Chapter 18: The Letter

POV: Felicia

“Open it carefully,” Cassian warned, his hand already on his sword. “Some letters are meant to kill before they’re ever read.”

I broke the black seal anyway.

⸻

The royal mage had already swept it for poison and curses twice by the time it reached my study, the palace spymaster hovering close enough to catch me if the parchment turned out to be a weapon after all. Orion stood by the door like he might physically stop me if it so much as smoked, his hand hovering near the hilt at his belt.

It didn’t. Three elegant paragraphs waited inside instead, the handwriting careful, almost pleasant, the kind of penmanship a tutor might have praised.

Congratulations on reclaiming a crown that was always yours…

By the second paragraph, the pleasantness had curdled into something else entirely. Selene knew about the children. Knew they were Lucien’s. Knew the word Eclipse and everything it meant, details she had no business possessing.

Someone had been watching Silvercrest long before I ever set foot inside it, long enough to know things I hadn’t even told my own family until days ago.

The final line hit hardest, each word landing like a struck bell.

Queens lose kingdoms. Mothers lose children. Which one will you be?

⸻

Silence swallowed the study whole. Orion ordered the gates sealed before I’d even set the letter down. Cassian doubled my guard on the spot, already barking names into the hallway. The council wanted the parchment burned before it could do more damage.

I folded it instead, slow, deliberate, and let myself smile.

Not because I wasn’t afraid. My hands hadn’t stopped trembling since the second paragraph.

But Selene had made one mistake she couldn’t undo … she’d written this letter assuming my pregnancy was still a secret.

It wasn’t. The entire summit hall had heard me say it myself.

She’d just handed me her greatest weapon with nothing left to threaten me with.

⸻

So instead of hiding, I built something with it.

Copies of the letter, sent to every Alpha at the summit. Her own threats turned into evidence, laid bare in her own handwriting. A false military order, planted carefully, designed to smoke out whichever spies still lingered inside these walls.

The council went quiet, exchanging glances I couldn’t quite read.

Orion’s mouth curved slowly into something I hadn’t seen from him before … pride, unmistakable, watching his daughter stop reacting to threats and start dismantling them instead.

⸻

A knock interrupted us before the council could finish arguing over the details. A guard leaned in, hesitant.

“Alpha Lucien is outside, Your Majesty. He wasn’t summoned. He heard about the attempt on the messenger and came straight here.”

Every eye in the room turned to me.

The old version of me would have refused without a second thought.

“Let him in,” I said instead.

The room emptied around us in a slow, uncertain shuffle, Cassian lingering longest at the door before he finally pulled it shut.

For the first time since the rejection, Lucien and I stood completely alone.

⸻

I handed him the letter without a word. He read it once, then again, his eyes moving faster the second time, his jaw tightening with every line until a muscle ticked visibly beneath his ear.

By the final sentence his hands had begun to shake, the parchment trembling audibly between his fingers.

“She couldn’t have known this on her own.” His voice had gone low, rough, edged with something close to fury. “These details … only someone inside Blackthorn’s highest council could have given them to her.”

His face hardened into something I hadn’t seen from him before, not even the night he’d rejected me … cold, focused, an Alpha calculating a threat rather than a man reading a letter.

“She never worked alone.”

He told me the rest slowly, like it cost him to say it out loud, each word dragged up from somewhere he clearly hadn’t wanted to revisit. Months before the rejection, three of his most trusted elders had quietly opposed him taking me as Luna. Two were dead now, killed in ways he’d never questioned closely enough. The third had vanished without a trace.

The missing one had served directly under Malachor.

The conspiracy went deeper than either of us had let ourselves believe, and I watched that realization settle over him like a physical weight.

⸻

We worked through the rest of the night without meaning to, maps and letters and troop routes spreading across my desk until there was barely room for either of our hands.

It felt achingly familiar … the easy rhythm of trading information back and forth, finishing each other’s half-formed theories, the same partnership we used to dream about building together before everything fell apart.

More than once I watched him start to say something else, something not about maps or spies, before catching himself and swallowing it back down.

I noticed every single time.

Neither of us crossed the line.

⸻

I rose to end the meeting as the candles burned low, and a sharp pain lanced through my abdomen without warning, sudden enough that my breath caught and I gripped the edge of the desk to stay upright.

My hand flew to my stomach on instinct, my knuckles white against the silk of my gown.

Lucien moved before he could stop himself, half a step closer, hand half-raised, close enough that I felt the warmth of him even before he touched anything … then froze, inches away, like touching me might be a line neither of us was ready for him to cross. His fingers hovered in the space between us, trembling slightly, aching with restraint.

The space between us felt endless even though he stood close enough to reach.

Then I felt it. One small heartbeat, echoing faint beneath my palm.

Then another.

Then all four at once, unmistakable, steady, filling the silence between us like something sacred.

His eyes widened. He’d felt it too … I watched the realization move through him, his hand still frozen in midair, his breath catching audibly.

Neither of us said anything for a long moment, the only sound in the room four small heartbeats and our own ragged breathing.

⸻

I finally broke the silence, my hand still pressed flat over my stomach, my eyes finding his and refusing to look away this time.

“I’m terrified…” I whispered.

A tear slipped free before I could stop it.

“…not because I’m carrying your children.”

I took one slow breath, forcing the rest of it out before I lost the courage.

“…because a part of me still remembers what it felt like to trust you.”