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Chloe's POVI found it while Kael and Theron were still arguing over the window.A single sheet, folded small, tucked under the base of the unlit lamp on Marcus's desk, easy to miss unless you were looking at the desk itself instead of the door he'd gone out through."Theron."He crossed the room in two steps. I unfolded the page carefully, Marcus's handwriting cramped and hurried, nothing like the careful hand he used for official records.*If you are reading this, I did not wait long enough for permission I knew you would not give me.**The margin note about the sister half named two courts, not one. I told you both, at the time. What I did not tell you, because I was not certain enough to say it aloud, is that the note also named a third thing. A place. Not a court. A location where Aldric performed the original working, before he ever reached the great hall of this keep, a smaller site, older, where the boundary between the curse and whatever came before it is thinnest.**I believ
Chloe's POVAdrian was awake when I came in, propped against pillows with his bandaged hand resting on the blanket, and something in his face changed the moment he saw mine."You've been riding," he said. "All night, from the state of you. What happened.""We found Seraphine.""Thank the gods." Relief moved across his face, quick and unguarded, the kind that was hard to fake even for someone as easy with a smile as Adrian usually was. "Is she—""Alive. Cold. Furious." I pulled the chair beside his bed closer and sat, close enough that he couldn't mistake this for a courtesy visit. "She heard something, while she was held. A name Thorne used. Someone who already knew everything Thorne knew, without needing convincing."Adrian's expression didn't change right away. That, more than anything, was what made me watch him closer."You think it was me," he said finally, quiet."I think Theron is standing outside that door right now deciding whether to believe it was."Something flickered behi
Chloe's POVThe pull sharpened all at once, hard enough that I gasped and nearly lost my seat.Theron's hand shot out to steady me before I'd finished swaying. "Chloe.""Close." My voice came out strange, thinned by the effort of holding onto the thread without losing it. "Very close now."Kael raised a fist, and the column behind us slowed, hooves going quiet on packed earth as the trees thickened around us into something closer to a proper wood. Dawn light came down through the branches in broken pieces, grey turning gold at the edges, and somewhere ahead of us I heard it before I understood what I was hearing.A voice. Low. Familiar in a way that made my chest go tight before my mind caught up.Theron heard it too. He was off his horse before I could stop him, sword already drawn, and I slid down after him despite every instinct in Kael's face telling me to stay put.We found the clearing forty paces further in.A small stone hut sat half-collapsed against a hillside, the kind of f
Chloe's POVKael was back at the window within a minute, torch in hand, leaning out over the ledge like he could will footprints into existing on stone that held none."Nothing," he said. "He knew this drop. He's used it before, or scouted it, or both.""Ridge roads," Theron said, low. "That's what he told Chloe. He thinks we don't know them.""We don't." Kael's jaw tightened. "Not the way a man who's spent years riding this border for pleasure knows them.""Wait." I looked between them. "Ridge roads. Rock that holds no tracks."Kael's eyes came up to mine, already working it out before I finished saying it."Seraphine," he said."The case they found empty, half a mile out near the old well road," I said. "Your own words, Kael. Tracks that stopped the moment the ground turned to stone, because whoever took her knew exactly where the tracking would fail."The room went very quiet."You're saying Thorne knew where she was taken," Theron said."I'm saying he just told us, without meaning
Chloe's POVElias looked worse under torchlight than he had in the courtyard, the cut above his eyebrow still raw, his hands folded together like he was holding onto them to keep them still.Theron didn't sit. He stood at the head of the table with his arms crossed, and I recognized the posture, the same one he'd worn the night he decided to let the council argue itself into revealing something none of them meant to show."Say it," Theron said."I need to see the message again first." Elias's voice was steady, but his eyes weren't. "I want to be certain before I put a name in this room. I've been wrong about worse things, and I'd rather stand here silent a while longer than watch you arrest an innocent man on my account."Marcus, still splinted and seated but present, slid the coded parchment across the table without being asked. Elias studied it for a long moment, his thumb tracing the line of ink like he was reading it with his fingers as much as his eyes."I've spent eleven years o
Chloe's POVI found Sera in the linen room again, the same place I'd found her the last time something ugly had landed near her name, and I wondered if she'd started going there on purpose, somewhere small and orderly she could control when nothing else was."Kael's already spoken to me," she said, before I'd said a word. "Twice, actually. He's very thorough for a man who apologizes badly.""This isn't Kael."Something in my voice made her set down the folded sheet in her hands."Thorne found a private allowance," I said. "Paid to you, three years ago, under the late King's personal seal. Not the crown's seal. His."Sera went very still, and for a moment I watched her decide something, weigh it, the way I'd watched Marcus weigh the same kind of decision in the archive weeks ago."I wondered when that would surface," she said finally. "I hoped it wouldn't have to. Not because I'm ashamed of it. Because it isn't mine to explain without explaining someone else's dying first.""Whose."She







