Chapter 6 CHAPTER 6

AURORA’S POV

"Coward."

The word came out before I decided to say it. But I meant it so completely that I didn't take it back.

"You sit on that throne and you talk about necessity and war and the greater good." I took another step toward him.

"You are a coward. A three hundred year old coward on a very impressive throne." My voice was shaking and I couldn't stop it and I didn't try. "You couldn't face my mother's power directly so you took her from a table she walked to in good faith. You couldn't face mine so you found the crack in my brother and you broke it open and you hid behind him." Something burned at the back of my eyes and I blinked it away hard. "You have never once faced a witch queen and looked her in the eye. You just wait until their back is turned and you take them."

He rose from the throne.

I hadn't understood, from across the room, how much space he took up when he was standing. It wasn't just the height of him or the breadth of his shoulders — it was something older than that, something that came off him like heat off stone.

He came down from the dais.

I held my ground. I would hold my ground in front of this man until my legs gave out before I took a single step back. My hands were already moving — reaching for him, some part of me that had stopped consulting the rest entirely, that had done the calculation and decided that dying trying was better than standing here doing nothing —

He caught both my wrists.

One motion. Effortless. Like he had seen it before the thought had fully formed in my own head.

His hands were enormous and the grip was firm without being cruel and that somehow made it worse — the absence of roughness, the complete and unhurried calm of it, like he had simply reached out and collected something that was never going to land anyway.

"Let go of me—"

"No."

"Let go of me right now—"

"Aurora." He said my name differently this time. Lower. Not a command exactly. Something else. "Stop."

I stopped.

Not because he told me to. I want to be clear about that.

I stopped because my mother's face moved through my mind at exactly that moment — not a memory, just her face, the way I remembered it from when I was small, before everything — and the grief of it came up so suddenly and so completely that it hit me somewhere the rage couldn't follow.

For one terrible, unguarded second I felt both things simultaneously. The fury and underneath it the loss. The raw, bottomless, six-year-old ache of a girl who had been missing her mother every single day and had been so busy being a queen that she had never once let herself sit down with how much that actually cost.

My eyes burned.

I stared up at him and blinked and refused.

He was looking down at me and this close — this insufferably, maddeningly close, close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off him like standing near a forge — I could see him in a way the distance of the throne hadn't allowed. The precise lines of his face. The sharp jaw, the dark lashes, the way the torchlight moved across his features and found angles that had no business existing on a person.

Those red eyes up close were a completely different thing than they were from across the room. Deeper. Older. The kind of red that had nothing to do with anger and everything to do with something ancient that had been burning long before anyone alive could remember and would still be burning long after.

He was beautiful.

The thought arrived with no warning and no apology and I despised it from the moment it formed.

I bit down on my lip. Hard. Enough to feel it, enough to give me something sharp and immediate to focus on instead of whatever my own mind was doing to me.

He was the reason I grew up without her. He was the reason my father had come apart piece by piece looking for her until there was nothing left to bury. He was the reason I had stood at a graveside at twenty one years old in a crown that didn't fit with nobody beside me and no one to tell me what to do next. He was the reason for the war and the loss and the six years of holding everything together with bleeding hands and the night that had just happened and Sera —

Sera.

I held onto all of it. Let it sit in my chest where the grief was. Let it remind me of every single thing this man's choices had cost me.

But he was still holding my wrists.

And the heat coming off him was doing something to the air between us that I had no framework for, something that moved against my skin like a current, and it was making the straight clean lines of my thinking go slightly soft at the edges in a way that frightened me more than anything else in this room.

Then he said, very quietly, "Do you feel it."

I stared at him.

"What."

He didn't answer immediately. Those red eyes moved across my face like he was reading something written there, weighing it, deciding.

"Do you feel it," he said again. The same words. Quieter. "Between us. Do you feel it."

I looked up at him.

Then I pulled my wrists back. He let them go this time and I took one full step back and I looked him dead in the eye and I said it clearly, every word deliberate, nothing wasted.

"The only thing I feel when I look at you is the specific and detailed desire to watch the life drain out of your eyes."

He said nothing.

"Listen to me carefully." My voice had gone somewhere past shaking.

“You have the collar on my neck. You have my magic locked down. You have this castle and these walls and three hundred years on me and I understand all of that." I held his gaze and I did not blink. "None of it changes what happens next. Every day I am inside these walls I will be watching. Learning every corridor, every guard rotation, every crack in every wall. I will smile when you need me to smile. I will sit at your table and I will listen and I will be so patient you will forget I am dangerous." A beat. "And then one day — one day when you have made the mistake of thinking you know what I am and what I'm capable of — I will find the opening. And I will not hesitate." I took one slow breath. "I will bring this mountain down around your ears with you still breathing inside it. And I will stand over you while it happens and I will look you in your ancient, burning eyes and I promise you, on my mother's name, on my father's grave, on every single thing you have taken from me — I will not look sorry."

The throne room held the silence like it was afraid to break it.

He stared at me.

Something moved through his face. Then slowly, with the precision of someone who chose every expression deliberately, the corner of his mouth moved.

Not a smile. Something older than a smile. The expression of a man who had stood in front of three hundred years of threats and was still here and knew it and found, somewhere in the specific character of this particular threat, something that surprised him.

"I would love," he said, very quietly, "to see you try."

He held my gaze for exactly long enough to make the point land. Then he turned his head toward the doors without any hurry.

"Doran."

The guard appeared in the doorway immediately.

"The east wing. The amber rooms." Valdris's eyes came back to me briefly. "She is a guest. Every courtesy. She does not leave the wing without an escort."

"Yes, my King."

Valdris turned back to the map. Just like that. Back straight, hands clasped behind him, eyes moving across the carved territories and the red marks in the south like I was already filed away and he had simply moved on to the next item on a very long list.

It was the most infuriating thing he had done yet.

"When the fury has settled," he said, "and you can hear what I'm saying without wanting to put your hands around my throat — I'll tell you everything. Your role in this war. What I know. What is coming. All of it." Another pause. "You deserve the full truth. I intend to give it to you."

I stared at his back.

Doran stepped forward. Patient. Waiting.

I looked at Valdris one last time.

He didn't turn around.

I walked out.