Chapter 21

(Elouera’s POV)

I could still taste blood and burnt sugar in the back of my throat.

I was shaking badly as I sat on the cold stone floor of the washroom. I kept scrubbing my skin with a rough brush until it became red and started bleeding. The water in the basin had turned dirty brown from all the dirt I was washing off.

I had crawled through the underground sewers to escape Archduke Holden’s guards. The horrible smell of the sewers was still stuck to my skin.

Master Bram had saved my life. When the crossbows had leveled on my chest, the old apothecary had hurled his boiling mortar of distilled mercury directly into the faces of the armored soldiers. In the screaming, blinding chaos that followed, he had shoved me backward through a concealed trapdoor. I had run in pitch blackness for two hours, my lungs screaming, my fractured rib grinding with every step, until I finally crawled through the hidden panel behind my wardrobe.

But I hadn't truly escaped.

I dropped the bloody brush onto the floor tiles and pulled my knees to my chest, burying my face in my hands. A fractured, breathless sob tore itself from my throat.

It forces the body to absorb its own hormones until the reproductive system violently calcifies. Bram’s raspy voice echoed endlessly in the dark corners of my mind. It strips away their sanity. It turns them into a hollow, obedient shell.

I had three weeks before the single black pill Holden had forced down my throat completely eradicated my mind. I wouldn't be the Weaver anymore. I wouldn't even be Elouera. I would be a blank, breathing corpse sitting on a velvet chair, entirely controlled by the Archduke.

A soft, metallic click sounded from my bedchamber.

My breath hitched. I instantly went rigid, my hand shooting out to grab the heavy brass candlestick resting on the edge of the washbasin. I pushed myself up, pressing my back flat against the cold tiles, and edged toward the open archway of the washroom.

"You can put the brass down. If I wanted to kill you, I wouldn't have knocked."

The voice was low, rough, and completely devoid of its usual arrogant drawl.

I stepped out of the shadows, my wet hair clinging to my face, my linen bindings damp and tight across my chest.

Stirling Vance was sitting on the edge of my mattress. He didn't look like a Crown Duke. The heavy, embroidered velvet coats and polished leather boots were gone. He wore a simple, unlaced linen shirt that hung loosely over his broad shoulders, and dark riding breeches. His bronze hair was a chaotic, wind-blown mess, and the dark shadows bruising the skin beneath his striking green eyes spoke of days without sleep.

He rested his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped loosely between them. He wasn't radiating the heavy, suffocating Alpha dominance he usually wielded like a weapon. The scent of crushed cedar and woodsmoke was subdued, carrying a strange, heavy undercurrent of pure exhaustion.

"How did you get in here?" I demanded, my voice hoarse.

"You left the latch on the balcony doors unbolted," Stirling murmured. He finally lifted his head, his gaze sweeping over my shivering, soaked frame. He didn't mock me. He didn't make a cruel remark about the pathetic state of the Second Prince.

His eyes just softened, filled with a dark, heavy sorrow that completely disarmed me.

"You look like you're carrying the weight of the entire empire on your shoulders, Elouera," he whispered softly.

Hearing my true name fall from his lips sent a violent, electric shock straight down my spine. He had called me 'Elian' in the archives, even after realizing I was female. Hearing him say my real name in the quiet intimacy of my shadowed bedroom completely shattered the barrier between us.

"What do you want, Stirling?" I asked, lowering the candlestick, my fingers trembling. "If Callan finds you in here..."

"Callan is currently tearing the east wing apart trying to figure out why he can't stop thinking about you," Stirling interrupted quietly. He patted the empty space on the mattress beside him. "Sit down. Please. Before you collapse."

I hesitated, every survival instinct screaming at me to run, but my legs were completely giving out. The cold numbness from the calcification drug was beginning to seep into my joints. I dragged myself across the Persian rug and sat on the far edge of the bed, putting a yard of space between us.

Stirling stared down at his own hands. For a long, agonizing minute, the only sound in the room was the howling wind rattling the balcony glass.

"The courier arrived from the north an hour ago," Stirling finally said, his voice entirely hollow. "The Empress officially sealed the contract. I am to ride for the northern border in three days. I am marrying Duchess Vespera."

I swallowed hard. The marriage contract I had intercepted. The death sentence for the rebellion.

"Then she has secured her alliance," I said carefully, looking at his profile. "You will command the largest private infantry on the continent."

"It's not an alliance," Stirling let out a bitter, jagged laugh that held absolutely no humor. He turned his head, his ,green eyes locking onto mine with a raw, terrifying vulnerability. "Vespera and her brother, Kasimir Adler, don't build alliances. They build slaughterhouses. Kasimir is a butcher who skins defectors alive and hangs them from the pines, and Vespera is the architect who gives him the orders. They don't want an Imperial Duke as a partner. They want a royal hostage to ensure the Empress never marches her legions into their territory."

He leaned toward me, the distance between us suddenly feeling dangerously small. The heat radiating off his large frame was blistering against my freezing skin.

"I was raised to be a weapon for my uncle," Stirling rasped, his voice dropping into a desperate, gravelly whisper. "I have spent my entire life standing in the shadows of arrogant, violent men, pretending to be exactly like them just so they wouldn't turn their blades on me. And now, my aunt is boxing me up and shipping me off to a frozen wasteland to be chained to a woman who will likely slit my throat in my sleep the moment she decides I'm no longer useful."

I stared at him, completely stunned.

The arrogant, mocking tyrant who cornered me in the corridors was entirely gone. Beneath the terrifying Alpha exterior was a man suffocating in the exact same political cage I was trapped in. He was terrified. He was entirely stripped of his armor, bleeding out on my bedsheets and asking for a lifeline.

"Why are you telling me this?" I whispered, my heart hammering a frantic rhythm against my bruised ribs.

"Because you're the Weaver," Stirling breathed. He closed the gap between us, his large body shifting across the mattress until his knee brushed against mine. I flinched, but I didn't pull away. "Because you are the only person in this entire cursed palace who possesses a mind sharp enough to see the board. I don't want to marry her, Elouera. I don't want to leave."

He lifted his hand. I froze completely as his long, calloused fingers gently pushed a wet strand of hair out of my eyes. His knuckles grazed the angry red bruise on my jawline where Callan had struck me.

His touch was agonizingly gentle. My suppressed Omega biology, already confused and fractured by the poison in my veins, violently leaned into the contact. A deep, instinctual whine built in the back of my throat, begging for the safety of his warmth.

"Tell me how to break the contract," Stirling murmured, his thumb lightly tracing the line of my lower lip. His green eyes darkened, the cedar scent wrapping around me like a heavy, protective blanket. "Tell me how to dismantle the Adler House before I even arrive. Give me a strategy, Elouera. I will do whatever you ask. I will burn my uncle's campaign to ash. I will hand you the capital on a silver platter. Just... tell me how to get out of this."

His face was inches from mine. The raw, desperate hunger in his gaze was entirely intoxicating. For the first time in my life, a man wasn't demanding my submission. He was offering his sword, his loyalty, his entire life, in exchange for my mind.

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him how we could play Kasimir against Vespera, how we could fracture the northern border from the inside out.

But as I drew a breath, a sharp, agonizing spike of pure ice drove itself directly into the center of my chest.

I gasped, my eyes flying wide. The pain was catastrophic. My lungs seized entirely.

Stirling’s face instantly dropped its desperate vulnerability, shifting into pure, panicked alarm. "Elouera? What's wrong?"

I couldn't speak. I reached up, gripping the front of his linen shirt with a shaking, violent desperation. My vision swam with dark, oily spots. I could feel it happening. I could feel the Night-bloom root surging through my bloodstream, rapidly calcifying the pathways to my brain.

"Elouera, look at me," Stirling demanded, his hands gripping my shoulders.

I choked, coughing violently. A thick, metallic substance hit the back of my teeth.

Stirling’s eyes widened in sheer, unadulterated horror.

He grabbed my chin, tilting my face toward the dim candlelight. He didn't look into my eyes. He looked at the stark, horrifying black veins that were suddenly webbed across the pale skin of my neck, spidering upward from my collarbone.

"Your veins..." Stirling whispered, the blood completely draining from his face. He wiped a thumb across the corner of my mouth, staring at the drop of pitch-black blood that stained his skin.

He knew exactly what it was. Every military commander in the Sovereign Empire knew the symptoms of the Archduke's eradication agent.symptoms

Who gave you the Night-bloom?" Stirling roared, his voice shaking the glass in the balcony doors.

I couldn't answer. The world tilted sideways, the agonizing cold finally swallowing my vision entirely as my grip on his shirt failed, and I collapsed forward into absolute, suffocating darkness.