[Jasper’s POV]
The cathedral empties in stages. Nobles file out in clusters, voices rising the moment they clear the doors—the verdict already becoming currency.
I stay where I am, back against the cold stone pillar, watching candle flames gutter as the doors swing open and closed around me.
The examination. I have run the numbers six different times and arrived at the same impossible answer: we survived it. The priest said the words and the court exhaled. Vivien did not break, and I still do not understand how, and I have decided not to think about it further.
What I do think about—what I cannot stop thinking about—is what comes next. Because the examination was the first obstacle. The consummation is the second, and it is the one I have no explanation for yet.
She is queen now. Crowned and married, her hand in Alastair's through the length of the feast. I observed from my post behind her chair.
I tried not to calculate the hours remaining between the dinner table and the bedchamber, and I failed at this completely. I am very good at many things. Not thinking about Vivien is not among them.
A servant approaches with the hesitant gait of someone delivering bad news to an armed man. He stops at a respectful distance, hands folded, eyes not quite meeting mine.
"Sir Jasper.” His voice is careful and quiet, and I strain my hearing to catch his words. “His Majesty has made a specific request. He wishes you to serve as ceremonial candle-bearer during the consummation this evening. An honor, he said. For the queen's most trusted protector."
The servant's eyes drift somewhere past my shoulder. He knows what he is asking. Or he doesn't, which is somehow far worse.
"Understood." My voice comes out level. Something behind my ribs turns to ice—solid, crystalline, settling in the place where warmth used to live. "I'll attend."
He bows and retreats, visibly relieved to still be breathing. I stand in the empty nave and look at the altar where she spoke her vows an hour ago, then leave for the feast, trying to mentally prepare for tonight.
When the time comes, I take position by the door. Stone at my back. The brass candlestick cold in my gauntlet, flame at eye level. I choose a fixed point on the far wall and become furniture—because that is what is required of me in this room, and I am exceptionally good at being what is required.
The other thing I am doing, quietly beneath the stillness: calculating what will happen when Alastair sees white silk and nothing on it. When he looks for the proof the priest declared and finds it missing.
I have no answer. I have not had one since last night, when I held her in the dark and chose her anyway and understood, with complete clarity, exactly what I was risking. I chose her regardless. I would choose her again. That fact helps nothing.
Alastair enters first, Vivien on his arm, relaxed in the way of a man who has never once doubted his right to occupy space. His collar was already half-loosened.
He guides her toward the centre of the room with his palm at the small of her back, speaking something quiet near her hair.
She answers in that composed, measured voice—the one that gives nothing away. He does not acknowledge me at all. I am the candle. The candle does not require acknowledgment, and I am grateful, because my face is doing something I cannot fully govern.
He turns her toward him and begins with her laces. Unhurried. The hands of a man who has done this many times before—confident and steady where mine trembled last night. Each lace releases cleanly, the bodice opening along her spine in one unbroken pale line.
He catches the silk as it slides from her shoulders, lets it fall without ceremony, and turns his mouth to her collarbone with the ease of a man who owns what he touches. Because that is precisely what this is, and that is precisely what she is to him now.
Vivien's head tips back. Her lips part. A soft sound leaves her throat, and the candleflame bends in my grip because my fist has tightened around the brass without my permission.
Then her eyes find mine over his shoulder. She does not look away. She watches me with something dark and deliberate as Alastair's mouth moves down her throat.
His hands pull the shift from her body and leave her bare in the firelight—and there is nothing apologetic in her expression. Nothing that resembles remorse.
What lives there is the look she reserves for when she wants me to understand something she will not say aloud. A command. Watch. Witness this. Be here even though it costs you everything, and I know exactly how much it costs you.
He moves her toward the bed, one palm cupping her jaw, the other spanning her hip, and she goes with him—fluid, pliant—and my blood runs hot and cold in alternating waves.
The jealousy is acid-bright and total, eating through composure I built over years of training and discipline. Beneath it lives something far worse: heat I despise myself for, coiling low in my gut as she responds to his hands and her bare back arches against the firelight.
She makes a sound—soft and real—and I cannot determine with any certainty whether it is for him or for me. That ambiguity is its own particular species of torment, and I know she knows it, because I can see her watching my expression when she does it.
Wax drips onto my knuckle—sharp, hot. I feel it land and I do not flinch and I do not look down and I do not move. My eyes stay fixed on hers across the width of the bedchamber.
He coaxes her fully onto the bed, his weight settling over her with practiced ease. She exhales—a long, unsteady breath—and her thighs shift apart against the linen. Her fingers curl into the sheets, and I watch every detail of it with a precision I despise myself for and cannot stop.
His mouth finds her breast and her spine curves upward from the mattress, her fingers spreading in the linen. The sound she makes is higher, sharper—it carries across the room with full intention—and her eyes, still fixed on mine, go dark and very wide.
He positions himself between her thighs, and I stop calculating. There is nothing left to calculate.
There is only this: white silk beneath her, and the thing that will or will not be on it afterward. The proof the priest declared aloud—that I know, with complete and ruinous certainty, does not exist.
She holds my gaze, and I hold hers, and neither of us looks away. The candle flame bends in my grip.
Somewhere beneath my breastbone, two things exist simultaneously: the jealousy that is eating me alive, and the cold, absolute terror of a man watching everything he loves swing open on a door he cannot close.
The flame does not waver. Neither do I. That is all I am—her sentinel, her fixed point. Even here. Especially here.
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