Weight of a borrowed crown

Kenna’s POV

I woke before dawn, the dream still clinging to my skin like sweat that hadn’t dried. 

My wrist ached where the silver mark had flickered in the night. I pulled my sleeve down over it before I even had a candle lit, as though hiding it from an empty room could undo whatever had happened.

Just nerves, I told myself, splashing water on my face. Just a bad dream and tired eyes.

I dressed and went down to the kitchens because staying in that room, under Jenna’s portrait, felt like drowning slowly. 

The cook barely looked up when I entered.

“My Luna,” she said, the title landing flat and wrong in her mouth, like she’d practiced saying it without meaning it.

“I’ll check the infirmary stores,” I said. “Then the guest prepares, since the envoys are still here.”

“As you wish.” She turned back to her bread without another word.

I heard them before I reached the infirmary door, two servant girls, voices pitched just low enough to pretend they thought I couldn’t hear.

“The false Luna’s up early.”

“Wants to play house before they send her back where she came from.”

I stepped through the doorway anyway, chin level, and began sorting bandages like I hadn’t heard a single word. 

A cluster of noblewomen passed in the corridor an hour later, skirts sweeping wide to avoid brushing mine, and not one of them offered a greeting.

Breakfast was worse.

I sat in the Luna's chair..Jenna’s chair, still  and my stepmother watched me over the rim of her cup like I’d stolen something from her plate instead of just a seat.

“Sitting up so straight,” she said sweetly. “One would almost think you belonged there.”

“I’m trying to,” I said.

“Trying.” She smiled at the tablecloth. “Yes. That’s the word for it.”

My father didn’t look up from his correspondence once. Not when I sat. Not when I left.

Jace found me as I crossed the hall afterward, flanked by two council members, already mid-stride.

“The Tezla envoys leave within the week,” he said, not slowing down.

 “Until then, you’ll maintain appearances. Meals, greetings, nothing more. Don’t give them reason to question the binding.”

“Good morning to you too,” I said.

He didn’t hear the edge in it, or didn’t care to. “That’s all,” he said, and was gone before I’d finished nodding.

I went back to my chambers because I didn’t know where else a person like me was allowed to go. 

I stood in front of Jenna’s portrait, the painted version of her laughing down at me from the wall, and for the first time I let myself speak the doubt I’d been swallowing for days.

“Was I ever supposed to be anything,” I asked the painted face, “or was I only ever meant to fill the space until you came back?”

The portrait didn’t answer. Of course it didn’t. I laughed at myself, short and humorless, and went out to the gardens instead, because at least the roses had never once called me false Luna.

I knelt by the flower beds I used to tend as a servant, before any of this, and pressed my fingers into the soil the way I had a hundred times before. And then the world tilted sideways.

Stone ruins rose around me where roses had been — broken towers, a courtyard cracked open by time, moonlight pooling silver across shattered ground. 

A voice moved through the vision like wind through a canyon, ancient and patient and terrible.

Daughter of the lost crown. You have slept long enough.

My wrist burned. I looked down and the silver mark was there again, brighter this time, tracing itself deeper into my skin like it was carving out permanence.

“Kenna.”

Jace’s voice cut through the vision and yanked me back into my own body. I was on my knees in the garden, breathing hard, and he was crouched in front of me, one hand closing hard around my wrist — the one with the mark.

“What is this,” he said, low, and his eyes weren’t cold anymore. They were dark with something I didn’t have a name for, something that made my pulse climb even faster than the vision had.

“I don’t know,” I said, and I meant it.

His thumb moved once, involuntarily, over the mark on my skin, and for one unbearable second neither of us moved. His grip wasn’t gentle, but it wasn’t cruel either, it was the grip of a man who’d forgotten, briefly, that he wasn’t supposed to want to hold on.

Then his jaw tightened, and he let go like my skin had burned him.

“This changes nothing,” he said, standing, putting distance between us like distance could undo what his eyes had just shown me.

 “Every resource we have is going toward finding Jenna. That doesn’t stop because of..” he gestured at my wrist, sharp and dismissive “whatever that was.”

“Of course,” I said, and hated how small my voice sounded.

The mark came back, sometimes a flicker at my wrist in the dark, gone before I could be sure I had seen it. I stopped mentioning it. Nobody had asked twice.

Jace and I spoke only in logistics. The envoys arrive Thursday. Don’t take meals alone with the council. That’s all. Four months of that’s all, until I’d almost convinced myself the garden had never happened, that his hand around my wrist had been a fever dream and not a memory.

I was kneeling in that same garden bed on an ordinary Tuesday, pressing new bulbs into soil gone cold with autumn, when the ground trembled under my knees exactly the way it had that first time.

A messenger burst through the garden hedge before either of us could say anything else, dropping to one knee, chest heaving.

“Alpha!!” He could barely get the words out. 

“We found her. Jenna’s returned. She’s injured, but alive and she’s asking for you.”

The garden went silent except for my own heartbeat, slamming so hard I could feel it in my throat.

Jace didn’t move for one full second, and in that second, my wrist ignited.

The mark flared white-hot, searing bright enough that Jace’s eyes snapped down to it in shock, and around us the roses burst into violent, out-of-season bloom, petals unfurling too fast, too full, as the ground beneath my knees trembled like something ancient had just opened one eye.

“Kenna…” Jace’s voice had changed completely, hunger and fear tangled together as he stared at my glowing skin like he was seeing me really seeing me for the very first time.

“Jace…” Jenna’s voice floated weakly from the 

direction of the main hall, faint but unmistakable. “My love…”

His head turned toward the sound before he could stop himself.

And I knelt there in a garden full of flowers that shouldn’t exist, my wrist burning with a power I didn’t understand, watching the only warmth he’d ever shown me evaporate the instant her voice called his name.