Chapter 10 — The Regent's Smile

I made it back to the suite before my hands started shaking. Then I made them stop.

I'd heard a man confess to murdering my entire bloodline through a wall. I'd heard him plan to do it again, starting with me. The smart move was to say nothing — to file it, the way I file everything, until I could survive using it.

Kael was waiting. One look at my face and he crossed the room.

"What happened."

"Nothing. Your Regent has a warm handshake."

"Aurora."

"Don't." I stepped back. "You told me the walls report to him. So forgive me if I'm careful which walls I bleed in front of."

"If he touched you—"

"He held my hand and smiled. That's all that happened." I made the lie clean and flat — because if I told him the truth tonight, he'd do something a king does. Something loud. Something that ended with my son exposed before he was ready. And I'd kept people alive by staying quiet for five years. I knew how to wait. "Did you know he raised Seraphina himself? After her mother died. He told me there's nothing a father won't do for the child in his keeping."

Kael's eyes sharpened. "Why would he tell you that?"

"Because it isn't a fact. It's a demonstration." I held his gaze. "He wanted me to understand he keeps children. That he's good at it. That a child in his keeping stays in his keeping." I turned away before my face could betray the rest. "He's very good, Kael. You were right about that. I just didn't understand how good until he smiled at me."

Something crossed Kael's face. "He says that to everyone. It's a threat in a nice coat."

"I gathered." I turned for the bedroom. "I'm tired, Kael. Let me be tired."

He let me. That, at least, he could still do.

The summons came at dawn. Heavy paper. The Council's seal.

Rowan delivered it himself and stood very still while Kael read.

"He's forcing a vote," Kael said. "On recognition. Whether the Council acknowledges Aurora as Luna and Luca as heir — or declares the union a fraud against the bloodlines." He set it down. "If they vote against us, the boy isn't my legitimate heir. The crown can't shield him. Which makes him a rogue three-blood child the Council is legally permitted to remove."

"He's doing it because he heard you cleared the vaults," I said. "He's dragging Luca into the open so he can be voted into a grave. Legally. With twelve witnesses and a clean ledger."

"He's doing it," Kael said grimly, "because he's good at this. He's been good at this since before either of us was born."

"Then we don't give him the vote," I said. "We don't show. We stall."

"We can't. A summons refused is a confession of fraud. If we don't appear, he wins without a vote at all." Kael's jaw set. "We go. We give them nothing they can use. And we pray the boy holds until we're back."

They took us up to the Spire — the Council's hall, a single black windowless tower that crowned the government heights, built to make whoever stood at its center feel watched by history. Twelve alpha thrones in a ring. And raised half a step above the rest, the Regent's seat.

Cyrus rose when I entered. He smiled at me the way he'd smiled at the slaughter. Warm. Paternal. Certain.

"My friends." He spread his hands to the ring. "We are here to protect a child. Surely none of us wants anything else. Let us simply establish the facts. Where the boy comes from. What he is. Whether the law may call him ours." His eyes found mine across the floor, and the smile deepened. A noose with very good manners. "The mother may speak first. Tell us, child. What is your son?"

The ring waited. Twelve alphas, and I could feel the room's weight tip toward me, all that ancient appetite for a verdict.

"My son," I said, "is a four-year-old boy who is sick. That's what he is. The rest is your business, not his."

A murmur ran the ring. One alpha — broad, gray-scarred, older than the rest, with a face like weathered stone — almost smiled. Most did not.

"A charming deflection." Cyrus turned to the thrones. "But the law doesn't recognize charm. It recognizes blood. So I move that we summon the child himself — here, now — so the Council may witness with its own eyes what manner of creature it is being asked to crown. Let the boy be brought up from his sickbed, and let us look at what we are deciding."

"No." Kael's voice cut the room cold. "He is too ill to move."

"Then perhaps," Cyrus said gently, "he is too ill to be an heir at all. Or perhaps—" his gaze slid to me "—the mother fears what we'll see when we look."

A younger alpha to his right leaned forward, eager to be noticed. "The Regent raises a fair point. We have crowned no heir we have not examined since the founding. To make an exception is to invite a hundred more."

"To haul a dying child across the city like livestock to market," said the gray-scarred old alpha across the ring, in a voice like gravel in a barrel, "is to forget what the Council was built to be." He did not look at Cyrus. He looked at me, and there was something measuring in it. "I have buried sons. I'll not vote to drag a sick one out of his bed to satisfy a quorum's curiosity."

"Noted, and overruled by the chair," Cyrus said smoothly. "We are not here for sentiment, old friend. We are here for the law. And the law says an unnamed heir is a danger until he is named, examined, and entered into the record where the bloodlines can account for him."

"The law says a great many things, Regent." Kael had not raised his voice once. That was the most frightening thing about him in that room — twelve alphas shouting their positions, and the king standing in the center of it as still as a held blade. "It also says the chair may not compel a king's heir without cause. So state your cause. Out loud. In the record. Say what you believe the boy is."

Silence. I watched it land. Cyrus could not say it — could not name the prophecy, the White blood, the thing he'd murdered thousands to bury — without confessing he knew it existed. And a man who admits he knows a buried thing admits he was there to bury it.

The smile did not move. But the eyes did.

"Call your vote, Regent," I said into the quiet. "Or admit you don't have the numbers and stop performing."

The gray-scarred alpha barked a single, surprised laugh, and smothered it. Cyrus's smile did not move, but his eyes did — and I knew I'd made an enemy properly, the way you only ever make one once.

"Very well," he said softly. "Let the record show the mother demands a vote. Let the record show—"

He never finished it.

Rowan came through the chamber doors fast — not a man interrupting a Council, a man who had stopped caring that he was. The slim black comm at his collar was lit, and so were a dozen others around the ring as the alert chased itself through the building, and his face had gone to a color I would learn to dread.

"My lord." He didn't lower his voice for the room. There was no time to. "The vaults. The monitors are screaming. It's the boy."

Luca.