Chapter 65

Stirling Vance

I had always believed I was a sensible man living in a kingdom full of mad dogs.

Callan ruled through his royal status and brutal behavior, while Jace acted like a weapon that had been trained to kill without thinking. But I was different. I thought things through before making a move. Every lord, every agreement, and every betrayal was something I studied carefully until I found a way to use it to my advantage.

When I first discovered the truth about the weak, sickly Second Prince, everything changed. I studied the security footage and slowly put the pieces together. Prince Elian wasn’t a boy at all. He was an Omega girl hiding the bloodline of the lost Sunfall family.

To me, Elouera was the perfect weapon. She was exactly what I needed to bring down the Empress and protect the Northern House for the next hundred years.

I told myself I was only interested in her because of her intelligence. I told myself I admired the brilliant, dangerous mind hidden behind that hunched posture and expensive velvet clothes.

But I had been lying to myself.

I was a complete fool.

Above us, pale silver mist began leaking through the iron air vent. It hissed as it entered the room, floating through the weak candlelight like a curtain of glowing rain.

The small archive vault had no windows, and its twelve-by-twelve-foot space was quickly becoming a death trap. The young messenger lay dead in the dust behind the cedar shelves. The black veins covering his face showed us exactly what the poison could do to someone who hadn’t been protected against it.

Jace was already on his knees beside the sealed iron gate. His short sword slipped from his hand and hit the wooden floor.

The Vanguard commander had survived ten years of bloody battles in the outer colonies, but even he couldn’t fight what was happening to his body.

He grabbed his throat, struggling to breathe. His chest rose and fell as he gasped for air, each breath rougher than the last.

The gas was attacking his lungs. At the same time, the artificial heat it caused was throwing his Alpha instincts into chaos.

His hazel eyes were growing darker by the second.

“Jace!” Elouera cried.

Her voice broke as she called his name, and for the first time, she no longer sounded like a royal prince pretending to be someone else.

She didn’t run toward the sealed door or break down crying. Instead, she moved quickly, faster than I could have imagined, despite the poison filling the room.

Because she had already taken small doses of Catalyst-7 into her body, the gas couldn’t knock her out the way it had affected the others. The resistance she had built up was protecting her.

She dropped to her knees beside Jace and grabbed the front of his leather coat with both hands. Using all her strength, she tried to pull his large, shaking body back against the stone wall.

“Stay awake!” she ordered, her rough voice filled with fear and desperation. “Breathe through your nose, Jace. Fight it!”

I moved forward to help her, my heavy boots crushing the dust and old papers scattered across the floor.

The gas burned my lungs like broken glass. My vision began to blur around the edges, but the rush of adrenaline kept me on my feet.

I bent down and grabbed Elouera’s upper arm with my large, rough hand, helping her pull Jace’s heavy body against the wall.

My fingers pressed against the thin wool of her sleeve. As I helped her, my hand brushed the bare skin of her shoulder where her tunic had torn during our escape.

And in that single moment, everything I believed changed forever.

Her skin was burning hot, but it wasn’t the kind of heat that came from a fever. It felt as though her body held a steady fire inside it, the same resistance that was protecting her from the poison.

But that wasn’t what made me freeze.

My nostrils flared, and I drew in a sharp breath before I could stop myself.

My own scent—the strong smell of cedar and cold winter air that I had covered her with using my thick wool coat—was slowly fading. Her natural scent was becoming stronger, breaking through the smell I had used to hide it.

Wild honey. Fresh lilies after the rain. A sharp scent like the air before lightning strikes.

The moment I smelled her true scent, something inside me changed.

It didn’t feel like discovering something useful for a plan. It felt like someone had struck me hard in the chest with a hammer.

Every logical thought and every political plan I had spent thirty years building suddenly meant nothing. The cold Northern Lord who always treated people like pieces on a chessboard seemed to disappear right there on the dusty floor of the vault.

It wasn’t just her intelligence. It wasn’t just her royal blood or the army I could give her to help bring down the Empress.

I wanted her.

The feeling was so strong and natural that my teeth began to ache, and my jaw tightened.

I wanted the girl who could hold a sharp blade against a lord’s throat without trembling. I wanted the girl who had willingly taken poison into her body just to make herself stronger and harder to control.

Her scent wasn’t something I wanted to hide anymore. It was something I wanted to breathe in for the rest of my life. I wanted to lose myself in it completely.

My fingers tightened around her arm. This time, I wasn’t holding her with the careful grip of a soldier helping someone.

I was holding her because a deep, possessive feeling had taken over me. My instincts wanted to keep her close, and I could feel my knuckles turning white from how tightly I was gripping her.

Elouera went still.

Slowly, she turned her head and looked up at me through the silver mist floating in the candlelight. Her dark eyes were still sharp and clear despite the poison in the air.

She looked straight into my eyes.

She could feel that something had changed in me. She could sense the sudden shift in my behavior and the strength of my Alpha instincts as I stopped hiding what I truly felt.

For the first time, I wasn’t trying to control those feelings with logic or reason. They were there for her to see, raw and impossible to hide.

“Stirling…” she whispered.

Her chest rose and fell as she struggled to breathe. For a brief moment, I saw a hint of genuine vulnerability on her pale face as she understood the dangerous truth revealed in my eyes.

“I lied to you,” I said, my voice rough and broken, sounding nothing like the calm man I used to be.

I still held her arm and pulled her a little closer. My thumb brushed gently over her shoulder as I stared into her eyes.

“In the map room, when I offered you my army, I told you I wanted to destroy this court alongside a Queen who knew how to use a blade.”

Elouera’s breathing caught. She quickly placed one small hand against my blood-stained chest plate.

“Stirling, the gas”

“I don’t give a damn about the gas,” I growled. My voice came out deep and rough, and I could feel the sound rumbling through my chest.

“I don’t care about the throne. I don’t care about the Vance family name. If we get out of this place alive, Elouera, I’m never letting you go.”

My confession hung between us in the poisonous air. My words were frightening, but I meant every single one of them.

Before she could say anything, before she could even react to what I had confessed, a loud, steady vibration came from the iron gate behind us.

Someone was trying to force it open.

But it wasn’t a key turning in a lock.

The thick iron bars began to bend and groan under an incredible amount of force. They twisted outward as though something monstrous was pulling them apart.

Through the thick silver mist filling the room, I watched in shock as the entire iron gate was ripped from its stone tracks and hurled into the corridor.

It hit the ground with a deafening crash.

Standing in the broken doorway, surrounded by the orange glow of a dozen torches, was Crown Prince Callan.

His dark military tunic was gone, leaving his chest bare and covered in sweat, black soot, and fresh blood. He held a large sword in his right hand.

But it was his eyes that made my blood run cold.

They were no longer crimson. They had turned completely black, and his sharp canines showed beneath his lips as the torchlight reflected off them.

His gaze was fixed on my hand, which was still gripping Elouera’s shoulder.

“Take your hands off my mate, Vance!” Callan roared.

His voice was so wild and powerful that the glass covers on the nearby wall lamps shattered.

“Or I’ll tear your heart out and eat it while you watch!”