Rise Of The Black Sovereign

Chapter 3

The words hung strangely in the air, quiet and certain in a way that didn't match the moment, and for just a second, Darius's smile faltered.

Then Reginald cleared his throat, breaking the tension deliberately. "I believe he's finished embarrassing himself for the evening. Security can escort him out if he requires further encouragement."

"That won't be necessary," Kael said.

He closed the ring box slowly, deliberately, and slid it back into his coat pocket. He looked at Lyanna one last time, not with anger, not with the desperate pleading she might have expected, but with something quieter and far more final.

"You said I was a footnote," Kael said, his voice carrying just far enough for those closest to hear. "Maybe I am. But footnotes are still part of the story, Lyanna. Someday you'll go looking for this page again, and you won't like what you find."

He knew Lyanna was being cajoled by her family. She wasn't really a bad person, she might be a good commander, who was fearless of any beast in the Wasteland, but when it came to standing up to her family and chosing what she wanted for herself, she always developed cold feet.

'maybe it's for the best' Kael said to himself. After all, with his real identity, he didn't want a weak woman that was easily swayed by his side.

"Is that a threat too?" Toren sneered.

"No," Kael answered. "It's a fact. There's a difference. I already told you that once tonight."

He turned and walked toward the exit, past Reginald's satisfied expression, past Corina's cold dismissal, past Darius's cousins snickering behind their champagne glasses, past the hundred faces that had gathered to watch a man be dismantled in public and had thoroughly enjoyed the show.

"Good instinct," Darius called after him, his confidence restored now that Kael's back was turned. "Walk away, Draven. The door's right where you left it. Try not to let it hit you on your way back to whatever hole you crawled out of."

Laughter followed Kael all the way outside, into the rain, and didn't fully fade until the doors closed behind him.

He stood there for a long moment, letting the cold water soak through his coat, his cheek still faintly warm from the slap, the ring box a dead weight in his pocket.

'Four years,' he thought. 'Four years, and the moment her family decided I wasn't useful, she let them decide everything else too.'

He started walking, no destination in mind, just needing the distance between himself and that hall to grow with every step.

"You're still walking." The voice came from his left, from the shelter of a doorway.

A closed tea house, its windows dark. Kael turned and found a woman standing just out of the rain, arms folded, watching him with an expression that carried no pity and no amusement. That alone set her apart from everyone else he'd spoken to that night.

Xena Vale.

He knew her by sight, the way everyone in Ashfall City did. The young ruler who had taken over after her father died. The woman the papers called the Iron Lady, because she had spent years refusing to let anyone take her city from her, one fight at a time.

"I saw the end of that from my car," she said. "I didn't need to see the whole thing to understand it."

Kael studied her for a moment before he answered. "Then you already know I'm not in the mood for company tonight."

"I'm not offering company." Xena stepped forward, into the pale light of the street lamp. "I'm offering something else. A different kind of proposal than the one you just had thrown back in your face."

Something in Kael's chest tightened at the word. He said nothing.

"The Central Council has given me forty days," Xena went on, her voice businesslike now, like she was reading from a report instead of standing in the rain at midnight. "Forty days to announce an engagement, or they force one on me. I need a husband who wants nothing from the arrangement except the arrangement itself. Someone the Council will approve, because he has no name, no family pulling strings behind him." Her eyes didn't waver from his face. "And, based on what I just watched, apparently no one in this city willing to stand up for him either."

Kael knew all about the engagement issues. The central council was planning to force one of their own on her as her husband in a bid to control her. Ironically, the said person was Darius Kane.

Kael could not help but scoffed at the nonsense games going on in this part of the world. He always found it amusing to watch from his Heavenly City.

Kael let out a short breath that wasn't quite a laugh. "You have a strange way of making an offer sound appealing."

"I'm not trying to make it sound appealing," Xena said. "I'm telling you exactly what it is."

She studied him for a long moment, her head tilted slightly, reading him the way Kael imagined she read every room she walked into, looking for the angle that mattered and ignoring everything else.

"A contract," she said. "Nothing more, unless you decide later that you want it to be. In exchange, you'll have my protection. My resources. A name that no one in this city will dare slap in public again." A pause. "I imagine that holds some appeal tonight, given the evening you've had."

Kael looked back once, toward the glowing windows of the hall behind him. He could still hear faint laughter carrying through the glass, Lyanna's voice somewhere inside it, already moving on, already folding tonight into something small and forgettable.

*You wanted me gone,* he thought. *You have no idea what just walked out that door instead.*

He turned his eyes back to Xena, standing there in the rain with an offer that felt less like romance and more like a business deal struck between two people who had both run out of better options.

"And if I say no?" he asked quietly.

"Then I find someone else," Xena said, without any heat in it at all. "And you go back inside and let them finish whatever they started tonight."

Rain kept falling steadily between them. Somewhere behind Kael, the hall's doors opened briefly, spilling warm light and a burst of laughter into the wet street before closing again.

Kael reached into his pocket. His fingers found the ring box, still sitting there, still warm from his own hand.

He didn't answer her right away.