Yona's hands tightened on the grip of her twin short blades until her knuckles blanched, the steel trembling faintly in her grasp, resonating with the fury she kept caged inside.
These blades had never known another's hands... never once left her grip, not for training partners, not for allies, not even for blood-kin. They were hers alone, her last line of truth in a life filled with chains.
Yet he had wielded them.
Not once. Twice. More than that.
Each time with the steady precision of someone who had walked years in battlefields, someone whose body already knew the weight of such weapons. His movements hadn't been fumbling, hadn't been the lucky strikes of a desperate royal whelp... they were measured, practiced, dangerously practiced.
As though he had been born with steel in his hands.
But that was impossible.
The tenth prince was no warrior. He was a royal outcast. A ghost in the palace. A boy whispered about in half-forgotten rumors of exile, disappearance, disgrace.
