Chapter 34 — The Video

I should have watched it alone. I watched it with Kael in the room instead, because some cold, testing part of me wanted to see his face when it played — wanted to know, before the world did, whether I was about to be surprised.

The footage was old. Grainy. Nineteen years old, by the look of it, and I knew the math before the timestamp confirmed it: Kael at sixteen. Five years after his parents were butchered. Deep in the regency of the man who'd done the butchering.

A boy stood in the Council Spire in mourning black that hadn't had time to fade. Too thin. Too still. The terrible stillness I knew so well — learned that young, worn like armor over a wound that hadn't closed. And in front of him, a hand on his shoulder, paternal and patient and triumphant, stood a younger Cyrus Voss.

"Repeat the oath, Kael," the younger Cyrus said, warm as a knife. "For the good of all wolfkind. For the vision."

And the boy — orphaned, grieving, sixteen, with nowhere on the earth to go that wasn't owned by the man whose hand was on his shoulder — lifted his chin and swore.

"I pledge myself to the Regent's vision," said the boy who would be king. "To the protection of wolfkind, by whatever means the vision requires. I will not stand against it. By moon and blood."

The screen went dark.

For a moment neither of us spoke. The boy in the footage stayed behind my eyes — that terrible thin stillness, the mourning black, the hand on his shoulder that belonged to the man who'd made him an orphan. I'd spent weeks learning to read the king. Now I'd seen where he learned to be unreadable. A child swears a great many things to the monster who owns his food.

"How old were you when you understood," I asked. "What he really was. The massacre. Your parents."

"Nineteen." Kael's voice was very low. "Three years after I swore that oath in that room, I found the order — the real one, for the night of the burning, signed in his own hand. I'd already pledged myself to protect wolfkind by the time I learned the man I'd pledged it to was the one who'd hunted mine to ash." A pause. "I've been keeping that oath against him every day since. He just made a tape of the wrong half of it."

"They'll cut it exactly there," I said. My voice came out flat — the clerk in me, already seeing the edit, already seeing the war. "Right at by whatever means the vision requires. They'll run it under your face and my face and the word ASSASSIN, and every wolf in the country will see the king who married the rogue White Lycan swearing himself, body and blood, to the Regent's vision. They won't hear the rest. They won't see the boy. They'll see a man who's been Cyrus's creature since he was sixteen."

"It was a fealty oath." Kael's voice was very low. "Every minor heir swears one to his regent. It was the most ordinary thing in the world, and the most coerced. I was sixteen, and he owned the floor I slept on and the food I ate, and the only other people I'd ever loved were ash because of him — though I didn't know it yet." His jaw worked. "And here's the part that should matter and won't: an oath wrung out of a grieving sixteen-year-old by the man who owned his food binds no one. A coerced vow from a minor is void in any court the Council keeps — Cyrus knows that better than I do; he wrote half those laws. But he never needed the law. He needed the picture. The law could free me of that oath in an afternoon. The footage will follow me the rest of my reign." He didn't look away from the dark screen. "I swore to protect wolfkind. That's what the vision was, to me. That's all it ever was. I'd have sworn it again at twenty and meant it, and I've spent every year since trying to keep it — against him." A muscle moved in his jaw. "He's going to use the truest thing about me to make me look like the lie."

I believed him. That was the worst part. Standing in the wreck of our marriage, the Protocol still raw between us — I looked at the boy in that footage and I believed every word the man said.

And I still felt the crack widen. Because that is what Cyrus does. He doesn't need you to believe the lie. He only needs to put one more thing between you and the person you're trying to trust, and let the distance do the rest.

"Tell me to trust you," I said. It came out smaller than I meant. "Tell me you've never lied to me about anything that matters, and I'll believe you, and we walk out of this together."

He was quiet a long moment. And then he did the bravest, most honest thing he could have done. He didn't.

"I can't," he said. "Because I did lie to you. About the Protocol. And if I stand here now and swear there's nothing else, and you find one more thing later, it finishes us for good." His jaw set. "So I won't promise you a clean slate, Aurora. I'll promise you this instead: from tonight, no more managing. No more pieces I decide you can't carry. You get all of it, even when it costs me you." He met my eyes. "That's not trust me. That's better than trust me. That's check my work."

And Goddess help me, it was. It was so much better than the lie I'd asked him for.

It was on every screen by morning, cut exactly where I said it would be.

By noon the Council had "circulated it for review" — the polite Council phrase for weaponized. By afternoon, alphas who'd been feeling out meetings with me were going quiet again, because allying with a hunted queen was one thing, and allying with a hunted queen married to the Regent's blood-sworn creature was another.

And by evening they came for the shot Cyrus had been setting up all along.

I'd agreed to a single press appearance — my first since the broadcast named me a monster. A careful, controlled thing, my pack at my back, meant to show the country a queen instead of a rogue. Cyrus had known I'd take it. He'd built the whole week toward the moment I'd be standing in front of forty cameras with no script and no exit.

I knew it was a trap walking in. Kael knew it too. He'd argued against the appearance for an hour — and then, the new thing, the thing I was still learning to believe, he'd stopped arguing and said: "It's your call. If you go, I'll be in the room. Not to answer for you. Just so you're not alone when he springs it." So I went. And he stood at the side of the room where I could see him, saying nothing, being there — which was the only kind of protection I'd ever actually wanted from him.

The reporter was young and frightened and someone's instrument, and she asked the question they'd given her to ask — the question with my marriage inside it like a blade in a cake.

"My lady," she said, into the silence, with the whole world watching my face. "After everything that's come to light this week — the Protocol, the oath, the footage — the people deserve to know." A breath. "Do you still trust your husband?"