LOGINBella's POVI had just finished my night shower and was feeling almost human again.The jewelry was sitting on my dresser where I had laid it out carefully after spending an embarrassing amount of time just looking at it. The bracelet I had already put on and taken off twice because wearing it made the circle mark on my palm do things that made it difficult to think straight. I picked up the waist chain and turned it over in my fingers, the tiny rubies catching the light, and thought about putting it on.Then I thought about who would see it on me in this packhouse.Not yet. No man but the King was going to see that chain on my waist. I set it back down with that decision made and felt immediately ridiculous about the thought I had just had because what I had just thought was no man but the King and I needed to examine what was happening to me seriously.No man but the King.I was far gone. I was genuinely, completely far gone and I hadn't even fully registered when it had started hap
Andrew's POVI had been turning it over since morning and I still didn't have an answer that satisfied me.The King sent my wife a package. With the royal crest. Addressed to her specifically, by her full name, with instructions that it be received by her alone. I had been sitting with that fact all day and running it through every framework I had for understanding how things worked in this territory and none of them were producing a conclusion I was comfortable with.The King and Alexander had history. That was established, that was known. Alexander had gone to Ethan directly to arrange the marriage and Ethan had agreed, which meant there was a relationship there that went beyond the standard Alpha to King dynamic. A closeness. The kind that produced favors and consideration and possibly, possibly, the kind of gesture that had arrived in a royal box this morning.That was the version I kept returning to because it was the version that made the most sense and left my position intact.
Bella's POVThe sitting room had gone very quiet.Not the natural quiet of a room where nothing is happening, this is the loaded quiet of a room where everyone is waiting to see what happens next and nobody wants to be the one who moves first. Cordell was holding the box with the royal crest. Andrew was looking at me. Hailey had stopped what she was doing with Andrew's clothes and was looking at me too. And I was standing there looking at the box and telling my face to do absolutely nothing while my mind ran in fifteen directions simultaneously."Why would the King send you a package, Bella?" Andrew asked.His voice came out even. Controlled. But I had been living in close proximity to Andrew long enough to hear what was sitting underneath the evenness and what was underneath it right now was something I had never personally heard from him before directed at me.Jealousy.Actual jealousy. Thin and sharp and trying very hard to sound like reasonable suspicion."I'm just as shocked as y
Ethan's POVI woke up feeling different.Not in a way I had a clean word for. Not better exactly, not worse, just different. Like something that had been sitting at a fixed grinding pressure inside my chest for a very long time had shifted fractionally in the night and the absence of that specific pressure was unfamiliar enough that my body didn't know what to do with it yet.I lay still for a moment and took inventory the way I did every morning, locating the curse, assessing its weight, measuring it against the day before the way a man measures water in a container he knows is draining. It was the first thing I did when I woke up and had been for long enough that I no longer thought of it as something I chose to do.The curse was there.But it was quieter.Not gone, not even close to gone, but the grinding constant pressure of it had pulled back by a degree that was significant enough to notice and I lay there in the quiet of my room and noted it without letting my face do anything
Bella's POVI sat on the edge of my bed and let my mind spiral for a while because there was no point pretending it wasn't going to.Every possible outcome. Every version of what Andrew could have gotten out of them, every direction that conversation downstairs could have gone, every crack in the story that he might have found and pulled at until it came apart. I ran through all of it, one scenario after another, and when I had exhausted every terrible possibility I sat with what was left and made a decision.I was going to trust my gut.My gut said Julie had held herself together. My gut said Lucas had walked into that room with his head up and his story straight and had not given Andrew a single thing to work with. My gut said that if either of them had broken I would know about it by now in a way that involved Andrew's footsteps on the stairs rather than silence.I held onto that and felt the tightest part of the tension in my chest loosen by a fraction.I got up and started undres
Andrew's POVI knew Bella was lying.I had known she'd lie the moment she walked through that door with her spine straight and her face arranged into that blank composed expression she had been wearing since she woke up from that fall. Something had shifted in Bella since she lost her memory and I hadn't been able to put my finger on the exact shape of it but I felt it every time she looked at me, a steadiness that hadn't been there before, a quality in her eyes that was different from the crying obsessive woman I had been married to for two years.That woman had never been able to hide anything from me.This one was trying.The guards losing track of the carriage was the part that sat with me most. I had put my best men on her this morning, men who knew this territory the way they knew their own hands, and they had lost a single carriage on roads they had traveled their entire lives. That didn't happen by accident. Either Lucas had taken a route that made no sense for where she claim







