Chapter 4 The Light

FREYA

“What do you mean you did what you had to do?”

The words came out sharper than I meant them to, but I didn’t care. My hand was still pressed against the marks on my neck, my whole body humming with something I didn’t understand, and I wasn’t in the mood for riddles from a man who’d bitten me without asking.

The doctor near the door stiffened. “You do not speak to his highness that way,” he said, quick and clipped, like the words had been trained into him. “It is not acceptable.”

“Eli.” Kieran said the name low, almost soft, but there was something underneath it that made the doctor’s spine go straight.

“Apologies, your highness.”

Kieran turned back to me, and whatever amusement had been in his expression earlier was gone now. “You would speak to me with respect,” he said, “considering I was the one who saved your life. You were dying out there, and I was drawn—”

He stopped talking. The sentence just hung there, unfinished, and something about the way his jaw tightened told me he hadn’t meant to say that much. I waited, half expecting him to finish it, but he didn’t.

“I turned you to save your life,” he said instead, colder now, like he was resetting himself. “You should be grateful.”

“I didn’t ask you to save me.” My voice cracked with how much I meant it. “You had no right.”

I don’t know what I expected. Maybe silence or maybe another cold line about survival and gratitude. I didn’t expect the way his eyes changed, the red deepening into something darker, something that made every instinct I had left scream at me to run.

His hand closed around my throat before I even saw him move. My back hit the wall hard enough to knock the breath out of me, and then his grip took the rest of it. “I… I can’t…” I couldn’t finish the sentence. Couldn’t get enough air to finish anything.

“Your highness.” Eli’s voice, tight with alarm. “Killing her now would be a waste. I think it would be best to—”

“SILENCE.”

The word cracked through the room like something physical, and Eli went quiet instantly, his eyes dropping to the floor.

Kieran’s fangs were fully out now, his eyes gone pitch black, no trace of the red left in them at all, and for the first time since I’d woken up in this room, I understood exactly what he was. Not a King in a nice coat. A predator, older and colder than anything I’d ever been taught to fear, and right now I was close enough to feel exactly how little effort it would take him to end me.

“No one speaks to me that way and lives,” he said, and his voice had gone somewhere low and inhuman.

I should have been terrified. Some small, rational part of me knew I should have been begging, should have been saying anything to make this stop. But six years of being someone’s mate, of shrinking myself down to fit inside what other people needed me to be, of being discarded the second I stopped being convenient, something in me had run out of room for fear.

I looked him dead in the eyes, my vision starting to blur at the edges from the lack of air, and forced the words out anyway.

“Do your worst.”

Something flickered across his face at that. Surprise, maybe. Or something closer to fury that I wasn’t giving him what he expected. His grip tightened instead of loosening, and the room started to tilt sideways, dark creeping in from every direction, my hands scrabbling uselessly at his wrist even though I already knew it wouldn’t do anything.

I thought, distantly, that this was a strange way to die. Saved from one death only to be handed another by the same man, in the same night, practically. And then the light came.

It didn’t build slowly. It simply happened, all at once, bursting out from somewhere inside my own chest, blinding and white and impossibly warm against skin that had gone so cold a second earlier. I felt it more than I saw it, a pressure releasing outward like something inside me had finally been given permission to exist.

Kieran was thrown backward so hard he hit the far wall, and I heard Eli and the guards stumble too, a scatter of bodies hitting the floor around the edges of my vision as the light kept pouring out of me, uncontrolled, unfamiliar, terrifying in its own way.

I collapsed forward the moment his hand left my throat, air finally tearing back into my lungs in one violent gasp, my knees hitting the floor hard enough that I barely registered the pain of it over everything else happening in my body.

The light faded as quickly as it came, leaving the room dim and quiet and full of the sound of everyone’s ragged breathing, mine loudest of all.

I looked up first. Kieran was still against the wall where he’d landed, and for the first time since I’d woken up in this palace, he didn’t look like a King. He looked shaken. Genuinely, visibly shaken, staring down at his own hands like he didn’t recognize them, like whatever had just happened had frightened even him.

“What,” he said quietly, not to me, not really to anyone, “was that.”

Eli was pushing himself up slowly from the floor, staring at me now with something between fear and fascination. “Your highness,” he said carefully, “I don’t think that was normal.”

Kieran didn’t answer him. His eyes had found mine across the room, and something in his expression had shifted completely from the fury of a few moments ago, replaced now with a wariness I hadn’t seen from him yet. 

Like he was looking at me and seeing something else entirely. Something he recognized from somewhere, or something he’d been warned about, or something he’d spent years dismissing as a story that wasn’t supposed to be real.

I didn’t understand what had just happened to me any more than they did. My whole body felt hollowed out, drained in a way that had nothing to do with blood, and my hands were shaking against the cold stone floor.

“What did you do to me?” I whispered, and this time it wasn’t anger in my voice. It was something closer to fear.

Kieran pushed himself off the wall slowly, still watching me with that same unreadable wariness, and for a long moment he didn’t answer at all.

Then, quietly, almost to himself, he said the words that made my stomach drop straight through the floor.

“I don’t think I did this to you at all.”