All Chapters of Sold to the Broken Throne: Chapter 1 - Chapter 8

Ondine POVThe chain came off at the bottom of the steps, and somehow that was worse.The handler unlocked it without being asked, because the sale was recorded and the collateral was no longer his problem, and for one disorienting second Ondine stood in the middle of the trade post with nothing physically holding her to anyone. No leash. No cage. Just three men who’d just paid a fortune for her and one of them who’d stood in front of a crowd and announced he didn’t want her.She could have run. The thought arrived clean and fast, the way survival thoughts always did, and died just as fast when she did the math — unranked, unarmed, in the middle of alliance-adjacent territory, with a mate bond in her chest currently behaving like a rope that hadn’t finished being cut. She didn’t know yet what rejection did to the physical pull. She was about to find out whether she wanted to or not.“This way.” That was the big one. Barrick. He said it like an instruction to a soldier, not a command t

Corvain POV“Say that again,” Corvain said, “slower.”“Someone knew we’d be at that auction,” Fenwick repeated, and if he heard the edge in Corvain’s voice, he didn’t let it change his pace. He turned the courier tag over once more in the firelight, reading whatever markings lived on the underside like the leather itself might apologize for what it meant. “This tag isn’t standard patrol issue. Kessler couriers carry these when they’re delivering a specific instruction, not running a general sweep. Someone told this rider to be at that trade post tonight, watching for exactly what he saw. That’s not luck. That’s a tip.”“A tip about what,” Barrick said. “Nobody knew Corvain was going to be there. We didn’t know until this morning.”“We knew this morning.” Fenwick’s eyes came up, and for the first time all night something like real fear moved behind the calm. “Which means whoever tipped Vaunt’s courier had the same morning we did to work with.”The clearing seemed to shrink around that

Ondine POV“Say that again,” Ondine said. “Slower. Because I need you to understand that I have spent my entire life being told exactly what I was worth, and it was never this.”Fenwick crouched by the dead fire, coaxing it back to life with hands that weren’t quite steady, and when he spoke it was in the careful, over-explained tone of a man trying not to make a bad night worse by rushing the wrong part of it. “The Ashgrove Sight isn’t proof you’re Corvain’s sister, if that’s the fear sitting underneath the question you actually asked. It runs in cadet branches — allied households, old marriage alliances, lines that split off from the direct throne two or three generations back and kept the trait without keeping the name. It’s rare. It’s not exclusive to one household’s immediate children.”“So I could be his cousin. Some relation. Distant.”“You could be a great many things,” Fenwick said. “Right now, honestly, we don’t know which one, and I’d rather tell you that plainly than hand

Barrick POVBarrick had spent the last hour watching three people take turns falling apart quietly, and he was done being the only one in the clearing who hadn’t said anything useful.“Someone tore a page out of a dead woman’s private ledger sometime in the last three years,” he said, “which means either it happened the night of the massacre, in which case whoever did it is long gone and we’re chasing a ghost, or it happened after, in which case someone’s had access to that ledger we don’t know about. Which is it, Fenwick?”“I don’t know yet.” Fenwick was still bent over the pages, close enough to the fire that the light caught the strain in his face. “The tear’s clean. Old. If it happened recently, in my care, I’d have noticed the ledger’s weight change. I think it happened before I ever had it — which means my mother did this herself.”“Why would she write the truth and then rip out the one page that named it?”“Because writing it down at all was already a risk she barely survived m