CHAPTER 15: THE MORNING AFTER KINGS FALL

I wake up to the sound of a war council arguing in my chambers.

Not my old chambers, the small ones with the locked door and the window I couldn’t open. These are Draevor’s. His bed, his furs, his maps still bleeding red ink onto the table, and his crown — a twisted band of black iron — sitting on the pillow next to me like someone wasn’t sure what to do with it yet.

Mira is curled against my side, still asleep, her face buried in my neck and her small hand fisted in my shirt like she’s afraid I’ll disappear if she lets go. The tether between us is quiet now, a warm thread in my chest that rises and falls with her breathing, and for the first time in six days I don’t feel like I’m about to lose her.

The arguing gets louder.

“She can’t just take his pack,” someone snaps, and I recognize the voice of Elder Harkon, one of Draevor’s betas. “Trial by combat or not, she’s unranked, she’s female, and she’s—”

“Alive,” Rook interrupts, his voice lazy but with that edge that says he’s picturing how Harkon’s throat would look torn out. “While Draevor’s very, very dead. So I’d say she took it just fine.”

I sit up slowly, careful not to wake Mira, and the room goes quiet. There are eight people in here that shouldn’t be. Harkon and two other betas from Draevor’s pack, the High Priestess Mavera looking like she aged ten years overnight, Silas lounging on the windowsill with his staff across his knees, Theo by the door with his head tilted toward me, and Kain standing at the map table with blood still under his fingernails. Rook is the only one actually looking relaxed, leaning against the bedpost with his arms crossed and dried blood flaking off his knuckles.

“Morning,” I say, because I don’t know what else to say when you wake up as an Alpha after murdering one in front of twelve thousand witnesses.

Harkon recovers first. He drops to one knee, but it’s not respect so much as calculation. “Alpha Nyx. The pack… awaits your orders.”

The word Alpha sounds wrong in my mouth and worse in his, but I don’t correct him. If I flinch now, I lose everything I bled for last night.

“The pack can wait,” I say, shifting so Mira doesn’t roll into the cold spot I leave behind. “We have bigger problems than patrol schedules. The Fifth Law is still in effect, and the High Council will be here by midday to decide if I get to keep breathing.”

“You killed Draevor in sanctioned combat,” Rook points out, and there’s a possessive note in his voice that makes Harkon’s jaw tighten. “The old laws protect you. They can’t touch you for that.”

“They can touch me for everything else,” I say, glancing at Mavera. The High Priestess hasn’t spoken yet, but her hands are shaking where she clutches her robes. “Blackmail, treason, inciting rebellion. Pick one. Draevor was going to use any of them to kill me before sunset yesterday, and now the Council gets to try instead.”

“Then we don’t let them,” Silas says from the windowsill, sounding bored. “You have four Kings, one dead Alpha’s army, and a little sister the packs will riot to protect if the priests threaten her again. I say we lock the gates and see how long their morals last when they’re starving.”

“That’s not a plan, that’s a siege,” Kain says without looking up from the maps. “And we lose a siege. We have food for three weeks, water for two, and no allies. The Council has every other pack in the territories, and once they brand Nyx a heretic, none of them will trade with us.”

“You’re quiet, Prophet,” Rook says to Theo, and there’s something almost gentle in the way he says it, like he’s surprised to find himself respecting the man he wants to kill on Day 16. “What do you see?”

Theo is quiet for so long that I think he won’t answer, but then he turns his face toward the window, toward the sun I can’t see yet. “I see fire,” he says softly. “I see the arena burning. I see the packs turning on each other. I see you, Nyx, standing in the ashes with a crown that isn’t Draevor’s, and I see Mira crying because you’re not there to hold her anymore.”

The room goes cold.

“When?” I ask, because I have to.

“Soon,” Theo says. “If the Council walks through those gates today, it happens before nightfall. If they don’t… it waits. But it still happens.”

Mavera makes a small, broken sound. “The Fifth Law was meant to prevent this. Four Kings, one Luna, balance restored through sacrifice. Now you’ve broken the balance, and the blood debt will be paid tenfold.”

“No,” I say, and I slide out of bed, leaving Mira buried in the furs. I’m in Rook’s shirt from yesterday and nothing else, with Draevor’s blood still under my nails and a crown I didn’t ask for on my pillow, but I’ve never felt more like an Alpha than I do right now. “The Fifth Law wasn’t balance, it was control. You bred us to kill each other so we’d never turn on you, and Draevor was your dog until he got greedy. Well, your dog’s dead, and I’m not taking his leash.”

I walk to the map table and plant both hands on it, looking at each of them in turn. “So here’s what’s going to happen. Harkon, you’re going to take your betas and tell Draevor’s pack that their new Alpha doesn’t execute children and doesn’t take orders from priests. If they have a problem with that, they can challenge me like he did and end up in the same dirt.”

Harkon stares at me, then at Rook, then at the crown on the bed. Finally, he nods once. “Yes, Alpha.”

He leaves with the other two betas, and I don’t watch them go because if I show doubt, I’m dead.

“Mavera,” I say next, and the High Priestess flinches. “You’re going to send word to the Council that I’m invoking right of parley. Old law, older than the Fifth. One day of truce, one day of talk, no blood spilled while we negotiate. If they refuse, then every pack in the territories gets to hear how Draevor was blackmailing you about your son, and how the Fifth Law is built on priests’ dirty secrets.”

Her face goes white. “You wouldn’t.”

“I would,” I say, and I mean it. “Because I’m done watching little girls get dressed in white for slaughter while you all pray to gods who let it happen. So you get me one day, Mavera. Use it.”

She leaves without another word, and the door shuts behind her with a sound like a coffin closing.

That leaves the Kings.

“You’re playing a dangerous game,” Kain says finally, still not looking at me. “The 1% where you survive Day 30 just dropped to 0.4%. If the Council calls your bluff—”

“Then we stop bluffing,” Rook cuts in, pushing off the bedpost. He crosses to me in three strides and cups my face in his hands, his thumbs brushing over the bruises Draevor left on my jaw. His touch is careful, like I’m glass, but his eyes are furious. “You should have let me kill him last night. Should have let me tear him apart before he ever touched you.”

“You were chained in a cell,” I remind him, covering his hands with mine and letting him feel how fast my pulse is running. “And if you’d interfered, I would have forfeited the Trial, and Mira would be dead right now.”

“I know,” he says, and his forehead drops to mine, the same way it did in the cells, the same way he promised me I’m not letting you go. “I know, and I still want to burn this whole fucking castle down for making you do it alone.”

“You didn’t,” I whisper, because it’s true. He was there, in the crowd, in the bond, in the rage that kept me standing when Draevor’s fist split my lip. “You were with me. All of you were.”

Theo makes a soft sound by the door. Silas sighs dramatically from the window. Kain finally looks up from the maps.

“One day,” Kain says. “That’s what you bought. One day of talk before the Council decides to burn us all. What’s the plan when it ends?”

I look at Mira, still sleeping in Draevor’s bed, still safe because I bled for her, and I think about the arena burning and the crown that isn’t Draevor’s and the future Theo sees where I’m not there to hold her.

“We don’t let it end,” I say. “We rewrite the Law before sundown tomorrow. Or we make sure there’s no one left to enforce it.”

Rook grins, bloody and wild and mine. “Now that’s my Luna.”

Day 7. One day of truce. 

And after that? War.