All Chapters of Dead Queens Don't Kneel Twice: Return of the Beheaded Empres: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

NESSA’S POV Dirt in my mouth. Dirt in my nose, my throat, packed so tight I couldn't pull a full breath. I gagged and twisted and my hands — wrong, immediately wrong, too small, the fingers too short — slammed upward into wood three inches above my face. A coffin. I was in a coffin. The panic that hit me had nothing to do with death. I'd already died. This was something worse — the panic of reaching for your own hands and finding someone else's. I pressed my palms flat against the lid and pushed. The wood creaked. I pushed harder, felt a splinter open my palm, didn't stop. The lid cracked down the middle and the earth came pouring in through the gap and I turned my face away and pushed with everything this small, wrong body had until the wood gave and I was clawing upward through cold dirt with broken fingernails and no air and no wolf and no idea what I was clawing toward. I came out gasping. Collapsed on the grass. Vomited. Rolled onto my back and lay there with dirt i

NESSA'S POVHe was still on one knee in the mud when I found my voice.I watched him clutch his chest, one hand pressed flat against his sternum like something had cracked open behind it. His jaw was tight. His eyes were shut. The mate bond — I knew what it was, I'd felt a muted version of it once, standing across a treaty table from him and pretending I hadn't — was tearing through him like a current and there was nothing I could do about it and nothing I could say.I reached inside myself anyway.Force of habit. Three years of marriage to Valerius had buried whatever I'd felt at the Threshold so deep it had stopped feeling like loss and started feeling like nothing. Like it had never existed. I'd made my peace with that. I'd had to.But this body didn't even have a wolf.There was no bond to suppress, no instinct to bury. There was just — silence. Empty and total. I pressed my hand against my own chest without thinking about it, fingers flat against my sternum the same way his were

NESSA'S POVHis tears soaked through my shirt.I felt them, warm and slow, and I held on and didn't let go because letting go meant stepping back and stepping back meant he'd see my face and I wasn't ready for him to see my face right now.I knew this grief. I knew what it had cost him because I had been the reason for it, and that knowledge sat in my chest like a stone I couldn't put down and couldn't carry properly either.I remembered the alliance summit. Every detail of it, sharp and clear the way things are sharp and clear when they've been turning over in your mind for years. I'd walked into that hall and scented him and something in my chest had lurched so hard I'd nearly stopped walking. I'd stood there in the middle of a crowded room and understood in one single terrible second exactly what he was to me.My fated mate.And I was already mated to Valerius.Already bonded. Already a Luna Queen with a pack and a son and a husband whose temper could level a kingdom if provoked. L

NESSA POVI was back in the square.The chains were on my wrists and the cobblestones were cold through my slippers and the crowd was packed on every side and I was walking, always walking, the whip finding my back again and again and I couldn't stop and I couldn't turn around and somewhere in that crowd was Lucian in the blue coat and I needed to find him, I needed to see his face one more time—Valerius was on the platform.Reading the charges in that calm, measured voice of his. The voice that had told me he loved me once, that had spoken my name softly across pillows in the dark, that had sentenced me to death in front of five hundred witnesses without breaking once. Not even a tremor. Not even a flicker of something human behind his eyes.I found Lucian.He was looking right at me and his chin was doing the thing — the wobble before the tears came — and I opened my mouth to say his name, just his name, just once—The blade fell.I woke up with both hands at my own throat.I was s

CASTIEL'S POVShe said she'd tell me what she could.I looked at her across the table and let that sit for a moment. *What she could.* Not what I asked for. Not the truth. What she could. Like she was already deciding how much of it I deserved before I'd even asked the question."That's not what I asked for," I said."I know.""I asked for the truth.""I know that too."I held her gaze. She held mine back without flinching, looking away or doing any of the things people did when they were nervous. Most people couldn't hold my gaze for more than a few seconds. Something about the way I looked at people made them want to look at the floor. This girl just sat there like she'd been looked at by worse things than me and had outlasted all of them."You're not a palace laundress," I said."I told you I was.""And I'm telling you that you're not." I leaned back in my chair and crossed my arms. "I've met palace laundresses. I've been in Valerius's court. I know what they look like, how they