Reborn for the Hidden Heir

Chapter 13: The Tower

The northern tower was not on any map the servants would admit to knowing.

I spent two hours finding it. Two hours of corridors that narrowed and turned back on themselves, of staircases that ended in locked doors, of gardens that seemed to shift their geometry when I wasn't looking directly at them. The palace was old, built in layers over centuries, each king adding wings and walls and secrets that only the bloodline was meant to navigate.

I found it finally by following the ravens. They circled the tower's peak in a slow, dark spiral, their calls echoing against stone that was blacker than the rest of the palace, older, built from something that wasn't quite rock and wasn't quite bone.

The door was oak, reinforced with iron bands that had rusted to the color of dried blood. No guard. The king didn't need guards when shame was enough to keep a prisoner inside.

I knocked.

Silence. Then, from somewhere high above, a sound like something heavy being dragged across stone. Footsteps, uneven, too large for a human stride. The door opened without warning, and Kael filled the frame.

He looked worse than I'd imagined. His formal clothes from the ceremony were gone, replaced by something that might have been a nightshirt, might have been a prisoner's uniform, thin fabric that showed too much of the scales beginning to form at his collarbone, his wrists, the edges of what should have been human skin. His eyes were fully gold, no white, no pupil, just molten metal burning in sockets that seemed too shallow for the heat they contained.

His nostrils flared. "You smell like him."

"Who?"

"Cedric." The word came out distorted, layered, as if two voices spoke from one throat. "You smell like my brother's wine and my brother's hands and my brother's intentions." His lip curled, revealing teeth that were longer than they had been, sharper, the teeth of something that didn't belong in polite conversation. "Did you enjoy dancing with him?"

"I didn't dance with him because I enjoyed it." I stepped forward, trying to see past him into the tower's interior, but his body blocked everything, a wall of muscle and scale and barely contained violence. "I danced with him because he offered information. Because Evelyne was watching from the balcony and needed to see me alone and vulnerable. Because in this court, survival means using what you're given, even when it comes from people you don't trust."

"And do you trust him?"

"I don't trust anyone." I pushed against his chest, felt the heat radiating from his skin, the vibration that seemed to match my heartbeat. "Including you. Especially you, when you look at me like I'm property you left unattended. Now let me in, or I'll stand in this doorway until someone reports us, and your father will have another reason to keep you locked away."

He stared at me for a long moment. The gold in his eyes flickered, something almost human surfacing beneath the dragon's surface. Then he stepped back, his movements jerky, uncontrolled, as if his body was fighting itself over whether to let me pass or pull me close.

The tower's interior was one room, circular, rising three stories to a ceiling lost in shadow. A bed. A table. A chair. Books scattered across every surface, their spines cracked, their pages marked with annotations in a hand I didn't recognize... his mother's, perhaps, or his own, or someone else's who had been here before him and left no other trace.

A window faced south, toward the main palace, but it was small, set high, designed to let in light without letting out a man who could transform into something that flew.

"Charming," I said. "Your father's interior decorating skills are legendary."

"Don't." Kael's voice was closer to normal now, the layered quality fading, but the anger remained, directed inward as much as out. "Don't make jokes. Don't pretend this is something we can laugh about. You saw the gallery. You danced with my brother. You know what they're saying out there, what they're planning, and you come here to mock my cage."

"I'm not mocking your cage." I walked to the table, picked up a book... The History of Noctari Bloodlines, heavily annotated, and set it down again. "I'm trying to understand how you survived in it for twenty-five years without learning anything that might help us both get out of it."

He laughed, short and bitter. "I survived by not existing. By being quiet, compliant, and forgettable. The servants who brought food learned not to see me. The guards who checked the door learned not to hear me. I was a ghost with a heartbeat, and that was the only way to stay alive."

"And now?"

"Now I'm a prince with a fiancée and a court that wants me dead and a dragon that wants..." He stopped, his hands curling into fists, the scales at his knuckles catching the light.

"Wants what?"

He didn't answer. He crossed to the window, his back to me, his shoulders rigid with tension. "You shouldn't have come. The king allowed you to be housed in the palace. He didn't allow you to visit me. If they find out..."

"If they find out, what? Will they separate us more thoroughly? Will they move me to a different wing? Will they tell the court that the engagement they already want to dissolve is improper?" I moved closer, close enough to smell the smoke on him, the wildness, the something underneath that was still Kael, still the man who had stepped from shadows to claim me. "We're already being watched, Kael. Evelyne's planning, Margot's scheming, Lucien's obsessing. The only advantage we have is that they don't think we're capable of planning together. They think you're a monster and I'm a fool, and that combination makes us invisible."

"You're not invisible." He turned, and his eyes were human again, gold but focused, seeing me instead of seeing through me. "You walked into that gallery in my mother's dress and drank my brother's wine and made a dowager look away. You're the most visible thing in this palace, Seraphina. And that makes you the most vulnerable."

I felt the truth of it in my chest, a cold weight I'd been carrying since I'd thrown the rose from the window. "Then teach me how to be less vulnerable. You know this court. You know these people. You've watched them for twenty-five years from behind walls they thought were soundproof."

"I watched them." He moved closer, his hand rising to my face, his fingers hovering near my cheek without touching. "I watched them dance and scheme and poison each other, and I learned that court etiquette is just violence wearing prettier clothes. That a smile is a weapon and a curtsy is a surrender, and the only way to survive is to be the one holding the knife."

"Then hold the knife with me."