Chapter 16: The Queen’s Choice

“Tell me one thing, Lucien,” I said, refusing to look away. “If the Moon Goddess gave you one chance to undo that day… would you still reject me?”

The question silenced the room.

Lucien didn’t answer immediately. He closed his eyes.

“…No.”

“I’d burn my own crown before I lost you again.”

⸻

I ordered everyone else out the moment the words left him, the war table still scattered with Malachor’s stolen files, my pulse hammering harder than I wanted him to see. My hands stayed folded in front of me, steady on the outside, shaking underneath where he couldn’t see them.

The silence that followed once the doors shut was heavier than any argument we’d ever had, thick enough that I heard my own breathing over it.

“Commander of Blackthorn’s forces,” I said finally. “Nothing more.”

I laid the rest out plainly, refusing to let my voice soften even when something in his face made softening tempting. No private conversations. No attempts to win me back. No mention of the past unless I raised it myself.

He didn’t argue a single line, his jaw tight, his eyes never leaving mine even as he agreed to terms that must have cost him something. “Agreed.”

Outside the chamber, though I wouldn’t learn it until later, Cassian stood pressed against the far wall, watching through the gap in the door, visibly startled that Lucien had taken every restriction without so much as a flicker of resistance.

⸻

We worked side by side after that, tracing troop movements that made less and less sense the longer we studied them … until the pattern surfaced all at once, cold and unmistakable, both of us going quiet at the same moment we saw it.

Ancient relics, stolen. Ones capable of corrupting Moon Magic itself, objects I hadn’t even known existed until that map spread out beneath both our hands.

Worse, every strike traced back to a place tangled up in my own unborn destiny, as though whoever was hunting me already understood something about myself that I didn’t yet. Lucien’s finger traced the pattern across the map, close enough to mine that I felt the warmth of his hand without either of us acknowledging it.

⸻

Lucien stopped at the door as he left, one hand braced against the frame like leaving cost him something physical, his shoulders squared like a man forcing himself to walk away from something he wanted badly to stay near.

“I know I don’t deserve forgiveness.”

He swallowed hard, throat working, his eyes fixed on the floor between us rather than on my face.

“I don’t even deserve to miss you.”

A smile touched his face, small and painful, gone almost as soon as it appeared.

“But I do.”

He walked away before I could answer, his footsteps fading down the corridor, and for the first time since that night in the Great Hall, I nearly called his name back after him, the syllables already forming on my tongue.

I didn’t.

⸻

Three weeks passed in a blur of training and exhaustion I couldn’t explain. My body felt like it belonged to someone else half the time … stronger some mornings, hollowed out by afternoon, my magic surging without warning.

During combat drills, a protective barrier tore out of me on pure instinct half a second before a blade would have connected. I hadn’t called it. It simply came.

The royal healer pressed two fingers to my wrist afterward and went very still, her expression sliding from professional calm into something closer to alarm.

⸻

She confirmed it in private the next morning, her hands trembling as she worked, the crystals lit brighter than I’d ever seen them, humming loud enough to fill the whole chamber.

Not one heartbeat. Not two.

Five.

Mine, and four unborn.

Each one, she said, carried its own signature … one burning like open flame, one echoing low like distant thunder, one ancient beyond anything she could name, older than the crystals themselves. The fourth, though, she couldn’t read at all, no matter how many times she circled back to it.

“Your Majesty,” she whispered, hands still hovering above me, unwilling to press further. “One of these children is hiding its power from me.”

⸻

Orion wanted absolute silence. Cassian wanted me moved to some hidden fortress before nightfall, already halfway into planning it out loud. The council feared what panic might do if the truth reached the wrong ears first.

I refused all of it.

“If my enemies are hunting my children,” I said, rising from my chair, “they will learn they are protected by a queen who refuses to hide.”

I wrote the announcement myself. No advisors smoothing the edges. No speech drafted to soften what was coming.

Only the truth.

⸻

The court gathered the next morning … nobles, Alphas, generals from every allied kingdom, every seat filled, every eye already on me before I’d spoken a word. I stood at the center of it in silver, my crown steady, my hands folded over the stomach I refused to hide anymore.

“I am carrying four heirs chosen by the Moon Goddess.”

Silence swallowed the hall whole. No one breathed. I watched the shock ripple outward, face by face, until it reached the very back of the room.

Then a staff struck marble, sharp enough to echo, and an elderly priest near the front dropped hard to his knees, his voice shaking so badly I barely understood him at first.

“…The prophecy was wrong.”

Every head in the hall turned toward him at once. He raised terrified eyes to mine, his whole body trembling like the words themselves were dangerous to say aloud.

“There were never supposed to be four…”

His voice cracked entirely.

“…there were supposed to be five.”

⸻

He pointed a shaking finger toward my stomach, color completely gone from his face.

“Your Majesty…”

“…if there are only four children…”

He looked up at me, fear plain and unguarded on his face.

“…then who is the fifth heartbeat?”