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“And the next morning,” I continue, because the seal is broken now and the rest is pouring out whether I will it or not, “my husband announced to a room full of his men that I had only ever been a tool. A signature. A way to secure a transaction with my father. And then he killed him. My father. And the rest of my family along with him.”

I still remember the way he said it.

Not cruelly—that’s the part that lives under my skin like a splinter that never worked its way out. He said it kindly, almost gently, the way you’d explain something obvious to a slow child, while I sat in the bed we’d shared the night before still wearing the marks of a claim I’d been fool enough to believe.

He thanked me, even.

Thanked me for being so beautifully, conveniently obedient.

And while I was still piecing together the shape of the betrayal, while the words were rearranging the entire architecture of my life into rubble, he was already giving the order that would erase everyone who had ever loved me.

I didn’t cry then.

That’s the thing I never tell anyone. I sat in that ruined bed bone-dry and watched my whole world end, and something in me decided, in that exact moment, that I would never again let a man witness the precise instant he broke me.

Silence.

Absolute, breath-held silence, three dangerous men gone statue-still around me as I swallow the stone lodged in my throat.

“I’m the trajectory of my family’s end,” I say to my own bare feet, the tears coming faster now, unstoppable. “I’m the door he walked through to reach them. And I did everything right. That’s the part no one ever believes. I followed every rule. I honored my father’s wish to the letter—the alliance, the marriage, the empire he spent his whole life building, all of it riding on my obedience. I knew the world he moved in was dark. I knew the risks. But he kept the dark off me as long as he drew breath. I got to dance. Ballet. The one thing on this earth I have ever loved without it costing me—right up until the day they buried him.”

They don’t know what my father built, and I don’t tell them the half of it—the reach of it, the names that answered to his, the empire that was supposed to outlive us all.

It doesn’t matter now.

What matters is that he loved me the way a man loves the one soft thing he’s allowed himself in a brutal life, and he protected me from the machinery of it with a ferocity I didn’t understand until it was gone.

I was the princess kept in the one tower the violence never touched. He let me have my barre and my pointe shoes and mysmall bright world of disciplined beauty, and in exchange I gave him the only thing he ever asked of me: yes.

Yes to the alliance.

Yes to the man he chose.

Yes, because I trusted that my father, who had never once steered me wrong, knew what he was doing when he placed my hand in a stranger’s.

I was wrong to trust it.

He was wrong to ask.

And the price of both our errors was every life that carried our blood.

My voice frays, and I let it.

“And then I had to strip. Because the moment my father was gone, my husband decided I was worthless—gave me no money, no standing, no scrap of power of my own—and a girl has to eat, so I climbed a pole instead of a barre and learned a whole new use for the discipline of my body. I saw things in those rooms. I did things. And somewhere in there, I think, is where the cracks started—where the girl I was began splitting into the women I had to become to survive her.” I lift one hand and drag it across my wet cheek. “Leaving him was the only sane choice left. And when Dorian pulled me out of that wreckage, I genuinely believed it—that freedom was bliss, that I’d finally gotten out—until I understood he was simply a different shade of the same color. A prettier cage. A gentler owner. Same walls.”

I wipe at my face with both hands and try to smile, the old reflex, the mask reaching for its hinges—and when I look up I find Riot is no longer in his chair.

He’s standing directly in front of me, beer abandoned, that hard scarred face doing something I don’t have a name for, and the sight of him there makes my eyes well over all over again.

I keep my head up anyway.

I refuse, even now, even crying, to lower it for the next part.

“I don’t regret killing Dorian,” I tell them, steady through the tears. “I won’t pretend I do. And if I’m ever given the chance to kill my ex-husband—the man who slaughtered everyone I came from—I’ll carry no regret over that either. None.” I pull in a shaking breath. “But I’d regret losing you. You lot of beautiful crazies. So… um.” My composure wobbles, cracks, gives. “Maybe don’t die for me, kay?”

Riot says nothing.

And that silence tells me everything, because I know—down in the root of me, in the place that reads people the way other people read the weather—that this man cannot make that promise.