Chapter 14: The Truth

“Who’s the father?” Orion asked quietly.

I couldn’t make myself say his name.

He closed his eyes.

“…Lucien.”

It wasn’t a question. It was the sound of a father’s heart breaking for his daughter.

⸻

“The spy can wait,” Orion told the guard, not even turning his head. “My daughter cannot.”

The guard vanished back down the path, and my father sank onto the stone bench beneath the moon trees, waiting for me to finish what I’d barely started, his hands folded so tightly together his knuckles had gone pale.

I told him everything. The crystals. The healer’s trembling hands. Not one child.

Four.

His face moved through disbelief, then grief, then something harder … rage that had nowhere to land … before settling into a guilt so raw it made my own chest ache to watch it settle over him, his shoulders curling inward like the weight of it was physical.

“If I’d found you sooner,” he said, voice cracking down the middle, “…none of this would have happened.”

I had no comfort to offer him. I wasn’t sure comfort existed for a wound that old, so I only reached over and took his hand instead, letting the silence say what I couldn’t.

⸻

His grief burned into fury fast. “Arrest him. Expel him from Silvercrest before sundown.”

Guards were already moving before the command finished leaving his mouth.

“No.”

The word came out of me sharper than I meant it to, and every guard froze mid-stride.

I reminded him, as gently as I could manage with my pulse still hammering, that Lucien’s army held our northern border. Pulling him now handed our enemy exactly the opening they were waiting for.

Orion hated that I was right. I watched him hate it … jaw tight, hands curling and releasing at his sides … but what seemed to cost him more was watching his daughter choose the kingdom’s safety over her own wounded heart.

⸻

The anger drained out of him slowly, leaving only the father underneath it, his voice gentler than I’d heard it since the night he’d first found me bleeding on that forest road.

“Do you still love him?”

I opened my mouth. Nothing came out. My throat closed around every version of the answer I might have given … no, not anymore, never again … and none of them would leave me.

My silence answered for me, and I watched it land on his face like a second blow, worse somehow than the first confession had been.

⸻

Cassian found us before either of us could speak again, and I watched him read the whole scene in three heartbeats … Orion’s ashen face, my tears, my hand pressed flat and unconscious over my stomach.

Something in him understood before I said a single word.

“…No,” he breathed.

I nodded, slow, careful, like moving too fast might shatter something.

“I’m pregnant.”

I forced the rest out before I lost the courage. “There are four.”

Cassian didn’t react. Not right away. That stillness frightened Orion more than any outburst could have … I watched my father’s eyes flick toward his son, waiting for the explosion that never came.

⸻

Cassian knelt in front of me instead, the marble path hard under his knees, his armor still dusty from wherever he’d come from.

Not as Crown Prince. Not as the warrior who’d torn through Blackthorn assassins with his bare hands. As my brother, plain and simple, taking both my trembling hands into his own steady ones.

“What do you need from me?”

Nothing else. No accusations, no demands for explanations I didn’t have, no flicker of the judgment I’d braced myself for. Just that question, offered like it was the only one that mattered in the entire world.

I hadn’t felt this unalone in longer than I could remember, and I gripped his hands back hard enough that my own knuckles ached.

⸻

The strategist in him surfaced fast after that, laying the danger out plainly, without softening a word of it.

If Blackthorn learned first, the elders would demand the children as future heirs, tools before they’d even drawn breath. If our enemy learned first, the prophecy itself became their target. If any neighboring kingdom learned first, every unmarried prince and desperate house would start calculating how to claim a piece of what I was carrying.

Four unborn children, already the most valuable lives in every kingdom that mattered.

None of us spoke for a long moment after that.

⸻

High above the gardens, hidden among stone gargoyles no one thought to watch, a cloaked figure pressed a communication crystal closed between two fingers, careful, unhurried, like they had all the time in the world.

One sentence, murmured low enough that the wind nearly swallowed it.

“The Chosen Queen is carrying the Eclipse heirs.”

The crystal flashed once and went dark, its light gone as quickly as it had come.

Somewhere far from that garden, someone smiled, unseen and unbothered, already moving toward whatever came next.

⸻

Guards flooded the gardens as we turned to head back toward the palace … not around us, but past us, sweeping the walls with a purpose that had nothing to do with escort duty, boots pounding stone in every direction.

Cassian was already running before I understood why, sprinting for the northern wall in time to catch a hooded figure mid-leap off the battlements, his hand closing around the man’s ankle just as he cleared the stone.

The spy laughed as Cassian dragged him back over the wall, that same laugh I’d heard once before, from a different man, in a different hall, right before he’d bitten down on his own death.

Then he bit down on something hidden in his cheek and went still before a single question could reach him, his body slack against the stone before Cassian could even shout for a healer.

But his fist stayed clenched even in death, and when Cassian pried it open, a scrap of parchment fell out … half burned, the edges curling black, the rest just barely legible in the gray morning light.

⸻

Cassian unfolded what remained of it with hands that had gone perfectly steady, which frightened me more than shaking ever would have.

Every trace of color left his face.

He turned it toward us without a word.

Kill the Queen before the four heirs are born.

Beneath the sentence, pressed into wax gone brittle with age, sat a seal I didn’t recognize.

Orion did.

And whatever he saw in it drained the last of the color from his face too … because it belonged to someone who should have been dead for twenty years.