HER CROWN, HIS FLAME
Part I: Betrayal, Blood Oaths & Forbidden Feelings
CHAPTER FIVE: THE QUEEN'S LOVER
The old tunnel had not been used in years, judging by the cobwebs, but Olivia had spent enough of her childhood exploring the service passages beneath the royal residences of both kingdoms to remember exactly where this one let out, a forgotten servants' door behind the kitchens of Valoria's western wing, rusted at the hinges but not, she discovered with a silent, grateful breath, locked.
The corridors beyond it had not changed in ten years. The same tapestries, faded now, the same particular smell of beeswax polish and old stone that she remembered from a state visit she had made at twelve, holding her father's hand and trying very hard not to fidget while two kingdoms exchanged careful, meaningless pleasantries above her head. She had thought, then, that Valoria's palace was the most beautiful place she had ever seen. She thought, now, moving through it like a thief in her own borrowed cloak, that beautiful things were very good at hiding what lived underneath them.
She had come to find Jullius. She told herself that, over and over, as she crept through corridors she had last walked as a girl who believed the world was mostly kind, her heart hammering so loudly she was certain the whole palace could hear it. She had come to find him, and to give him the contract, and to let him save her the way he had promised in the letter that still sat folded against her ribs like a second, colder heart.
She was three corridors from where she believed his rooms to be when she heard Ellia's voice.
It came from behind a heavy door at the end of a narrow hall, muffled but unmistakable, and Olivia froze so completely that for a moment she forgot to breathe at all. There was no reason for the Queen of Rone to be behind a locked door in the private wing of Valoria's palace, deep in the night, unless the reason was one that could not survive daylight.
Olivia crept closer. She told herself, even as she did it, that she should not.
❖ ❖ ❖
The door had not been latched properly, and through the narrow gap where it met the frame, Olivia could see a slice of candlelit room, gold and shadow, and two figures standing far closer together than any two people who did not share a bed had any right to stand.
Jullius kissed Ellia the way Olivia had once imagined, in her most private and humiliating fantasies, that he might one day kiss her. Slow, certain, entirely unhurried, the kiss of two people who had done this a hundred times before and expected to do it a hundred times again.
Olivia's whole body went cold.
"You worry too much," Ellia was saying, when the kiss finally broke, her fingers still resting against Jullius's jaw with the easy familiarity of long ownership. "The girl suspects nothing. She never has. That is the particular gift of raising someone to believe she is loved. She stops looking for the knife."
"She's clever, Ellia. Cleverer than her father ever gave her credit for."
"She's grieving. Grief makes even clever women stupid for exactly as long as you need them to be." Ellia's laugh was low and pleased with itself. "You did beautifully, my love. The letter, the promise, the little postscript about the contract, all of it exactly as we discussed. She'll walk through that gate tonight or tomorrow believing you're the one honest thing left in her collapsing little world."
Olivia's hand found the doorframe, because her legs had gone strangely unreliable beneath her.
"And once she signs it," Jullius said, "Valoria has a legal claim to Rone the moment she's declared dead. Which, I assume, is happening soon."
"Soon enough. The mirror already has her scent. Once she's inside these walls, it will only be a matter of choosing the hour." Ellia's voice turned warmer, almost fond, in the particular way Olivia now understood meant something was about to be discussed that neither of them considered shameful in the slightest. "You did well, feeding me everything you learned of her all those years. Every habit. Every small fear. The way she still flinches at raised voices. The way she has never once, in her whole life, learned to ask for help before it's already too late. It made her so very easy to write to."
"She trusted me completely."
"That was rather the point, my love." Ellia's laugh was low and pleased with itself. "The letter, the promise, the little postscript about the contract, all of it exactly as we discussed. She'll walk through that gate tonight or tomorrow believing you're the one honest thing left in her collapsing little world."
Olivia's stomach turned entirely to ice. Every gentle word Jullius had ever spoken to her, every confidence she had ever handed him across a decade of careful, patient friendship, had been collected, catalogued, and handed to the woman who murdered her father, so that it could be used to lead her, gently and willingly, into her own grave.
Every warm memory she had built her whole understanding of Jullius around, the garden, the promise, the years of careful, patient devotion, rearranged itself in front of her into something else entirely. Not love. A long, patient hunt, conducted with a hunter's understanding that the surest way to catch something wild was to convince it, first, that it was safe.
You gave her poison to my father. Olivia realised, with a distant, sick horror, that she must have said it aloud, because the voices on the other side of the door went suddenly, completely silent.
❖ ❖ ❖
She did not remember deciding to run. She remembered only the sound of her own ring, her mother's ring, the one small piece of home she had carried out of Rone sewn into her sleeve, slipping loose and striking the stone floor with a sound that seemed, in the silence, as loud as a bell.
The door was flung open before the ring had finished spinning.
Jullius's face, in the candlelight, was nothing at all like the face she remembered from the garden. It was cold, and calculating, and entirely without the warmth she had spent six years believing was meant only for her.
"Olivia."
She ran.
She heard him shout something behind her, heard Ellia's voice rise sharp and furious over his, a single word that chilled her more than anything else she had heard that night. Kill her. Now. Before she reaches the gate.
Olivia had never run so fast in her life, not even in the forest on the night her father was buried, because that night she had been running from strangers, and this time she was running from the collapse of every single thing she had let herself believe about who loved her and why.
❖ ❖ ❖
The seven of them were already turning back toward the forest, the long day's waiting having stretched past any hour they'd expected, when Adam heard footsteps.
He went still first, one hand already on the hilt of a blade, and then he heard the particular, ragged quality of the breathing beneath the footsteps, someone running not with purpose but with pure, animal terror, and something in his chest lurched before his mind had finished identifying why.
He turned, and saw her.
Olivia came out of the tree line at a dead sprint, her hair wild, her face streaked with tears she did not seem to know she was crying, and Adam did not wait for an explanation. He did not ask what had happened, or whether she was hurt, or why the wards at the border had let her back through so easily. He simply ran, closing the distance between them faster than he had ever moved in his life, and caught her as she collapsed forward into him with the full, unbraced weight of someone who had stopped, entirely, holding herself upright.
"I've got you," he said, arms closing around her, one hand pressed flat against the back of her head as though he could hold the whole shattering shape of her together through touch alone. "I've got you. You're safe."
Olivia sobbed into his chest in front of all six of his brothers, in front of the open forest and the fading light and every careful wall either of them had spent two weeks building, and did not care, for the first time in longer than she could remember, who saw her fall apart.
"I want to go home," she said, the words breaking apart in her mouth. "I want to go home."
She meant the house sunk low among the roots of the oldest trees in the forest, and every single one of them heard it, and none of them corrected her.
Theo reached them a moment later, having circled back at the sound of Adam's shout, and stopped a short distance off rather than crowd her, though Olivia felt his presence all the same, steady and careful, a second kind of safety standing just behind the first. He did not try to take her from Adam's arms. He simply stood close enough that she understood, without needing to look up, that he had not left either.
❖ ❖ ❖
It took her the better part of an hour, once they'd made camp again and Rowan had pressed a warm cup of something bitter into her hands, before she could speak in full sentences instead of broken pieces.
She told them everything. The kiss. The confession that spilled out of Ellia like poison finding its natural container. The poison itself, and who had supplied it. The letter, every word of it engineered, down to the postscript, to walk her willingly into a trap built from the one thing she had never learned to protect herself against, the desperate hope that someone, somewhere, actually loved her.
"He never loved me," she said, staring into the fire, her voice gone flat and strange with exhaustion. "He spent years learning exactly how to look like he did. Long enough to be useful when Ellia finally needed him."
No one spoke for a long moment. Adam sat close enough that his shoulder pressed against hers, and did not move away, and did not say a single word about being right, though they both knew he had been.
"I don't want the throne back because it's mine," Olivia said, finally, and something in her voice had changed, the raw grief hardening into something with edges. "I don't even want it back just to prove I didn't kill my father. I want Ellia and Jullius to understand, before the end, exactly what it costs to spend someone's whole life as a tool and then throw them away once the tool has served its purpose."
She looked up, at Elliot, at Bastian, at Rowan and Lucian and Finn, at Theo's steady, grave attention, at Adam beside her, and felt something settle into place inside her chest, cold and clear and entirely new.
"Teach me to fight," Olivia said. "Not the way you've been teaching me. Properly. I want to be strong enough that the next time someone comes for me, or for anyone I love, I am not the one who has to be rescued." Her hands curled into fists in her lap. "I want to end their reign with my own hands."
For a long moment, no one answered her. Then Elliot, who had spent two weeks doubting whether a human girl could be worth the risk of harbouring, rose from where he sat across the fire, crossed the small distance between them, and inclined his head to her, formal and grave, the way Olivia imagined he might once have bowed to a commander he actually respected.
"Then we will teach you," he said. "Properly. Starting tomorrow."
It was not forgiveness. It was not even trust, not yet. But it was, Olivia understood, watching the firelight move across seven very old, very careful faces, the first time any of them had looked at her as something other than a guest to be tolerated, or a danger to be managed.
It was, for the first time since the snow had fallen out of season over her father's coffin, the beginning of something that felt, however fragile, like an army of her own.