A secret Ashborn child?
The pieces crashed together with the subtlety of a collapsing building.
The Shadow Monarch's son.
The boy who had stood in front of her in high school, nervous and hopeful and so painfully earnest that she'd laughed before he even finished speaking.
The boy she'd mocked in front of their entire class. Whose words she'd repeated with a significant amount of embellishing… She read it aloud in a performance of cruelty so polished that people applauded. The scrawny, quiet, nobody she'd turned into a joke that lasted years.
That boy was an Ashborn.
One of the richest, most connected families in the entire nation.
Son of the most terrifying woman alive.
And she had humiliated him for sport.
Vaelira's stomach lurched.
Bile climbed her throat, and she swallowed it down with difficulty, the taste burning and acidic. Her vision swam, and for one horrifying moment, she thought she might actually collapse right there at the breakfast table.
