(Alaric's POV)
The meeting was dragging on like a winter that wouldn't end. My mind kept slipping away from the council's dry reports and numbers; all I wanted was to be back in the bed I'd left behind, with Aurelia warm against me. The room around me — high-ceilinged, lined with banners and the heavy stone smell of the palace — felt smaller than my own skin.
We were here for the twentieth anniversary of my mother's death. Every year the council insisted on ritual and ceremony; every year the wound reopened. She had been admired by the whole kingdom, but that admiration never healed the hurt.
My memory drifted, unbidden and clear as glass, to the day it happened. I could still see it from five-year-old eyes: the chaos, the rogues who had come in the night, and the way the world had become smoke and noise. The image of their empty black eyes haunted me the most. Around this time of year I usually suffered nightmares; this year, oddly, I had slept through them.
Probably because of our mate, Dax had said the night before, leaning back in the study chair with a half-grin. I'd smiled then, thinking of her — of how gentle she had been, how untouched by our world she seemed. The thought comforted me. She was so innocent; knowing I would be her first—and, if I had my way, her last—settled something inside me.
The meeting was winding down when I lifted my mug for the last sip of bitter coffee. The taste was wrong — sharper, metallic, crawling across my tongue like ice. Before I could register the change, the room tilted. My breath came ragged. The words of a councillor blurred into one another; the edges of faces smudged like wet paint.
Someone near me shouted. I tried to answer but the sound in my ears thudded like running hooves. My vision tunneled; councilors' faces went in and out of focus, their expressions frantic and far away. A hand grabbed my shoulder — steady, panicked — and there was a voice, distant and thin, saying something about finding my mate.
Then darkness came like the end of a long, slow breath.
(Aurelia's POV)
Something in the palace shifted before the first shout reached me — an electrical prickling under my skin, Arrie's muscles tensing like a coiled spring. I felt it like a tightness in my chest, a sudden, cold dread.
I rushed from the study, hair half-tied, heart pounding. Voices rose from the corridors, servants scurrying with a haste I'd only ever seen at a funeral or a fire. I pushed a door open just enough to see a young maid pass by; her eyes widened when she met mine and she cried out, "She's here! She's here!"
Every head in the hallway turned. A guard stepped forward, his face tight with concern. "My lady," he said, bowing low though his posture was all business. "You are needed in the meeting room."
"What's happening?" I asked, but he only nodded once and moved, as if he'd been given orders he could not question. I followed him down the echoing stair, the palace suddenly feeling too large and cold. Tapestries brushed the walls like the slow whip of history.
At the meeting room door a rough, older voice barked, "Who is it?" The guard replied, "It's Sir Aiden. I brought her, as asked." A pause. Muffled conversation on the other side, and then, clear and final: "Only she may enter."
The corridor fell into a guilty hush as I pushed the heavy doors wide.
Alaric was on the floor. His skin had that pale, waxen shade of someone bled of heat. For a terrifying instant the image of that winter night — the Queen's screams, the terror when I had read of it — flared in my mind; then anger swallowed the fear.
I knelt beside him without a thought, cradling his head in my lap. His breath came in shallow, irregular pulls. He was alive. That was something. A sharp edge of fury sharpened inside me.
I looked up at the councilors arrayed around their table — men in embroidered robes and heavy rings, the very men who would lecture on duty and ceremony and arrange funerals. Their faces were masks of propriety. I felt a flash of cold revulsion.
"Is anyone going to answer me," I demanded, voice low and dangerous, "or shall I start ripping heads off myself?"
The room stalled. The way they froze — the posture, the slack mouths — set a chill in my bones. It was the same silence that had followed the Queen's death; a silence that had allowed horrors to happen.
Finally one councilman cleared his throat and stepped forward. "We were holding the regular meeting when Prince Alaric grew pale and collapsed," he said, voice small. He gestured toward the table as if the explanation lay in dusty ledgers.
My gaze snagged on a small mess beside the prince's seat: a white cup, a thin swirl of steam curling up, abandoned among papers. I bent close and lifted it to my nose. The scent hit me — metallic, floral, sickly sweet.
"Wolfsbane," I said before I could stop the word. It landed in the room like a thrown stone.
Silence shattered — but not with denial. With movement. One of the councilors reddened, as if caught; another opened his mouth and then shut it again. All around me, the palace seemed to tilt on the edge of something terrible.
"No one touches that cup," I ordered, my voice steady, ice-hard. "Help me get Alaric to his chambers. Now."
A councilman tried to object, to murmur that protocol— that the guards should handle it— but I fixed him with a look so cold he folded into a nod. The power in that room had shifted. They had come to opine; I had come to act.
Within moments hands were at Alaric's shoulders, steadying him, lifting him with care. I pressed my fingers against his forehead; the heat was faint but there. My anger warred with fear — anger at the council's hesitation, fear for the man beneath me.
As they bore him away, I watched the cup, the residue staining its rim, and felt a new kind of resolve take hold. Whatever had been attempted upon him — whether random attack or something darker and planned — it had failed. For now.
But I would not let it stand unanswered. Not while I breathed.