I sat on the cold obsidian floor, the silence of the library pressing against my skin like a physical weight. I had spent my entire life performing for the Council, curating a version of myself that wouldn’t get me locked in a cell or used as a battery. But here, in the vacuum created by Seth’s presence, the performance felt thin—brittle, useless, and utterly exhausting.
“You want the analysis?” I asked, my voice barely a thread of sound in the cavernous room. “Fine. It’s not just a leak, Seth. It’s a graveyard.”
I didn’t give him the polished, royal version of my life. I didn’t frame it for the Queen or sanitize it for my brother’s sake. I told him about the seventeen years of suppression potions, the crushing weight of being a secret tucked away on Earth, and the mundane, soul-killing
