Chapter seven: Can't Afford to Let You Live

RURIK

I felt him before I heard him.

Laron had a way of walking into a room that made it feel colder without ever raising his voice. He stood over my bed, close enough to touch, far enough that he could always say later he hadn't.

"Still nothing, nephew," he said quietly, only for me. He thought I couldn't hear. "Six months, and still nothing. Your mother is wasting away with grief. The Council is getting restless." A soft laugh. "And I'm tired of waiting for a corpse to make room for the living."

I lay still. I'd gotten good at that. Lying still while a man who wanted me dead stood close enough that I could smell the silver still eating through my blood.

He straightened his cuffs and left.

That was Laron. He never said anything that could be used against him. Careful, always careful. But I'd learned to hear what he didn't say as clearly as what he did. And what he hadn't said just now, standing over my bed, was when are you finally going to die.

He hadn't needed to.

Elira. I pushed the thought out into the dark, the way I'd learned to. I didn't know if it would reach her. I didn't know how any of this worked, only that it had worked once. Laron just left my room. He's coming for you next.

Nothing came back. The link only seemed to hold when she was close, or asleep, or touching me. Not stretched across a house full of stone and silver.

I hated that. I hated it more than I'd hated anything in six months. Watching danger walk toward someone and not being able to move. Not even a finger.

She'd woken something in me that had nothing to do with the coma. The wolf, yes — he'd been pacing and snarling behind my ribs since the moment her foot crossed my door. But something older too. Something that went quiet a long time ago, back when I was twelve and understood for the first time that everyone who came close to me wanted something from the throne I hadn't earned yet.

Elira hadn't wanted anything. She'd looked at me like I was just a person, not a prize. And when she leaned down and whispered help me destroy them, and I'll help you wake up, there was nothing fake in it. No angle. Just a girl who'd run out of people to trust and decided, out of pure exhaustion, to try trusting a body that couldn't even open its eyes.

I still didn't know if that made her useful or made her a problem I couldn't afford.

I only knew that when Laron said end up like the others, something moved in my chest that had nothing to do with strategy.

Three candidates in six months. Each one got close to me. Each one disappeared within the week. Reassigned, the official story said. Sent home. No longer suitable.

I never believed that story. I believed it even less now, hearing my uncle deliver the same warning himself, wrapped up as concern, to the one candidate who had actually done something none of the others managed.

She'd burned through the toxin for the first time in six months.

He couldn't let that keep happening. Men like my uncle didn't wait around for problems to solve themselves. They removed them.

The door opened again. I braced myself, still and silent and furious in every place a body isn't supposed to be able to feel anything at all. The scent coming through the door wasn't Elira. It wasn't Laron either.

Council black. Enforcer boots. Two sets.

Get up, I told my body, the way I told it every single day. Get up, get up, get up—

The door swung open all the way, and I heard my uncle's voice drift in from the hallway, warm and easy, right behind the two men now crossing toward my bed.

"Sedate him further," Laron said. "I want him deeper under before the girl's private meeting this afternoon. Can't have any more surprises."