Chapter 346 Cage Or Kill. Your Choice.
Tristan watched them go. His chest was a war.
Every instinct in his body screamed at him to follow her, to find her, to pull her into his arms and press his mouth against her hair and tell her that every elder in this room could burn and he would still choose her.
He stayed.
Because following her meant abandoning the fight, and abandoning the fight meant the elders would decide in his absence, and their decision would be the one he was standing here to prevent. His father would hold her. His father would say the right things. Tristan needed to end this.
“I will say this once more,” Tristan said, and his voice had changed. The pleading was gone. The arguments were gone. What remained was the voice of a prince who had stopped asking and started informing. “I am taking one wife. She is River. We have been bonded in every way that matters. I will never take a second.”
“Your Highness—”
“We abandoned the practice of multiple bondings centuries ago. I understand that every elder at this table remembers those centuries personally, but for the rest of us, the practice is dead. Do try to keep pace.”
Elder Maren’s eyes narrowed. “How dare you imply—”
“That you’re old?” Tristan finished. “That is the word you are looking for, and yes, I am using it. You are old. Your traditions are older. Your suggestion that I take a second wife is the oldest thing in this room, and I include the furniture.” He stepped closer to the table. “I am asking for the Severing Ceremony. Grant it. Vesper Willow can marry a man who wants her. I certainly do not qualify.”
The eldest priestess rose.
She had been seated at the far end of the crescent, separate from the elders, her silence carrying the particular weight of a woman whose authority came from the divine rather than the political. Her robes were white. Her eyes were silver. Her voice, when it came, carried a resonance that filled the chamber without effort.
“It is against the will of the Moon Goddess,” she said. “The fated bond is a sacred gift. Severing it is an act of defiance against the divine order. I am sorry, Tristan. Deeply. But this council cannot grant what you are asking.”
The words landed across Tristan’s shoulders and stayed there.
“Then you are sentencing that woman to a life in the dungeons,” Tristan said. “Where she cannot harm herself and where she remains away from me and away from my wife. I will keep her there as long as it takes.”
Gavriel watched Tristan redirect the argument in real time, watched him take the council’s refusal and hand it back to them with consequences attached. You won’t free me? Fine. Then you own what I do next. The technique was Atlas. The fury was Tristan. The combination was devastating.
“You would do that to your fated tie?” Elder Maren asked, and for the first time his voice carried genuine shock rather than political calculation.
“Funny you say that.” Tristan’s mouth curved into something that was closer to a blade than a smile. “I am doing it now. As we speak. She is in the lower cells, under guard, behind wards. The arrangement began this morning.”
The chamber erupted. Two elders exchanged looks that carried the weight of men realizing the prince had stopped negotiating three sentences ago.
Gavriel wanted to clap for Tristan. Because of course he had already done it. Of course the prince hadn’t waited for permission. Of course he had walked into this council with the woman already in a cell, the decision already made, the argument already won before it started. He was presenting the elders with a fait accompli and daring them to undo it.
“Her pain will darken your soul,” Elder Vareth said. “The longer you keep her caged and rejected, the deeper the corruption will reach. We will allow many things, Your Highness, but we will not allow you to destroy yourself.”
“Then I will sentence her to die.” Tristan said it the way he said everything that mattered: without hesitation, without flinching, with the complete and total conviction of a man who had arrived at the end of his options and was choosing the one the room feared most. “Execute her. End the tie permanently. The bond dies with her.”
The silence that followed had a temperature. Cold. The particular cold of a chamber full of ancient Fae hearing a prince announce his willingness to execute his fated tie and recognizing, on every face, that he meant it.
“You would sentence her to die? The woman you are fated to. A gift from the Moon Goddess. Your perfect match, body and soul.” The priestess’s voice was quiet. Horrified.
“Yes,” Tristan answered. Zero pause. Zero negotiation. Zero of the hesitation that the elders were searching his face for and failing to find.
Elder Maren exhaled. The exhale was long, measured, the breath of a man recalculating his position. “Tristan. Listen to me. We will concede that you do not need to marry her. We will withdraw the second wife suggestion. But confining her the way you are, rejecting the bond entirely, it will only hurt you in the long run. Killing your fated tie is against the laws of nature among all Fae kind.”
Laws of nature. Gavriel stared at the elder who said it and felt a rage so clean it burned white. Laws of nature. As though the matebond were a law and not a leash. As though the Moon Goddess were a legislator and not a jailer. As though a man who had loved a woman since he was ten years old and had been handed a different woman by a deity who didn’t ask was violating nature by choosing the love over the assignment.
The laws of nature had given Tristan Aelindor a fated tie to a woman with dark magic who crashed his wedding. The laws of nature had given Gavriel Sterling a fated tie to a woman who assaulted his best friend.
And both men, thousands of years apart in the same soul, had arrived at the same conclusion: nature’s laws were goddamn wrong on this one.