Chapter 4 CHAPTER 4

AURORA'S POV

The corridors of the castle were nothing like I expected.

That was the first problem.

I had built this place in my head over years of war — dark, brutal, the kind of architecture that existed purely to intimidate. And it was dark, yes, and the ceilings were high enough to make you feel small, and the walls were black volcanic stone that absorbed torchlight instead of reflecting it. But there was something else too. Carvings running the full length of every corridor, intricate and old, dragons mid-flight worked into the stone with a detail that must have taken years. Tapestries in deep red and gold. Braziers burning with a blue-edged flame that gave off heat without smoke and cast everything in a colour I had never seen firelight produce before.

It was extraordinary.

I caught myself slowing down to look at a carving above a doorway — two dragons facing each other, wings spread, some kind of script running beneath them in a language I didn't recognise — and I stopped myself.

No.

I straightened and looked forward and kept walking.

I was not going to stand in my captors' home and admire the décor. I was not going to give this place anything, not my attention, not my wonder, not a single moment of genuine feeling that they hadn't already taken from me by force.

Aldric walked ahead without checking whether I was behind him. He hadn't spoken since we entered the castle. The guards flanking me hadn't either. The only sounds were boots on stone and the distant, constant hum beneath the floor that I felt more in my chest than heard with my ears.

The ley lines.

I had grown up feeling them beneath my coven — a steady, familiar presence, like a heartbeat in the earth. These were different. Deeper. The way an ocean is different from a river. I kept my face neutral and my eyes forward and tried to ignore the way they pulled at me through the collar like something recognising something.

Aldric stopped in front of a set of doors.

They were enormous. Black iron, a dragon worked into each one with the same extraordinary detail as everything else in this place — wings spread wide, heads raised, facing each other across the seam where the doors met. Two guards flanked them, armoured, staring straight ahead.

Aldric glanced back at me. Just once. Something in his face I couldn't read.

Then he pushed the doors open and walked in and I followed because there was nothing else to do.

The throne room stopped me cold.

I kept walking — I kept my face together, kept my spine straight — but everything in me went very still.

It was vast. The ceiling disappeared into shadow far above, the walls lined with torches burning that same blue-edged flame, and the floor was black stone polished to a mirror finish that reflected everything in dark, warped shapes. Along the left wall ran a map — not painted, carved directly into the stone and filled with pigment, covering the full length of the room from floor to twice my height. Every territory. Every border. Movement markers in red and black, clusters of them in the south that even from here I could see were dense and wrong and getting worse.

Battle formations on a side table. Supply routes. Correspondence weighted down with iron markers.

This was not a throne room built for ceremony.

This was a war room with a throne in it.

And at the far end, on a seat carved from the same black volcanic rock as the mountain itself, was the Dragon King.

I had three hundred years of stories about him. Paintings in the coven archives, old and faded, that the elder witches kept more as warnings than portraits. I had built him in my imagination the way you build any monster — from fear and secondhand accounts and the specific shape of the damage he had left behind.

None of it was accurate.

He was enormous. Not in the exaggerated way of stories — just genuinely, quietly large in the way that ancient things are large, like the size was simply a fact about him rather than something he wore. Dark armour covered him from throat to wrist, scaled and fitted and clearly not decorative — this was armour that had seen use, that bore the faint marks of things it had deflected. His hair was long and dark, loose around his shoulders. His posture on the throne was not the cultivated stillness of someone performing authority.

It was the real thing. Someone who had held power so long that holding it had become effortless.

And his eyes.

Red. Not dark, not rust-coloured — red, bright and deep, the colour of something burning at its core. They found me the moment I cleared the doorway and they did not move.

For one moment — one single, humiliating moment — I felt something that was not fury.

Then I remembered.

This was the man who had sent soldiers to my mother's parley. Who had taken her while I was sixteen years old and terrified and waiting for her to come home. Who had let me wait for six years without a word, without a body, without anything — just silence that I had slowly, painfully filled with the understanding that she was gone. Who had watched my father destroy himself looking for her. Who had, somewhere along the way, decided that wasn't enough and sent for me too.

Who had, I was now certain, put something in my brother's ear. Made Cael an offer that Cael, to his eternal ruin, had accepted.

The rage came up so fast and so hot that my hands moved before I could stop them — reaching for the magic that wasn't there, grasping at power the collar had reduced to a whisper, and the whisper was not enough, and I knew it wasn't enough, and I stood there in the middle of the throne room with my hands half-raised and my teeth together and the most powerful man in the known world watching me from his throne without blinking.

I lowered my hands.

Aldric stepped forward and bowed. "My King. The mission was a success. The Witch Queen is secured."

Valdris looked at me for a moment longer before he shifted his gaze to Aldric. When he spoke his voice was low and even and carried the full length of the room without effort.

"The coven," he said. "How much damage?"

"Minimal. As instructed." Aldric clasped his hands behind his back. "The eastern quarter took fire in the initial breach. We pulled the dragons back before it spread. The structure is largely intact."

Valdris nodded once. "And the brother."

Something moved through Aldric's jaw. Brief. Controlled. "Alive. As agreed." A pause. "I would have preferred otherwise."

“Oh..why so?”

"He traded his sister for authority over a coven." Aldric's voice was flat. The flatness of someone who had decided contempt was more useful than anger. "I have fought beside men who gave their lives for less. I find it difficult to extend the same courtesy to someone who sold his blood for a title."

"You don't have to extend him anything," Valdris said. "You have to honour the agreement we made."

"I would have burned him where he stood."

"I know." Valdris held his gaze. "We made a deal. We keep it. That is the end of the matter."

Aldric said nothing. His expression said considerably more. He bowed — sharp, precise, the bow of a man who disagreed and had accepted that it made no difference — and turned.

He walked back past me toward the doors and for one brief second his eyes met mine. Then he was gone and the doors closed behind him with a sound like a full stop.

The rage that moved through me was so complete I couldn't speak inside it.

They had a deal. Cael had walked into a negotiation, put me on the table, and walked out with everything he wanted. And the man on that throne had shaken his hand and kept his word and was now sitting there watching me with those red eyes like this was simply how the world worked.

But underneath the rage was something worse. A question I couldn't stop turning over no matter how much it hurt.

How.

How had Cael looked at this man — this specific man, the one who had sent soldiers to our mother's parley, who had taken her while we were still children, who had left two kids to bury their father and hold a coven together alone — and shaken his hand. Sat across a table from him. Negotiated terms. Smiled, maybe. Agreed. Walked away satisfied.

We had grown up in the shadow of what this man had done to our family. Cael had held me while I cried for her. Had stood at our father's grave with his jaw tight and his eyes wet and his hand in mine. Had said, more than once, that one day it would be different.

And then he had gone and made a deal with the reason it wasn't.

I didn't understand it. I wasn't sure I wanted to.

And it was just us.

The Dragon King on his throne and me in the centre of his war room, collared and stripped and burning with a fury I had nowhere to put.

He looked at me.

I looked back.

Neither of us spoke.