[Amber’s POV]
Nothing says "loving husband" like locking your wife in her room. I discover this at dawn, when my hand closes around the iron handle and the door does not move—not stuck, locked, the heavy kind that requires a key turned from the outside.
Arthur's post is empty. I know this the way I know the shape of my own breathing—by the absence of pine and cold air on the other side of the wood, the missing gravity that has stood sentinel outside this door for months.
"Hello?" I pound on the oak. It swallows the sound whole. "Is anyone out there? I know you're there—open this door."
Footsteps pause beyond the wood. A servant's voice, muffled and careful: "Apologies, my lady. The prince's orders were specific."
"Which orders? What's happened?" Nothing. My forehead drops against the door, and the mark on my forearm pulses once—a slow, deep throb, like a second heartbeat registering something I haven't been told yet. "Then find me someone who can tell me."
The footsteps retreat without answering. I pace the chamber like it's shrinking, each circuit tighter than the last, the study flooding back in pieces: Desmond's nostrils flaring, his hands in my hair, his mouth graceless and starving against mine while the desk shuddered beneath us.
And behind us, six feet away, Arthur breathing through it like a man learning to drown on dry land. Then the question aimed at his brother's retreating back—conversational, devastated.
By midmorning, a tray appears through the narrow service slot. The hands that slide it through are shaking. "Please," I crouch to the level of the opening. "Tell me where Arthur is."
The servant's eyes dart anywhere but at me—she is young, a couple years older than Jonah. "You should not ask questions today, my lady," she whispers. "Please. Just—don't."
The slot closes. I stare at the bread and cannot make my hands reach for it. By afternoon, my fingernails have memorized the grain of the door.
Then: a different set of footsteps—faster, sharper, the rhythm of someone who has bribed her way past obstacles and is running out of time. "Amber." Lady Seren's voice, pitched low against the wood. "Don't talk. Just listen. I haven't got long."
"Seren, what—" But she is already talking over me, the words tumbling out rapid and precise.
"He's called a formal challenge. Arthur's in the lower cells. The duel is tonight, moonrise." She speaks the way you speak when every second costs something. "No weapons. No seconds. Both forms permitted—skin and wolf, shifting at will. To the death. No other option."
My knees forget their primary function. I catch myself against the doorframe, the silver-gold mark on my forearm blazing like a brand. "And Desmond is the challenger."
"Desmond is the challenger." Seren's rings click against each other—the nervous habit she only shows when the situation has outpaced her. "A formal challenge from the crown cannot be declined. Refusal forfeits name and rank. Exile at best. Execution at worst."
"And if Arthur wins?" The silence on the other side of the door stretches long enough to develop its own weather system.
"No one has ever defeated a reigning Wolfblade prince in formal challenge and lived to hold the consequences." That's the most clarifying thing anyone has ever said to me.
Not comforting—clarifying. Arthur fights, he may die. Arthur refuses, he certainly dies. Arthur wins—and somehow, that is also death.
"The court is assembling—full nobility, every warden, every servant who can find a vantage point." Seren's voice takes on the clipped efficiency of someone delivering battle intelligence. "He wants witnesses, Amber. He wants this remembered."
"Thank you, Seren." I close my eyes and press my palm flat against the wood, as if I can hold the corridor in place through sheer contact.
"Don't thank me. Survive the evening." Her footsteps retreat, quick and deliberate, and the corridor returns to its indifferent silence.
The lock turns two hours later. Wardens—four of them, ceremonial armor polished to a killing shine—flank me through corridors that feel longer than they have ever been. Torchlight licks the stone walls in patterns that make the shadows crawl.
The throne room hits me like a wall of heat and sound—every seat occupied, every alcove packed. Nobles in their house colors, wardens in formation along the walls, servants pressed into every remaining crevice.
The air is thick with perfume and the electric hum of a crowd that has gathered to watch something bleed. That is what this is, I realize. A public bleeding.
Desmond sits the Obsidian Throne in full regalia—black and silver, the crown of forged iron resting on his brow like it was grown there. His hands rest on the throne's arms with the precision of a man who has rehearsed this moment until the seams disappeared.
Arthur stands before him in ceremonial restraints—wrists bound in silver-threaded cord designed to hold a wolf in either form. The scar through his left brow catches the torchlight, and his silver eyes are fixed on his brother's face with a steadiness that does not waver.
"My brother has violated the terms of his oath." Desmond addresses the court, and his voice fills the hall the way weather fills a valley—total, inescapable, unhurried.
He does not specify the nature of the violation. His gaze moves across the assembled faces, finds mine, and rests there for exactly long enough.
Every person in the room draws the same conclusion. The collective understanding is a sound in itself—a hundred small inhalations, the rustle of silk as the court absorbs the shape of what he is not saying.
"Arthur." Desmond's attention returns to his twin, and something in the quality of that single word—stripped of title, stripped of rank, just the bare name of the boy he shared a womb with—makes my chest fold in on itself. "Have you anything to say?"
Arthur looks at his brother. His mirror. The other half of a face he has spent twenty-five years standing one step behind. The restraints catch the light as his hands settle—not straining, not testing. Just still.
"I would do it again."
The room inhales as one body and does not exhale. Desmond's spine does not move, his expression does not crack—but something behind those silver eyes rearranges itself, tectonic and irreversible, a foundation shifting beneath a structure that was already failing.
"Moonrise it is then." Desmond rises from the throne. "Don’t make me wait, brother."
The court rises with him, because that is what gravity does to lesser objects. The wardens take Arthur by the arms and turn him toward the doors, and the crowd parts for him the way crowds part for the condemned—by pressing backward, by holding their breath.
He passes within arm's reach of me. Close enough that the scent of pine and cold air cuts through the perfume and the torch smoke and the hundreds of bodies packed into this hall. He does not stop. He does not turn his head.
But as he passes—right at the point where his shoulder draws level with mine, close enough to touch—he speaks.
"Amber." Just my name. Nothing before it, nothing after—no message, no reassurance, no goodbye. Just the sound of it, shaped by his mouth, carried into the vaulted ceiling and the silence of a court that has stopped breathing.
It fills the hall the way a bell fills a cathedral. Completely, and long after the source has gone.
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