LOGINRavena's POVMarianne's jaw tightened. The needle hadn't gone in. So she reached for a crueler one."Family?" she sneered, and her lip curled. "Is that what you are? Do you know, Luna, my daughter here once had a great deal to say about you, before you were quite so grand. About the kind of woman my nephew was bringing into the royal house." Her eyes glittered. "A woman married once already and cast off. A woman with a used name and a second wedding. Cressida had her doubts about whether such a one belonged among us at all, and she was not wrong to have them, wha
Ravena's POV In the end, Marianne chose to pay.She gave the order through her teeth, and her steward went to the room and came back with a thick fold of bank notes, and she had them set down on the table in front of me rather than placed in my hand, as though passing them to me directly would cost her something more than the coin.I didn't take offense. I just drew them towards me and started to count.
Ravena's POV I had my hand on the door and Vivienne behind me and the whole stack of books held tight against my body when Marianne broke."Wait."I stopped, but I didn't turn around, not yet. I let her say it again."Wait." Her voice was tight, forced out through her
Ravena's POVThe Ministry of Justice. I had said it plainly, and I had said it on purpose, because I knew something that these two women knew even better than I did. The Ministry of Justice, the kingdom's own house of questioners and judges, did not answer to some distant lord. It answered to my husband. Evander held it. The prince who commanded the armies also commanded the men who put hard questions to criminals against the crown, and every soul in the capital knew it.
Ravena's POVDuchess Marianne's house was different at night.By day it had been all light and polish, grand rooms made to make a visitor feel small. But at this dark hour it was hushed and shadowed, and the servant who let us in did so with the stiff, uneasy manner of a household that had not expected callers and didn't know what to make of two women arriving with a stack of books and four silent guards at their backs.
Ravena's POV I had the manager brought to me in a small stone room at the back of the manor.It was the deep middle of the night by then. I had spent hours over the true books and the contract, and I knew now almost everything the numbers could tell me. What I didn't yet have was the thing numbers can't hold. The intent behind them. And for that, I needed the man who had kept them.They sat him on a stool in the middle of the room, the shop's accountant and manager both, the soft ink-stained man who had come sighing about losses only that morning and now looked as though he had aged ten years in a day. A guard stood at his shoulders. And in the corner a small charcoal stove had been lit at my order, and its coals glowed low and red, and laid across the top of them was a long iron rod, and the tip of it was beginning to take on the colour of the coals.I sat down in the chair across from him and folded my hands, and I let him look at the rod for a while before I said anything."I am
Ravena's POV"I feel nothing," I said simply.And it was true.I felt nothing at all.Their betrayal had drained every last drop of mercy from me. Every last ounce of compassion. I had nothing left to give them. No pity. No sympathy. No regret.Watching Lucien take those lashes had not brought me j
Evander's POVThe border reports were spread across my desk in neat stacks. They contained numbers, casualties, supply lines, and territory markers. I had been staring at them for hours, trying to make sense of what we had gained and what we had lost.Even though the war was over, the work never en
Ravena's POV"I don't know," Evander said quietly. "But I hope he does."The words hung between us for a moment, filled with honesty and doubt.Then he gestured ahead. "Let's go. You need to rest."I followed him until we arrived at a camp, my mind still turning over everything that had happened. T
Ravena's POV"I still stand by my words that Astrid is innocent," Lucien said, his voice shaking but resolute. "Someone is trying to ruin her. Frame her. Destroy her reputation."I stared at him in shock. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the numerous testimonies, and the undeniable truth presente







