Chapter 370 Consort Title Within The Year (Over Her Dead Body)
The words landed on Agnes’s chest and stayed there, each one heavier than the last, the sentence constructing itself in her mind with the slow, deliberate precision of a building being erected on a foundation she hadn’t known existed.
Her jaw dropped.
“You cannot be serious.”
“Oh, I am very serious.” Reginald’s hands were still folded. His voice was still level. The calm of a man who had spent months engineering this outcome and was delivering the final result with the composure of a diplomat presenting terms. “The Emperor is married. His wife holds the formal title. But the Fae monarchy has a long tradition of consorts, and the consort title carries political weight that rivals the queen’s in practice if the consort is strategic enough to leverage it.”
He paused. Let the architecture settle.
“You will play nice with his wife. You will learn the court. You will make yourself indispensable. If things go well, and they will, because you will make sure of it, the consort title follows. Within the year.”
Agnes stared at her father. The stare was long, empty, the particular vacancy of a woman whose mind was processing a revelation so enormous that her face had run out of expressions and was defaulting to blank.
“I need eyes and ears in Orosia, Agnes. They are vital for our survival in the invasion that is coming. The Fae Emperor needs a son who is part Fae, part wolf. A hybrid heir who can legitimize his claim over the wolf territories he intends to conquer. You come from an Alpha bloodline and you have the training to navigate court politics.” His voice dropped half a register. “You will be the most important person on two continents. This is the assignment you were built for.”
“I refuse.”
The words came out clean. No calculation. No half-truth. No tactical positioning. The raw, unfiltered response of a woman whose body had just rejected a future so completely that the rejection bypassed every layer of training between her instincts and her mouth.
Reginald’s hand moved.
The backhand was fast, practiced, the specific economy of motion that belonged to a man who had struck this face before and knew the angles. The impact connected with her left cheek and snapped her head sideways, the chain on her wrists going taut as her body followed the momentum, and the sound of the contact echoed off the study walls with the flat, final quality of a sentence being punctuated.
Agnes’s lip split. Blood welled, tracking down her chin in a thin line that caught the window light and held it.
She turned her head back slowly. The motion was controlled. Her eyes found her father’s face, and what lived in them was new, something Reginald had never seen from his daughter because he had spent twenty years making sure it never had a reason to surface.
Fury. Genuine, personal, carrying the specific heat of a woman who had been struck by the man who built her and was deciding, in real time, that the man who built her had just lost the right to claim credit for the result.
“You will never speak to me that way, daughter.” Reginald’s voice was even, unaffected, the voice of a man who had delivered the correction and considered the matter closed. “Ever. I have tolerated sentiment. I have tolerated delay. I have tolerated a matebond that I allowed to continue long past its operational usefulness. My tolerance has a floor, and you have just found it.”
He straightened in his chair.
“If you refuse the Emperor’s arrangement, they will use compulsion magic. The Fae variety. It removes free will entirely. You become a vessel, Agnes. A body that follows instructions without the consciousness to deviate from them. You will go to Orosia regardless. The only question is whether you go as my daughter or as a puppet, and the puppet version makes you useless to me, which makes you useless to House Viremont, which makes you disposable.”
Agnes swallowed. The swallow carried blood from her split lip, and the taste of it, copper and salt, settled on her tongue like a reminder of every time compliance had been beaten into her and she had swallowed that too.
“Are you forgetting,” she said, and her voice was steady in a way that the blood on her chin made devastating, “that I already have a mate? A mate who is an Alpha King? A mate who is probably tearing his castle apart looking for me right now?”
Reginald Viremont looked at his daughter. The look lasted three seconds. In those three seconds, the man who had designed Agnes’s entire life, who had trained her and placed her and extracted her and struck her and considered all of it parenting, allowed something to surface on his face that was worse than anger and worse than indifference: satisfaction.
“Oh, I am counting on that.”
He stood. His hands went behind his back. He walked to the door without urgency, without looking at her, without offering the courtesy of a backward glance, because Reginald Viremont had never once looked back at a decision he had already made.
The door closed. The lock turned. His footsteps faded down the corridor with the measured cadence of a man who believed the conversation was over.
Agnes sat in the silver chair in the center of her father’s study, her wrists burning, her lip bleeding, her wolf muffled behind a wall of metal and pain, and the matebond to Garrett Darkhowler whispering in her chest like a heartbeat she was afraid to lose.
Agnes waited. Ten seconds. Twenty. Long enough to confirm the footsteps were gone and the corridor was empty and the man who had just backhanded his pregnant daughter had left her alone in a room full of his things.
She glanced down at the place below her ribs where something tiny was growing carrying half of Garrett and half of her. A secret that no one knew about including her father.
“No. I’m not going to let anything happen to you,” she told it.
She had to get out.