MasukEMBER’S POV“You were small at the time. Three, maybe four.” Her voice drops toward the floor. “You had a doll, and you carried it everywhere. Named it yourself, the first name you ever gave anything—”And something moves in the deepest, a cold thread pulling up from a place I’ve never once been able to reach, and before she can say it, my own mouth opens and the name falls out like it’s been waiting my whole life.“Molly.”Devika goes chalk-white.“Yes. Molly.”“I remember—” and it’s surfacing now, dredged up from under years of suppression. “I remember playing with her in the dirt. I brought her things. I made her—” my breath catches, “—I made her tea parties. I brought her flowers. I thought she talked to me. Mother, I remember thinking my doll was talking to me, telling me to—”“It wasn’t the doll,” Devika says quietly, and the whole room goes quiet.“W-What?”Devika sighs.“They found you in the daycare yard one day. The whole place had gone really quiet, and when they came looki
EMBER’S POVShe leans in, and that’s when the dread starts to build in her voice.“You have to understand what that meant, Ember. Esmerelda watched it happen from the inside, and it terrified even her. Isolde bluffed all she could, parading Elara as the chosen one, but the people are as clever as their queen, and they refused to be fooled for too long. A Caelora without the Silver Wolf is a wounded thing, and every hungry house in the East could smell it. The queen with no god. The throne with no teeth. Isolde grew more frightened every season the wolf stayed lost, and a frightened Isolde is a monstrous one, because that woman answers fear with blood. Executions. Purges. Anyone who whispered that the Silver Maiden might be gone for good simply vanished. The whole court began walking on glass, waiting, praying one of the girls would manifest and end it. And they never did. Because the Maiden was already gone.” Her eyes fix on me. “She’d already chosen. She’d followed your father’s esse
EMBER’S POVMy eyes snap to him and my chest caves, because I have never heard this, not once, not in all our nights, and he’s laying it on a rogue’s scale like loose change.But he keeps the pain clean off his voice, and he will not look at me, because if he looks at me, he won’t be able to do it. So I do the only thing I can.I squeeze his hand, hard. I’m here. I have you. You don’t have to carry it alone. And his hand squeezes back, once, and that’s all, and that’s everything.Devika studies the memory laid out on the glowing silver scale, and something moves through even her face.“Damn, that’s a dark one, King.” She sits back, eyes half-lidded, the gambler measuring the pot. “Hmm. To take it, or not.”The scale hums between us, light buzzing, waiting.Then Devika leans forward and accepts the wager.The magic reaches for him instantly. It seizes Knox, snapping his head violently backwards as it rips the toll from his body.A second later, it releases him, and he returns heaving f
EMBER’S POVAnd finally, it all hits me. The crushing weight of every truth Devika has spilt about my origins.The crushing realisation that I was never of Northern descent.I was Eastern.I was of royal Eastern blood.Ember of Caelora?My heart races, dread eating up my insides.Rhovan.Lord Rhovan of Caelora.My father is an Eastern Queen’s chosen mate, a man who dreamed of overthrowing his own wife, and his blood has been in me my whole life while no one ever told me.The realisation hits me so hard I can barely breathe, bringing Sapphire’s glazed eyes and cryptic words from my trance back to the surface.She had told me herself that when my own people find me, they’d kill me.I finally understand.My own people. The East.If the Alpha Queen ever discovers the bastard daughter her husband created with his secret whore, she will burn the world down to see me dead.I am the living evidence of a royal treason, and yet I have spent years believing I was an omega nobody. Meanwhile, the
EMBER’S POVI hate that it moves me. I hate it more than anything she’s said tonight. And I don’t let it show on my face.Under the table, Knox’s hand turns and closes over mine, an anchor, the only thing keeping me upright, and I hold onto him like a woman going under, because I am.“That’s enough,” Knox says. “She doesn’t need it framed like—”“She asked, King.” Devika finally shifts her gaze from mine, and the poison is back in them. “The house deals in truth. That’s my truth.”“Then here’s one back.” Knox’s voice could split stone. “It’s rather pathetic that you think not killing her was your one moment of weakness. It wasn’t. It was the only moment of true strength you have ever had in your miserable, selfish life. And it terrified you so much that you spent the next two decades punishing her for it. You lost your filthy silk and your golden palace, but the real tragedy is that you were given a daughter worth a thousand of those things, and you were just too cowardly to ever dese
EMBER’S POVShe looks at me across the table, dead-eyed, beaten down to the bone, and she does not hide a single bit of her resentment.“Yes, Ember. You. You were the pregnancy that got me caught. You were the thing that cost me the palace and the expensive silk and the man I loved and the only happiness I was ever given. You ruined my entire life by the simple act of beginning to exist, and I have never once in my years been able to look at your face without seeing everything I lost. So when you ask me why I could never love you the way a mother’s meant to—there. There’s your answer. You were my new grave. My new permanent mountain. Tell me how a woman learns to love her own captor.”“I was your child!” I spit, the words tearing out of my throat before I can stop them. I slam my hands down, the rage blinding me. “Your own blood! You do not get to blame me for decisions you made long before I was even born! It is your fault you are in this mess. It is your fault your life got destroye







