Page 100 of Renegade Kingdom
“You should go to her,” I said.
His expression shuttered. Careful. Guarded. The instinct of a man who’d spent too long having his own desires used against him. “It’s not that simple.”
“It’s exactly that simple.” I leaned forward, resting my arms on the table. “I’ve spent years watching her from a distance,Damon. Telling myself the timing wasn’t right, that she didn’t need the complication, that what I felt didn’t matter as much as what she needed. And you know where that got me?”
He was quiet. Listening.
“Dead,” I said simply. “With a chest full of regret and a head full of things I never said.” I held his gaze. “Don’t make my mistake. She’s down the corridor, probably convincing herself that she needs to plan strategy instead of doing what every part of her clearly wants to do. Go to her.”
Something shifted in his face. The careful guard cracking. Underneath it, hope. The kind that belongs to a man who has been denied good things for so long that he’d stopped believing they were meant for him.
“I don’t...” He stopped. Swallowed. “The bond between us, it’s barely there. What if she doesn’t want...”
“She wants,” I said. “Trust me. I’ve had years of practice reading that woman’s face, and right now it’s not a war council she’s thinking about.”
The ghost of a smile crossed his face. Tentative. Real.
He stood. The shadow magic settled around him, quieter now, responding to something softer than combat.
“Rhidian.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
I shook my head. “You brought me back from the dead. This doesn’t even begin to cover it.”
He held my gaze for one more moment. Then he turned and walked down the corridor, and the shadows trailed behind him like a cloak.
I sat alone at the table in the Fifth Court and breathed.
The silence was comfortable. The kind of silence that doesn’t demand to be filled. I could feel the court around me, faintly, like hearing music from another room. Not my magic. Not anymore.Just the ambient hum of a place that was waking up after a long sleep.
Beyond the walls of this ancient court, Nymeria’s dying world waited. Broken and hurting and trapped under the heel of a man who wanted to burn it all down. There was a battle coming, and the cost of it would be terrible.
But beyond that battle, beyond the smoke and the terrible price of setting things right, there was a horizon.
And for the first time in my life, it belonged to me.
Chapter Thirty
Damon
The corridor was too quiet.
That was the thing I kept noticing. Not the stone under my feet or the faint glow of the veins in the walls or the way my shadow magic trailed behind me like smoke from a candle. The quiet. The beautiful, deafening quiet inside my own head.
For months, every silence had been a lie. The nightmare would let me think I was alone, let me relax into a moment of peace, and then it would speak. That mocking voice sliding through the dark like a blade. Reminding me that I was never truly alone, that every thought I had was observed, catalogued, and stored for later use as ammunition.
Now the silence was real. I kept waiting for it to break. Kept bracing for the whisper, the laugh, the cruel observation that would prove it had all just been an illusion.
But it didn’t come.
The wolf stirred instead. A presence in my chest that I was still learning the shape of. Not words, not exactly. More like instinct translated into feeling. Right now it was restless, alert, aware of something ahead that it wanted to move toward. I could feel itsattention focused like a beam of light down the corridor, pulling at me the way a current pulls at a swimmer.
Alyssa.
I found her in one of the smaller chambers off the main hall. She was standing by a window that looked out onto nothing I could name. The Fifth Court existed in its own strange geography, and whatever lay beyond that glass was all silver light and shifting shadow. She had her arms wrapped around herself, and the light beneath her skin pulsed faintly in time with her breathing.
