Chapter 24: The Enemy Within

POV: Felicia

“If I told you the man who ruined both our lives was your father…” I whispered.

Lucien didn’t blink.

“…I’d believe you.”

Then he said the one thing I wasn’t prepared to hear.

“The question is whether I’ll have the strength to kill him.”

⸻

I made myself say the rest of it, the truth I’d only just admitted to myself somewhere between the letter and the scout’s trembling report, my voice steadier than I expected it to be.

“He manipulated you. I believe that now.” I held his gaze, refusing to soften it, watching him brace for whatever came next. “It explains why you chose what you chose. It doesn’t erase what you chose.”

“You were used,” I said. “But I was still the one abandoned.”

He didn’t argue. He didn’t reach for a single excuse, even one I might have handed him if he’d asked.

Only silence, and something raw moving behind his eyes, his jaw working like he was holding back words he’d decided he no longer had the right to say.

For one unguarded second, my hand lifted toward him on its own … and I stopped it, curling my fingers back before they could close the distance, my whole arm trembling with the effort of restraint.

Neither of us was whole enough yet for whatever that touch would have meant.

⸻

Cassian burst into my chambers hours later, his clothes soaked dark with blood that clearly wasn’t his.

“Guards. Six of them. Dead in the private corridors, and no one raised a single alarm.”

Whoever had done it had known exactly which patrols protected my family, exactly when they’d be alone.

They hadn’t been trying to break in at all.

“We’ve been searching outside the kingdom,” Cassian said, his voice thick with something close to nausea, “…when the monster has been living beneath our feet.”

⸻

The four of us gathered in secret within the hour … Orion, Cassian, Lucien, myself … and the intelligence waiting for us there gutted whatever hope I’d been holding onto.

The man believed to be Magnus had been living inside Silvercrest for months under a false name, hiding in plain sight among people who trusted him.

Then a second report arrived, and everything shifted again.

The fingerprints didn’t quite match. The handwriting, close but not identical. The scent, wrong in ways only a wolf’s nose could catch.

Someone was wearing Magnus like a mask.

Which meant the real enemy wanted Lucien chasing a ghost while the true threat moved somewhere else entirely.

⸻

I made the decision that would haunt me later … keeping this from the full council, trusting only the four of us with it.

Orion disagreed immediately, sharply. Cassian argued harder, accusing me of repeating the same mistake that had let a spy sit at our table for months.

Lucien sided with me instead, quiet but firm, and I watched that alignment fracture something in the room that had nothing to do with the enemy at all.

None of us noticed the shadow near the door, the advisor who’d lingered a moment too long before slipping away into the dark.

Our secrecy had already failed before we’d finished arguing about it.

⸻

The palace shook before we’d even set our plan in motion, explosions tearing through the eastern wing hard enough to rattle the floor beneath my feet.

The underground archives were burning. Twenty years of royal records. Moon Bond histories. Bloodline documents. Every scrap of evidence pointing toward the conspirators, all of it turning to ash while we’d been busy arguing over who to trust.

He’d wanted us distracted. He’d gotten exactly that.

The royal historian died in those flames protecting a single scorched journal, his last breath barely a whisper as guards pulled him free.

“Don’t trust… the Moon Priest…”

He never finished.

⸻

Lucien led soldiers straight into the collapsing tunnels. Cassian pulled trapped servants free one by one, his arms black with soot to the elbow, coughing through smoke thick enough to taste. Orion organized the evacuation from the courtyard, his voice hoarse from shouting orders over the roar of the fire.

I ran for the archives anyway, ignoring every warning shouted after me, some desperate need to save what little truth remained outweighing everything else, my lungs already burning before I reached the stairwell.

The ceiling gave way before I reached the door.

Lucien caught me half a second too late, stone grazing my shoulder as he hauled me back, both of us hitting the ground hard enough to steal my breath, his body curled protectively over mine as debris rained down around us.

I survived. The healer’s face, checking me over afterward, told me survival wasn’t the whole story.

The shock had reached the children. Not fatally, she said quickly, watching my face carefully. But enough that her hands hadn’t stopped shaking since she’d first pressed them to my stomach.

I refused treatment until every trapped servant had been carried out.

Orion found me afterward, fury and fear tangled together on his face in a way I’d never seen from him before.

“That wasn’t bravery,” he said. “That was reckless.”

Neither of us backed down. For the first time, my father and I stood on opposite sides of something, and neither of us was entirely wrong.

⸻

Dawn found me still sitting near the ruined archive doors, too exhausted to move, when a soldier knelt before me, trembling, a small black box balanced carefully in his hands.

“Recovered from the fire, Your Majesty.”

I opened it myself, expecting jewels, or documents, or anything ordinary.

Four tiny silver bracelets sat inside instead, each one engraved with a name. Names I hadn’t chosen yet. Names only the healer and I had ever spoken aloud, in private, in the middle of the night.

No one else had known there were four.

A folded note lay beneath them. My hands shook badly enough that it took two attempts to open it.

One sentence, written in a hand I didn’t recognize.

Tell me, Chosen Queen… did you really believe I wouldn’t know my own heirs?