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He knew it hadn’t worked. Of course he knew. And now… Now what would he do with that knowledge? He could have ousted me in front of the Court. Or at least Nevara, but he was waiting. For what?

He didn’t release me as he swept us through several narrow doorways through the servant’s passages and up hidden stairwells.

The wind screamed through the shuttered windows. Ice crackled along the walls, haunting us more closely than our own shadows. By the time we reached the familiar walls of the queen’s sitting room, I couldn’t feel my fingers.

The doors slammed shut behind us with another frigid gust of air.

He finally released me, fury radiating from him like heat from a forge.

His eyes burned brighter than the auroras they resembled, wild and cold and unrelenting, and his jaw clenched so hard I could swear I heard it crack.

“No reason to avoid the ceremony?” he bit out through ragged breaths.

I swallowed. “I told you it was too soon.”

A lie. A weak one.

His eyes narrowed, and he clenched his fist. His left one again, where he wore his wedding band.

“Try again,” he gritted out.

Batty flew over to me with anxious little chitters, and I hurriedly put her in my sleeve before Draven could direct his anger at her. He tracked the motion, jaw clenched, while he waited for my response.

“Your mana is more powerful than mine, so it probably just eclipsed it.”

I wasn’t sure why I was still bothering when we both already knew. Even the skathryn gave a small, disappointed trill from my sleeve.

Draven looked down at his fist, honing in on the ring that was born of our combined blood like it had personally wronged him. Frost spread outward from the band, creeping up his arm.

He snapped his gaze back up to mine.

“The truth.” His voice dropped, low and lethal. “What is wrong with your mana?”

My throat tightened, but this time, I didn’t respond.

He reached into his coat, pulling out something that was more familiar than I wanted it to be. Sharp black edges gleamed in the low lighting, amethyst stones winking from the hilt.

He spun it in his grasp, leaning toward me. I backed away, only to hit the wall, but he didn’t advance. Instead, he pressed the flat side of the blade against my chin, slowly raising it so that my eyes met his.

For all I had missed my dagger, I didn’t want to get it back like this.

“An Unseelie dagger,” he spat.

That went without saying. All daggers were Unseelie. Still, my blood turned to ice in my veins when I nodded.

“When I saw this, I thought you were working with them.” His glacial tone was a jagged contrast to the mana crashing over my skin, burning me from the inside out.

He pressed the blade more firmly against my skin, forcing my head to the right, then the left while he studied my features, searching for something. Anything. A tell, maybe? At least I didn’t need to scrounge for a lie this time.

“I would never work with the Unseelie,” I said, holding his stare and allowing him to feel the full weight of my honesty.

He took a step back, the blade dropping from my chin.

“That might have been better than the truth.” He let out a bitter, dry laugh. “I would have hated you for it, but us despising each other is nothing new, is it? At least then we could have found a way to make the stone accept you. But as a Hollow? You’re completely?—”

He stopped himself just short of saying useless , but it hovered in the air between us all the same. Something flickered behind his eyes, gone so fast I could hardly read it.

Disappointment? Resignation? It stripped me bare in a way the anger hadn’t, sending tears stabbing at the backs of my eyes.

I didn’t have a defense that would hold, and we both knew it, so I said the only thing I could.

“Punish me if you will, but leave my family out of it,” I said quietly. “They didn’t know.”

He scoffed, shaking his head as another wave of fury rolled off of him. “Are you incapable of opening your mouth without lies pouring out?”

For the first time since the ceremony, anger crept in to chase away some of the despair. That was easy for him to say. When had he ever needed to lie? He opened his mouth and demands poured out and the entire kingdom fell over themselves to accommodate him or died for lack of trying.

“It isn’t like I asked for any of this,” I shot back at him, waving my hands in a gesture meant to encompass it all.

The stupid frigid palace and the circumstances of my birth and my useless lack of mana and him .

Most of all him.

“And you think that I did?” he demanded, voice rising with every syllable. “Do you think that I went to sleep every night begging the Shard Mother to send me a Hollow bride so that together we could bring my kingdom all the way to ruin? Do you think any part of me wanted to marry you ?”

For all I had accused him of being a monster, I had never actually seen him lose his temper, had never heard him raise his voice.

But he was furious now. Distantly, I realized I should be afraid, but all I felt was his bone-deep disappointment echoing straight through to my soul.

Like he had been holding fast to a single thread of shining hope, and I had just severed it with my inadequacy.

It shouldn’t have hurt. I shouldn’t have cared at all. If anything, I should have taken pleasure in the way I had finally made him lose control, made him suffer the way this entire arrangement had made me suffer.

Maybe it was the marriage bond stopping me from relishing in my petty win for a change. But then, there were no winners here. Not me, not him, not the kingdom.

We all lost.

I squared my shoulders even as shame burned my cheeks.

“Then let me go.” It was a fool’s hope. The only way he would let me go was in a coffin, but I had to try.

“Let you go?” he echoed. Though his tone was controlled now, it was no less dangerous, a quiet lethality underpinning each word.

I swallowed, summoning my bravery.

“You said yourself that neither of us wants this. So fake my death, or say that I’m ill, or…” I trailed off, realizing the options were precariously few. “We could unbind ourselves and be free of one another.”

He stalked closer to me until I was backed against the wall, trapped between the ice at my back and the unyielding glacier of a male in front of me. He leaned down, speaking in my ear the way he had the first courtier, just before he shattered her.

“If I could so easily be free of you, Morta Mea, I would happily kill you myself.”

Morta Mea .

He was telling me I was the death of him. Literally. Something in the way he said it made me think it was more than just an insult.

It was a bone deep belief.

He backed away, turning his back on me before I could form a response.

“But the Shard Mother has spoken, and the bond cannot be broken, so we are both chained to this fate.”

He gripped the handle on the door, cold mana pulsing down the frame from his touch. Frost gathered around him like a curse. It climbed the polished walls and smothered the dying embers in the hearth, robbing the room of its last vestiges of warmth.

Batty shivered in my sleeve, so I scooped her out, holding her against my chest and pretending it was for her sake rather than mine.

The last thing I heard was Draven’s growling voice, demanding a soldier fetch him the visionary. Then he was gone, leaving me with his fury and the unwelcome realization that there was no way out.

Not for either of us.