Chapter 363 Wolf Hearing Didn’t Ask Permission

TRISTAN’S QUARTERS

Lucian’s footsteps paused outside their door, briefing scroll in hand. Wolf hearing didn’t ask permission. He heard enough. He left before he heard more.

The briefing could wait. The words behind that door could not, and they weren’t his to hear, and hearing them anyway was a punishment his loyalty had earned and his heart hadn’t.

“You can’t keep doing this, Tristan.”

River was sitting on a chair by the fire.

“Doing what?”

“Pulling things from her. The public corrections. Every time you take something from Vesper, every time you fight the fated tie, I feel it.”

He turned. “Feel what?”

“Darkness.” She said it quietly. The way she said things that scared her. “Inside you. Growing. Every time you reject her, every time you force the bond backward, something in you gets darker. I can sense it, Tristan. It’s cold. It wasn’t there before.”

His jaw tightened. “She disrespected you in front of the entire court.”

“And you corrected it. And I love you for it. And it cost you something you’re not telling me about.” She held his gaze. “I need you to try. Whatever the elders suggested about managing the tie, whatever the priestess recommended, I need you to try it. Because I would rather sit three rows back for the rest of my life than watch the darkness eat you alive.”

He crossed the room. Knelt in front of her. Took both her hands.

“There is no version of any morning, in any life, where I wake up and do not think of you first.” His voice was raw. Stripped of the prince and the commander and the wit he wore over everything. “You are the first thought I have ever had that I did not choose. You were there before I opened my eyes, every day, since I was twelve years old. The darkness can have whatever it wants from me, River. It cannot have that.”

Her chin trembled. The thing it did.

“No, Tristan. I need you to actually try. Stop destroying yourself and give your fated tie an actual chance. Please, do it for me.”

His forehead dropped to their joined hands. He stayed there. Breathing. Holding on.

“I’ll try,” he said. “I will try. But I need you to understand that trying means tolerating a woman who isn’t you. Every second of that tolerance will be the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”

✦✦✦

The torches along the colonnade shifted from gold to pale pink as River walked past, her magic bleeding into the architecture without her permission.

Starlight filtered through the open ceiling of the assembly hall, bending around the pillars in angles.

Vesper sat in the chair beside Tristan’s. The chair that had been River’s. The arrangement was protocol, mandated by the elders as part of the fated tie formalization, and the mandate was correct, and the correctness was a weapon Vesper wielded with the precision of a woman who understood that the most devastating attacks are the ones sanctioned by authority.

River sat three rows back. Her hands were in her lap. Her back was straight. Her eyes were on the floor.

Tristan entered the room four minutes late, which was unusual, because Tristan Aelindor had never been late to anything in his life and treated punctuality as a personality trait.

He scanned the room, then stopped walking.

The room noticed. Three hundred faces tracked the prince as he stood in the center aisle, looking at the chair beside his throne, then at the woman sitting in it, then at the woman three rows back who was pretending the floor was the most fascinating surface in the kingdom.

“Move,” Tristan said to Vesper.

Vesper’s chin lifted. “The elders mandated this arrangement. I am within my rights to—”

“Move, or I will have the chair moved with you in it. Those are the options. Pick the one that preserves your dignity. You have three seconds.”

“The protocol clearly states—”

“Two.”

Vesper stood. The standing was slow, deliberate, every inch of the rise calibrated to communicate that she was choosing to leave rather than being forced. Nobody in the room believed the performance, but nobody in the room interrupted it either, because the alternative was watching the prince count to one, and no one wanted to find out what one looked like.

She relocated to a seat at the far edge of the front row. The seat was beside an elder, who received her the way a man receives a weather event: with resignation and zero enthusiasm.

Tristan turned towards the third row.

“River.”

She looked up. Her pink eyes found his, and the expression on her face was the specific blend of gratitude and mortification that only occurred when someone you loved made a public scene on your behalf that you had not requested and could not stop.

“Come sit with me.”

“Oh no, I’m fine here. It’s really—”

“River.”

“It’s alright, Tristan. The protocol says—”

“I don’t give a damn what the protocol says. That chair is yours. It has always been yours. Come sit in it.”

“People are staring.”

“People have been staring since I walked in. They will continue to stare regardless of where you sit. The difference is whether they stare at you beside me or three rows away from me, and I have made my preference clear.”

“Tristan, this is unnecessary—”

“River Aelindor.” He said her full name with the weight of a man who had given her half of it and intended to remind the room. “Walk down here and sit beside me, or I will walk up there and carry you.”

She stared at him. He stared back. The standoff lasted four seconds, which was three seconds longer than most standoffs with Tristan lasted because most people didn’t have the spine to hold past one.

River stood, face flushed.

From the gallery, Lucian watched her walk to the right chair and exhaled for the first time since he’d seen her in the wrong one. He left before she sat down. He didn’t need to see the hand squeeze. He already knew it was coming.

Across the front row, Vesper was staring straight ahead with the rigid posture of a woman composing a formal complaint she would never be permitted to file.

Atlas, at the center of the dais, looked at the seating arrangement. At Vesper in the wrong chair. At River in the right one. At his son, who had walked into a protocol he disagreed with and rewritten it in under sixty seconds without raising his voice above conversational.

He picked up his gavel.

“Shall we begin?”

That night, the dark veins returned. Two thin lines. The emotional distance his anger had created was enough to trigger the corruption’s return.

He didn’t tell anyone, but River knew.