CHAPTER 20 The Truth About My Mother

I stared at my father, waiting for him to say something else, something that would make the words he'd just spoken make sense. He didn't. He just sat there, looking older than I'd ever seen him look, his hands still shaking in his lap.

"Twenty years," I said slowly. "You've known for twenty years that someone murdered my mother, and you never told me."

"I told you what I thought would keep you safe," my father said. "You were five years old, Aurora. What was I supposed to say? That someone inside our own palace poisoned your mother's tea, and I couldn't find who did it no matter how hard I searched?"

"You could have told me the truth when I was older."

"I was afraid," he admitted quietly. "Afraid that whoever did it was still watching, still waiting, and that telling you the truth would only paint a target on your back before you were old enough to protect yourself."

I thought about Damian, sitting in a cell downstairs with a smile on his bloodied face, claiming to know the answer my father had spent two decades chasing.

"I need to see him," I said. "Now."

"Aurora—"

"He asked for me, Father. Not you. Me." I stood up before either of them could argue further. "If he knows something about my mother, I want to hear it from his own mouth."

Cassian rose immediately. "I'm coming with you."

"He'll only talk to me alone," I reminded him.

"Then I'll stand outside the cell where I can hear every word," Cassian said, in a tone that made it clear he wasn't going to be argued out of it. My father didn't object either.

The dungeon beneath the Iron Keep was cold and damp, lit by only a few flickering torches along the stone walls. Marcus sat slumped in one cell, still nursing his wounded leg, glaring silently as I passed. Elira sat in another, curled into herself, refusing to meet my eyes.

Damian waited in the last cell, sitting calmly against the stone wall like a man without a single worry in the world.

"Niece," he said warmly, as if we were meeting for tea instead of standing on opposite sides of iron bars. "I wondered how long it would take you to come."

"Tell me about my mother," I said, cutting straight through whatever games he had planned.

"Straight to business. I like that." Damian rose slowly, walking to the bars, close enough that I could see the dried blood still crusted along his jaw. "Your mother was a remarkable woman, Aurora. Kind. Clever. Far too trusting of the people around her."

"That's not an answer."

"Patience," he said. "Your mother discovered something she wasn't supposed to discover. A secret arrangement, buried deep in the royal treasury, tied to a group that's existed far longer than your father realizes. She threatened to expose it."

"What secret?"

Damian's smile widened. "An arrangement between certain powerful families across three kingdoms, all working quietly toward the same goal for generations. Your mother stumbled onto proof of it by accident, reading documents she was never meant to see."

"So they killed her."

"So we killed her," Damian corrected softly. "I won't lie to you now, not when I have nothing left to lose. I gave the order myself."

The words hit me like a physical blow. I gripped the cold iron bars to steady myself.

"Why?" I whispered.

"Because your mother threatened to destroy everything we had built," Damian said simply. "Because your father would have believed her over me. Because some things matter more than family, Aurora, even to a man who once loved his niece enough to bring her sweets from the market."

Behind me, I heard Cassian's sharp intake of breath, the sound of his hand tightening around the hilt of his sword.

"Who else is involved?" I demanded. "Halden. Is he part of this?"

"Halden is a small piece of a much larger board," Damian said. "There are others, Aurora. Names your father has trusted his entire life. Names that sit at council tables, that dine at royal feasts, that smile at you during celebrations while quietly working to see your entire bloodline erased."

"Give me the names."

Damian tilted his head, studying me with something almost like pity.

"Why would I give away my only advantage?" he said. "As long as I'm the only one who knows, I'm valuable enough to keep alive. The moment I tell you everything, I become nothing more than a body waiting for the executioner's blade."

"You're already condemned," I said. "Nothing you say now changes that."

"Perhaps," Damian said. "Or perhaps there's still a way out of this cell for me, if the right people decide I'm worth more alive than dead."

"That's not going to happen," Cassian said sharply from behind me.

Damian's eyes flicked past me toward him, unbothered.

"We'll see," he said calmly. "In the meantime, I'll give you one more thing, Aurora. A gift, since you came all this way to see me."

"What?"

"The person who poisoned your mother's tea wasn't a stranger smuggled into the palace," Damian said slowly, savoring every word. "It was someone who lived inside those walls every single day. Someone who tucked you into bed some nights when your mother was busy with court matters. Someone you trusted completely as a child, and someone who still walks free inside your father's palace today."

My heart pounded so hard I thought it might crack my ribs.

"Who?" I demanded, my voice barely above a whisper.

Damian's smile turned into something almost gentle, almost sad, as he leaned close to the bars.

"Ask your father," he said quietly, "who really raised you the summer your mother died. Ask him who held you every night while he was too broken with grief to do it himself."

The blood drained completely from my face as the memory surfaced, sudden and vivid, a warm voice humming lullabies beside my childhood bed, gentle hands braiding my hair, a familiar face I had trusted my entire life.

"No," I breathed. "It can't be her."

Behind me, heavy footsteps came rushing down the dungeon stairs, and one of the royal guards burst into view, breathless and pale.

"Princess," he gasped. "Your father sent me. You need to come immediately."

"What's happened?"

The guard's hands were shaking.

"It's your old nursemaid," he said. "The one who traveled with the king's convoy this morning. She's disappeared from the keep, and she left something behind in your chambers."

He held out a small folded parchment, sealed with wax stamped in the shape of a crescent moon, a symbol I hadn't seen since I was a small child.

"She left this," he said, "addressed only to you.”