POV: Rena Vale
Heartbeat… gone.
“Repeat it,” I rasp, fingers slipping on the balcony rail as if stone turned to oil under my palms. “Say it again.”
Verdan’s smile glints like a blade. “Your father is still alive.”
“My father died,” I whisper, memory stuttering—ashes, whispers, a grave with no body, a name carved like a question. My knees tilt. Air won’t go in.
“That’s the story we let you believe,” he says, savoring every word like it costs me blood.
A tremor seizes my whole body—jaw, fingers, spine. Lyria shoves forward, furious and frantic. Lie, she snarls. Hook on a line. Don’t bite, little moon.
Arms find me—Kai, hard and warm, wrapping me up like the only thing that matters is keeping me from shattering. “Don’t listen to him,” he says against my hair, voice rough, a vow nailed into the night. “He wants you unmade.”
I’m not unmade. I’m… undone at the seam my mother left and a man I buried without bones. “How,” I croak into Kai’s jacket. “How could he—”
“With exquisite care,” Verdan purrs, lifting the moon-poison chains like a puppeteer lifting strings. “He is in the Council’s custody—alive, suffering, waiting for you to come claim him.”
“Where?” The word tears my throat raw. Hands tear out of Kai’s hold without meaning to. I step forward and the light around me flares like a cry. “Where is he?”
Verdan tilts his head. “Surrender yourself,” he says, sickly sweet, “and we will lead you to him.”
Everything narrows—sound, color, sense—until only two points exist: the chains glinting wrong, and a door in my mind opening on a cell I’ve never seen. Lyria rakes claws down my insides. Trap, she hisses. Trap, trap.
“My father,” I say again, and the word doesn’t sound like a word anymore; it sounds like falling down a stairwell in the dark. “You have him?”
Kai’s hand clamps around my wrist, iron hot. “No,” he says, a blade honed to a single syllable. “Rena, no.”
“He’s alive,” I whisper, dizzy. The idea is a sun rising in the wrong place. “If he’s alive—”
“Then we take him by force and bring him home,” Kai snaps, moving to block me from the edge, from the field, from the gravity pulling me into a decision I can’t undo. “We do not pay with you.”
Auren edges closer, blood on his knuckles, eyes blown wide with shock and fury. “Rena,” he says carefully, as if any wrong note will shatter me. “This is leverage. Don’t let him set the board.”
I barely hear them. Grief and hope wrestle so brutally I can’t tell which is winning. “Tell me where,” I plead—the word a sob sharpened to a point. “Tell me where he is. Please.”
Verdan’s smirk relaxes into something crueler. “Dear child, you aren’t in a position to bargain.”
“Watch me,” I spit, power buzzing under my skin so hot it aches. “You think I won’t burn down every black file you’ve ever written to get him back?”
“Bold,” he says, amused. “And yet… so predictable. Come down, surrender your light, and I’ll take you to him myself.”
Kai’s other hand covers mine, pinning both to his chest, trying to anchor me in a heartbeat that won’t lie. “Look at me,” he orders, low and urgent. “Do not take one step toward that line. He doesn’t lead you to a father. He leads you to a box.”
“What if it’s not a lie?” My voice breaks open, bleeding panic. “What if he’s breathing somewhere in the dark and I’m up here… making speeches?”
Auren swears under his breath. “We find him the right way. Intel. Raids. Not deals with devils.”
“Devils keep time,” Verdan coos. “Your father’s clock ticks. How many beats until… silence?”
The chains swing gently in his fist. Something inside me snaps.
“Stop,” I scream, and the sound shakes the balcony rail beneath my hands. Torches below gutter; wolves flinch as if the night itself recoiled. “Stop using my family to bait me!”
“Then move,” he replies, bored now, as if my pain is a toy he’s tired of. “Step down, be bound, be led.”
Lyria lunges at the bars inside my chest. Light burns poison. Light burns lies. Her voice threads steady through the chaos. Make yourself anchor. Not them.
Breathe. Count. Remember the training Kai taught until I hated him for it and loved him for making me strong. In—four. Hold—four. Out—four.
“I can’t—I can’t just stand here,” I whisper, small and savage, almost to myself.
“Yes, you can,” Kai says, foreheads almost touching, eyes burning mine back into my skull. “And then we move together. Smart. Armed. With every pack that loves you at our back.”
“War takes time,” I choke. “Fathers run out.”
“We’ll split time,” Auren says, stepping closer, voice shaking but steadying with every word. “I go now with Rowan and a ghost team to hit their outer houses. Kai locks the palace. You don’t move alone.”
Verdan laughs, pleased to hear us planning like it’s a game. “By the time you form a committee,” he sing-songs, “he will beg me to end him.”
The world tilts again. “Please,” I say to nobody and everybody. “Stop talking.”
“Say the word,” Kai urges, thumb stroking my wrist, grounding, infuriating, necessary. “I’ll carve a path through their lines tonight. I’ll hang his chains from my gate come morning. But you do not go down there.”
My gaze keeps sliding to the field—past the wall of gray, past the ranks of torches. In my head a corridor forms: stone slick with damp, a single bulb humming, a breath that isn’t mine echoing in the quiet. Dad? The child in me knocks on the door I dreamed for years. The woman in me wants to kick it down.
“Rena.” Auren inches into my peripheral, voice hushed. “Please. Look at me. Don’t let him herd you. You’re the only one who can’t be replaced tonight.”
“I don’t want to be queen,” I whisper, old truth flaring up like a bruise. “I want a father.”
Kai flinches, barely. “You can have both,” he says, fierce, soft, impossible. “But not if you become his prisoner.”
Verdan lifts the chains again, runes crawling like maggots. “Tick-tock,” he says cheerfully.
My stomach heaves. I can’t stand the sound. I can’t stand the image of those links closing around my wrists, around my light, around my mother’s scream made metal. I can’t stand the image of a man with my eyes breathing alone in the dark because I chose safety over a chance.
“Give me a location,” I demand, voice raw. “Prove it.”
“Come,” he says. “Or he keeps waiting.”
Kai’s grip tightens to pain. “NO.”
I jerk, instincts warring—obedience to the only voice that’s saved me, defiance of the only hand that’s ever dared to hold me back. “Kai—”
“NO,” he repeats, harsher, closer to a growl than a word. “I will not watch you walk into a cage.”
Tears spill before I can stop them—hot, humiliating. I scrub them away with the heel of my hand and immediately hate that I lost the battle with my own face. Wolves below can’t see this far. Verdan can. He smiles like he just tasted wine he extorted.
“Don’t give him your tears,” Auren says, almost too quiet to hear.
“Don’t give him your life,” Kai adds, not quiet at all.
“Don’t give him our life,” Lyria breathes, the we in her breaking me open and holding me together at once.
“Choice,” I whisper, dizzy. “I have to make one.”
“You already did,” Kai says. “You stayed.”
“I’m standing still,” I argue, almost angry at him for making that feel like bravery.
“Sometimes that’s the bravest thing,” Auren says, and his mouth twists like he doesn’t believe it for himself but he wants it to be true for me.
Verdan is still talking—something about mercy, something about law. The words skim off the top of my rage and vanish. My gaze drags to the city, to the faces below, to the wolves pressed to the gates because they’ve decided I am worth staking their night on. My gaze snaps back to the field, to the man who murdered my mother with paperwork and now dangles my father like a worm on a hook.
Every nerve screams. Every instinct splits.
“Rena,” Kai whispers, forehead to mine, voice shaking in a way he’ll never admit later. “Do not make me hold you harder.”
My fingers twist in his jacket. “Don’t make me choose between him and me.”
“We’ll make a plan,” Auren says quickly, desperate to bridge the canyon opening under us. “We hit at dawn. We use the tunnels. We pull archives. We flip a magistrate. We—”
“Enough,” I cut in, because the plan I need lives in a part of me that doesn’t speak strategy; it speaks blood. I slip my hands out of Kai’s grip—quick, clean, guilty—and step sideways out of the shelter of both their bodies.
“Rena.” His warning rides my name like thunder.
“Rena,” Auren begs, reaching, stopping himself, fingers shaking.
Wind rushes in the space between us, cold and loud. My legs feel like they’re made of someone braver, someone stupider, someone I don’t recognize and have been waiting to become.
“I can’t stand here while he breathes in a cell,” I say, voice shaking so hard it’s almost soundless and somehow still carries. “I can’t. I won’t.”
Kai takes a step. I take two back. Torches below lift; Verdan’s chains glint; Lyria’s heartbeat hammers against mine like she’s willing to tear my ribs open just to sit in the driver’s seat.
“Don’t,” Kai says, breaking—finally, beautifully. “Don’t go where I can’t follow yet.”
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, and it’s not enough, and it’s everything.
I set my shoulders, meet the Chancellor’s eyes like I’m staring down the throat of a wolf I intend to make lie down, and give my future the ugliest truth it’s asked for yet.
“I’m going after him—with or without you.”