn, aggressive step forward.

Caspian didn’t budge. He remained fixed directly in front of me, a wall of leather and muscle blocking the hallway.

“I don’t doubt your lethality for a second, Princess,” he purred low, a dark smirk catching his jaw. “It’s your self-preservation I worry about.”

His gravelly voice dropped into a rough, low register that turned the chilly air in the hallway thick and suffocatingly warm.