All Chapters of Dead Queens Don't Kneel Twice: Return of the Beheaded Empres: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

NESSA'S POVThree days had passed in a blur of maps and guard rotations and palace layouts that I'd recited to Castiel until my throat was dry.And now it was the morning we were leaving.I'd been pacing for an hour.The room wasn't big enough for it. Four steps to the wall, turn, four steps back, turn again. I couldn't sit. Sitting meant stillness and stillness meant the thoughts got louder and the thoughts were already loud enough.*Vorrath.*I was going back to Vorrath.I turned that over in my head and underneath the fear and the fury there was something else — something cold and focused and very, very patient that had been building since the moment I'd clawed out of that grave. Every morning I'd woken up in this fortress with nothing to do but wait, it had gotten a little larger. A little more certain of itself.I was going to kill him.The question was how.Poison was the cleanest. Valerius had always been careful about his food and drink but careful men got comfortable eventual

NESSA'S POVI sat with my back straight and my eyes on the window and said nothing.The fortress disappeared behind us within the first mile and after that it was just road. Bare trees on either side, grey sky above, the rhythmic knock of wheels on frozen ground marking every mile between me and Vorrath.I counted them.It didn't help much but my mind needed something to do that wasn't the other thing it kept doing, which was running through every possible way to get close enough to Valerius to end him without getting myself killed first. The calculations had been running since I woke up this morning and they hadn't stopped.The tournament meant access. Every noble on the continent funneling into that palace, every corridor packed, every guard stretched thin across double the usual foot traffic. Chaos was cover. I knew that palace better than anyone alive — every hidden passage, every servant corridor, every room Valerius used and at what hour.The poison cabinet on the third floor, e

CASTIEL'S POVHe looked exactly the same.That was the first thing. Three years since he'd stood on a platform and sentenced his own Luna to death in front of five hundred witnesses and Valerius sat on that throne looking like a man without a single unresolved debt in the world. Relaxed. Patient. The easy posture of someone who had never once in his life been held accountable for anything.My wolf went absolutely silent the moment I saw him.It wasn't calm by any means, just silent.I kept walking.Valerius watched us cross the throne room with that expression of his — the one that looked like polite interest and was actually the expression of a predator watching prey move through a space he controlled completely. Half-blooded, they said. His mother's wolf instinct without his father's full shift. Couldn't become the animal but could read a room like one, could smell weakness like one, could make every person in his presence feel like they were being assessed for vulnerabilities they

NESSA'S POVLady Yuna was Valerius's chief concubine. The woman who had spent six years watching me from the edges of court with careful, patient eyes. The woman who had whispered in my son's ear in that square while I walked to my death. The woman who had sat across from Valerius and constructed every lie that put me in chains — the poisoning I hadn't committed, the conspiracy I hadn't known about, the charges that had been written before she'd even finished deciding which version of my destruction was most efficient.She looked well.That was the thing that struck first and hardest. She looked rested, dressed beautifully and completely, entirely fine. She was holding my son's hand like it was the most natural thing in the world.Like he was hers.I pressed my hands flat against my thighs under the table and said nothing and breathed. My palms burned against the silk of my dress, the friction of restraint, the desperate need to anchor myself to something physical before I floated awa

YUNA'S POVLucian had been talking since we left the dining hall."—and the man sitting three seats from father had a sword with a gold handle," he was saying, his small hand firm in mine, his steps quick to keep up with my pace. "Did you see it? The handle had wolves on it. Real ones. Well, not real ones but carved ones. Can I have a sword like that?""When you're older," I said."You always say that.""Because it's always true."He considered this with the gravity only a six-year-old could bring to the subject of swords. "How much older?""Considerably."He accepted this with a sigh that came from his entire body and moved on immediately. "The lady was crying," he said.I glanced down at him. "Which lady?""The one sitting near the Lycan man. The one with the gold hair." He looked up at me, his brow furrowed in that way that was so entirely his mother's. "She said something was in her eye but it wasn't. I could tell.""It isn't polite to point out when someone is crying, Lucian.""I