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Her head snaps toward me.
I feel it before she even says a word—the crushing command of her will bearing down like a boot to the spine.
"Silence," she says, voice smooth but venom-laced.
The word wraps around my throat like a noose. My mouth clamps shut. My body tenses with the restraint of it. I grind my teeth, jaw aching, every muscle screaming to move, to speak, to retaliate—but I can’t.
Not until she lets me.
Not until she’s had her laugh, reclaimed her dominance, and reminded us all that we’re puppets carved by her hands now.
Caspian doesn’t flinch. He smirks. “My bad,” he murmurs innocently. “Didn’t mean to trigger your gag reflex. Must be all the lies you’re used to swallowing.”
Her eyes narrow. But she doesn’t punish him.
Not yet.
She’s saving it. Tucking it away like a thorn in silk. Branwen likes her vengeance slow. Likes us waiting for it. Dreading it.
That’s her real game.
But Caspian just leans back, fingers trailing along the stem of the wine glass she handed him like he’s touching her throat.
And I sit there. Silenced. Seething. Fingernails carving crescents into wood.
Because one day, Branwen will choke on more than fruit.
Orin’s voice is a blade disguised as balm.
He leans back against the far wall like a man unbothered, a scholar with all the time in the world, and not one of us sees the subtle flex of his fingers, the white-knuckled grip on the spine of the book he pulls from thin air. Not conjured. Justthere—as if his grief carved it into existence.
“Shall I read for you, Branwen?” he asks, and his tone is gentler than I expect. But Orin’s gentleness is always a threat in velvet.
She purrs approval, her arms draped wide across the bone-carved arms of her throne, like she’s the goddess of some rotted temple and not a girl who’s deluded herself into thinking we’ll love her if she breaks us clean enough.
I feel her power roll across the room again. Not like Luna’s. Luna’s pulls. Branwen’sdemands.
Caspian shifts, stretching his legs out, rolling his eyes upward in a way that readsdear gods, someone save me, and Orin flips the book open with the gravity of a man reading someone's sentence.
His voice—measured, rich, layered with something old—fills the room.
“She wept not for herself, but for the hunger in others,
For the hands that take and call it worship.
For the knife that called itself mercy—
And the mouth that called it love.”*
The silence that follows isn’t peace. It’s tension coiled in velvet.
Branwen blinks slowly. Doesn’t flinch. But I know her well enough now to see the shift. The slight curl of her lip. That’snotthe praise she was hoping for. Orin didn’t read to soothe her.
He read to gut her.
And he did it with poetry.
Caspian smothers a grin behind his wine glass.