The morning light through the casement is pale and accusatory, and Arthur is gone. His side of the bed holds nothing but a dent in the pillow and the faint, devastating scent of pine—and I press my face into it like a person who has lost all claim to dignity.
Lady Seren finds me in the east gallery before noon, which means she was looking. She has the particular unhurried stride of a woman who owns information and wants you to earn it—hands folded, chin level, the faintest curl at the corner of her mouth.
"You look rested." She falls into step beside me. "That's either very good or very dangerous."
"Can't it be both?" I keep my pace even, my hands steady at my sides. The bruises Desmond left on my collarbone are hidden beneath a high collar, but the ones Arthur's mouth left along my ribs pulse like a second heartbeat.
Seren lowers her voice. "The older nobles are talking. Not the usual court gossip—the ones who remember what the last Wolfblade king was like before he burned his own council chamber with the council still in it."
My stomach drops through the floor. Nothing says elegant dynasty like generational arson. "Charming family history. Please tell me there's a point."
"They're saying Desmond watches you. At dinner, at court functions, when you cross a room, when you speak with servants." Her eyes don't leave the corridor ahead, but every word lands with surgical placement. "The kind of watching that has nothing to do with punishment."
My throat works around nothing. I swallow hard. "He watches everyone. He catalogues the court—that's his entire personality."
"No." Seren stops walking, and the shift in her voice is the kind of thing your body obeys before your brain catches up. "He catalogues everyone. He watches you. The older families recognize the difference, and it is making them nervous."
The gallery stretches in both directions—empty, cold, portraits of dead Wolfblades staring from gilded frames. Every one of them looks like they died owning something they shouldn't have.
"A cruel prince has limits," Seren says, quiet enough that the words barely survive the air between us. "Cruelty is a tool—you pick it up, you put it down. Obsession has no function. It consumes, and what it touches does not survive."
My ribs go tight. Something cold and precise settles behind my sternum. "What are you telling me to do?"
"I'm telling you what you already know." Her hand brushes my elbow—brief enough to be accidental, except nothing about this woman is accidental. "You are no longer being punished. You are being kept."
She leaves me in the gallery with the dead silver eyes and the sound of my own pulse ticking behind my teeth. I stand there until my breathing steadies, then I walk.
Arthur finds me an hour later for the afternoon patrol—our sanctioned circuit of the north courtyard, the one sliver of Desmond's decree that gives us open air. The six inches between our shoulders hum like a plucked wire.
"Seren came to see me." I watch the flagstones. "The older nobles are worried about Desmond. The obsession kind of worried—the 'this isn't punishment anymore' kind."
Arthur's jaw shifts. A muscle in his cheek moves once, then locks—and his eyes go to my hands before they come back. "She's not wrong."
"That's the part making my hands shake." He glances down. They are, in fact, shaking—but he doesn't reach for them, because every window in the east wing overlooks this courtyard.
"We need to talk about what comes next," I say, and my voice comes out harder than I intend. "Real terms. Not the survival-by-inches we've been doing."
His guard-voice surfaces—flat, professional, a manual he's been reading from since birth. "Talk."
"Running." I test the word like pressing a bruise, watching his profile against the grey stone wall. "Is it viable?"
"No." No hesitation, no softening. "The Wolfblade network extends past the border territories. He'd find you within a week, and the retrieval would not be gentle."
"Challenging him—politically, some kind of formal contest, anything with legal teeth." I press my palm against the courtyard wall. The rough cold stone bites into my skin, and I let it.
"Suicide." His hand closes into a fist at his side, knuckles draining white. "Desmond controls the judiciary, the wardens, every noble house with enough power to make a challenge stick. No institution in this court would choose you over him."
The options close like doors slamming down a hallway. My nails bite into the stone. "Then what?"
"You become indispensable." Arthur stops walking and turns. The wind catches his hair, and behind him the grey sky stretches like something slowly bruising. "So embedded in the court that pulling you out costs more than keeping you."
"That could take years." My voice comes out thin, scraped. "I don't know if I have years."
"You've been doing it since the day you arrived." His voice drops, rough and certain. "The servants trust you. Seren chose you—and she doesn't choose projects she intends to lose."
"You read rooms better than anyone in this court." Something close to a smile surfaces at the corner of his mouth. "You're not building a strategy, Amber. You're noticing the one you already built."
Something in my chest reorganizes—a loosening and a tightening at once, like a foundation settling after a quake. I look at this man, scarred and steady, six careful inches away.
"What are you willing to risk?" My voice scrapes past something sharp at the back of my throat. "For this—for all of it."
The wind dies. Arthur looks at me, and every piece of professional distance, every careful mask, every hour at his post while his brother's hands were on me—all of it falls away. What is underneath is so unguarded my lungs forget their function.
"Everything." Not a whisper, not a declaration—just the flattest, most devastating arithmetic ever spoken aloud. "I am willing to risk everything."
The mark on my forearm burns silver-gold, answering something in him his voice just made real. A warden rounds the east wing corner, and we step even futher apart with practised speed, just to be safe.
But the summons arrives an hour before dusk—Desmond's handwriting, sharp and angular, a script that looks the way his voice sounds. My study. Now.
Arthur walks me to the door and stops. His hand grazes the small of my back—gone before the air registers it. I don't look at him, because if I look at him I will not walk through this door.
I knock once and enter. The study is dim, lit only by dying light through the western window—papers across the desk, a half-empty glass, and Desmond at the window with his back to the room, silhouette carved sharp against the sky.
He turns when the door closes. And the face looking at me is one I have never seen—not the calculated cruelty, not the cold performance, not the possessive hunger he wears like court finery. All of it is gone, and what remains is raw and enormous and entirely uncontrolled.
His lips are parted. His hands hang at his sides. And his silver eyes hold mine with something that is not a prince, not a punishment, not a sentence—something bare and shaking apart, with no strategy behind it and no exit planned.
It is aimed, with the full devastating weight of Desmond Wolfblade, directly at me. And I have nowhere—nowhere at all—to hide from it.
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