Chapter 56

Stirling Vance

The blue light from the monitors filled the dark underground archive, casting strange shadows across the stone walls.

My ribs ached beneath the thick linen bandages, reminding me of the injuries Callan had caused during the night of the Gala. The pain burned through my side, but I ignored it. My rough, calloused fingers, hardened by years of handling war bows in the freezing North, moved carefully over the brass keys of the main security terminal.

In the capital, the nobles believed the Imperial Guards controlled the palace gates. They were fools.

Forty years ago, the Northern House had built the lower security system, hiding cameras and mechanical passages deep inside the stone walls of New Avalon. The Empress might believe the palace belonged to her, but almost every dark corner could be watched if you knew which keys to press.

I opened the recordings from the night before the Gala.

The images on the screen flickered, making everything look grainy and unclear. I went through the footage one frame at a time until the long corridor outside the Second Prince’s chambers came into view.

Everyone at court believed Prince Elian was a weak, sickly boy who spent his nights coughing blood into silk handkerchiefs. They felt sorry for him.

Callan, on the other hand, despised him.

I leaned closer to the screen, narrowing my amber eyes as the timestamp at the bottom reached midnight.

Then, a figure appeared from a narrow servants’ passage hidden behind a heavy tapestry.

The figure wasn’t a weak, sickly prince who could barely stand straight. She moved smoothly and confidently, keeping low as she slipped past the guards on patrol. She was so quiet that she seemed like a ghost.

She wore a plain, dark wool cloak with the hood pulled over her head. But as she passed beneath the camera near the southern archway, a sudden breeze caught the fabric and pushed her hood back a little.

My breath caught in my throat.

It wasn’t just the delicate shape of a woman’s jaw or the dark hair that had escaped the pins usually used to hold the prince’s hair in place.

It was her eyes.

They were fierce, cold, and filled with a dangerous intelligence. There was no way those eyes belonged to the weak royal spare everyone thought they knew.

Elouera.

A powerful shock ran down my spine.

The sweet scent of wild honey and fresh rain suddenly filled my mind. It was the same scent that had destroyed my self-control during the Equinox waltz. For a moment, it felt as though the fragrance was coming straight through the screen and filling my lungs.

“Where were you going, little bird?” I whispered into the silence of the archive, tracing the outline of her figure on the glass screen with my thumb.

I activated the tracking system and followed her from one camera to the next. The footage led me through the outer drainage passages, past the tall iron walls surrounding the palace, and deep into the city’s dark, decaying underworld.

She wasn’t running to meet an ally, and she wasn’t looking for protection from the Northern envoys.

Instead, she went straight to the Under-Market.

In the forty-second recording, I watched her climb down through a rusty iron grate behind the old slaughterhouse. Below it was a maze of stone tunnels known as the Sinks. I followed her through three more camera feeds until the cameras could no longer track her. The last one showed a thick oak door reinforced with iron. A roughly painted crow’s skull marked its surface.

Vane’s hideout.

He was the leader of the Black Cell, the most ruthless network of mercenaries and underground dealers in the realm.

My jaw tightened, and a muscle twitched near my collar.

Why would the hidden heir of Sunfall, a girl pretending to be a prince, risk her life to meet a criminal syndicate leader in such a dangerous place just twenty-four hours before the Gala?

I rewound the recording from the passage outside the hideout.

The blurry footage showed Elouera standing inside a dark chamber, surrounded by four armed mercenaries with their swords drawn.

She didn’t look frightened. She didn’t offer them any gold.

Instead, she reached beneath her cloak, pulled out a thick, sealed document bearing Archduke Holden’s private wax seal, and tossed it onto the stone table in front of Vane.

My mind raced as I tried to understand what I was seeing.

She wasn’t there to make a deal with the mercenaries. She was examining the very contract Holden had prepared to fill the Gala with Night-bloom.

She had known about her uncle’s betrayal before anyone even lit the first burner.

While everyone believed she was a helpless pawn in his hands, she had walked straight into danger to gather the evidence against him herself.

“Gods above,” I whispered.

A strange mixture of anger and deep admiration filled my chest. For the first time, I realized just how dangerous Elouera truly was.

She wasn’t just trying to survive. She was making fools of every lord in the capital.

I leaned back and slammed my palm against the iron console. Then I brought up the live camera feed from the royal bedchambers in the East Wing. I needed to see where she was and what was happening to her.

The screen flickered for a moment before the picture became clear.

Inside the small, dark room, Archduke Holden stood near the velvet curtains. A cruel, satisfied smile spread across his pale face. He held a heavy brass vial filled with vaporized Catalyst-7, with his thumb resting on the seal that kept it closed.

Callan was on his knees, blood running from his neck. Jace stood beside the bed, completely submitting to Holden.

And Elouera stood between them.

Her linen nightshirt was torn, and the golden Sunfall mark on her throat glowed brightly.

As I watched the live feed, Holden pressed his thumb down on the brass lever.

The glass seal cracked.

A thick cloud of bright, silver smoke burst out of the vial, quickly filling the closed room.

My heart stopped.

Through the camera, I watched Elouera’s eyes fly open in shock. I expected her to collapse, overwhelmed by the poison, and fall into a helpless heat.

But that wasn’t what happened.

The golden lines on her neck suddenly blazed with an intense, burning light. She reached into her sleeve, pulled out the silver stiletto hidden there, and stepped straight into the deadly cloud.