You’d think a prince would at least have a spine. Turns out, when you mix royal politics with pure, unadulterated cowardice, men fold faster than a cheap tent.The second my morning sickness started giving me away in the middle of the capital, the Cresthaven high court moved like a pack of starving wolves. They didn't care about the secret hours we spent talking in the orchards. They didn't care that I had spent half my life bleeding in the mud so those fat nobles could keep their castles. All they saw was a massive scandal that would make the crown look like an absolute joke.They dragged Prince Cassian right into the high chambers to face the music, expecting some dramatic showdown. Instead, I stood there in heavy iron chains while the man who swore he hated the crown as much as I did looked straight through me like I was a total stranger."I don't know this woman," Cassian said. His voice was completely flat, his eyes dead. He stood beside the Cresthaven King, draped in his fine Va

You know what’s hilarious? Watching a grown man who used to think he owned the world absolutely shit his pants in broad daylight.Twenty years. Two decades of eating dirt, freezing our asses off in a miserable cave, rubbing numbing root on a beast-rotted leg, and training until our knuckles split open just so we could look this exact moment in the eye. And there he was. Prince Cassian. Except he wasn't a desperate, sneaky prince anymore. He was draped in heavy, expensive furs, sitting tall on a massive white warhorse, wearing the crown of Valen right beside the crest of Cresthaven like he owned the entire continent.Only, he brought an audience.Behind him rolled a whole line of shiny velvet carriages and guards wearing polished silver armor that looked way too clean for the border. And sitting on a dainty little horse right next to him was his high-born wife, looking like she smelled something terrible, probably because the wind was blowing straight off the Ashen Wastes.And then the

Five-star dining room looks incredible when every single person sitting at the mahogany table is secretly figuring out how to murder everyone else. Three days after we marched our dusty, scarred boots straight through the capital gates and into the royal palace, Prince Cassian decided it was a brilliant idea to host a formal family dinner. His logic? Keep up appearances. Make the high council think everything is totally fine, smooth over the massive scandal, and pretend like a twenty-year-old ghost and her illegal revenge twins were just long-lost relatives coming home for the holidays. Absolute idiot. The dining hall was massive, dripping with stupid amounts of wealth—crystal chandeliers, gold-plated candlesticks, and a table long enough to host a military battalion. Lady Eleanor sat at the far end, looking like she had swallowed a lemon whole. Her face was locked in a tight, frozen smile, but her eyes were practically shooting lasers straight at me. She had spent two decades bel

The blood on the marble floor didn't dry before the palace scrubbers arrived.Long before the sun cracked the horizon, while the rest of the capital slept beneath a heavy blanket of fog and ignorance, the double doors of the grand dining hall swung open again. This time, there were no swords drawn, no masked guild killers slipping through the shadows. Just a half-dozen terrified kitchen maids and palace scullery workers dragging heavy oak buckets of lye, coarse salt, and steaming water across the threshold.They moved in absolute, bone-chilling silence. They had been woken up in the middle of the night by panicked head servants and told to clean up a royal disaster. They didn't ask questions. They just dropped to their knees on the cold stone, scrubbing viciously at the dark, coagulated pools of red that stained the white marble.One young maid—scarcely older than Cael, with grease smudged across her cheek—vomited quietly into a wooden bucket halfway through the job when her rag caugh

The dust from the royal guards' boots had barely settled in the grand stone corridor before I was already dragging Lord Corvo by the heavy, expensive folds of his silk collar.Corvo was the kind of junior minister whose entire existence was built on looking aggressively pompous while quietly siphoning state grain funds into his own pockets. Right now, though, he wasn't looking pompous at all. He was squeaking like a cornered rat, his manicured fingers clawing uselessly at my scarred, leather-wrapped forearm, slipping clean against the coarse, battle-worn material."You can't—this is an absolute outrage! The High Council will have your head on a spike by midnight!" Corvo choked out, his face turning the exact shade of a bruised, overripe plum as the fabric tightened around his throat."The High Council is currently busy changing their trousers after my children rearranged their entire dining room," I said, my voice a flat, gravelly rasp that cut straight through his pathetic whining. W