“You’re not getting cold feet, are you?”
I want to scream. I want to rip open the velvet curtains and let the Akuran wind tear this whole building down to its foundation. I want her to look at me—not the future duchess, not the pawn on the political chessboard. Justme.
“No,” I say softly. “Just tired.”
Her expression smooths like polished porcelain. She leans in, presses a kiss to my cheek that smells of rosewater and control.
“You’ll see,” she whispers. “Once you put on the dress, everything will make sense.”
No it won’t.
But I nod anyway.
She glides away down the hall, and I retreat toward my suite like a ghost with a curfew.
My room is quiet.The kind of quiet that hums in your ears when the door clicks shut behind you and the whole world stops pretending to care what you think.
I drop my heels near the velvet settee, let the dress pool to the floor like spilled silk, and pad barefoot to the window.
The training grounds stretch out beyond the rose garden—barren, blistering, and brutally real. No manicured hedges. No servant girls giggling. Just flat stone, battered holograms flickering in and out of combat stances.
There he is.
Rayek.
He’s moving like a storm unchained. No armor. Just black training pants and a sleeveless tunic soaked through with sweat. Muscles shifting under scale and scar as he drives his fists into one of the combat holo-drones.
The machine flickers, readjusts, tries to counter. He slams a knee into its midsection, spins, ducks,shattersthe holographic skull with a vicious elbow. The next drone materializes and he doesn’t even flinch.
I press my forehead to the window glass.
He fights like it’s the only thing keeping him tethered to this world. Like heneedsto move, to hit, to burn. Like silence eats him alive if he doesn’t beat it back with brutality.
And gods, he’s beautiful.
Not in a pretty-boy way. No soft smiles or delicate hands. He’s made of violence and heat and sacrifice, forged from a thousand lost battles and stitched together by duty. Everything about him should terrify me.
It doesn’t.
It makes me want to open my chest and let him carve his name on my heart with those claws.
The window fogs where my breath hits the glass.
I know what this is. What I feel. I’ve known it since I turned nineteen and caught him watching me with an expression so raw it made my skin flush. Since he stopped being just “Rayek the bodyguard” and becamehim—the one I dreamed about. The one I couldn’t touch.
And now I’m supposed to marry someone else. For peace. For legacy. For duty.
For everyone but me.
I close my eyes, trying to push the ache down, but it rises anyway. Thick and hot and unrelenting. A slow, golden execution. That’s what this is.
My fingers curl into the window frame. My nails bite into the paint.
What good is knowing what you want… when the universe has already written your ending?
CHAPTER 2
RAYEK
