The healing mark catches the moonlight wrong, too pink at the edges, too new, and once I see it I can’t unsee it.
“That mark,” I say slowly, my voice barely above a whisper.
“You said the rebellion branded you decades ago.”
My aunt’s expression doesn’t change, but something behind her eyes goes very still, the particular stillness of someone recalculating a plan in real time.
“Decades ago,” she agrees.
“This is a second one.
Fresher wounds heal faster when there’s urgency behind them.”
“Convenient,” Queen Maerwen says dryly, not moving from where she stands near the shattered window, gold ring still resting in her open palm.
“An urgent need to reopen old scars, precisely when your niece happens to be holding the one artifact capable of proving whose blood actually runs the fifth house.”
“I don’t need to prove anything to you,” my aunt says, and for the first time her calm cracks, just slightly, just enough that I catch the flash of something underneath.
Not fear exactly.
Impatience.
“I’ve spent twenty years protecting what’s left of my sister’s legacy while you sat on a throne built from her silence.”
“I sat on a throne,” the Queen says, “trying to keep her daughter alive long enough to inherit it.
Something you seem remarkably uninterested in helping with, despite your very moving performance in that tunnel.”
The air in the chapel goes taut, thin as wire.
“What performance?” I ask, looking between them.
“What is she talking about?”
My aunt’s jaw tightens.
“She’s trying to turn you against me before you’ve heard the whole truth.”
“Then tell me the whole truth,” I say, and my voice comes out sharper than I mean it to, all the fear and confusion of the last hour finally curdling into something closer to anger.
“Because right now I have two women standing in a broken chapel, both claiming to have known my mother, both claiming to want to protect me, and neither of you has told me a single thing that adds up.”
Silence.
Jodan shifts closer to my side, close enough that I feel the warmth of him even through the chill radiating off the shattered window.
“She’s right,” he says quietly.
“Enough riddles.
Someone start explaining, or we leave, and you can settle whatever this is without her caught in the middle of it.”
My aunt’s gaze flicks to him, assessing, then back to me.
“Fine,” she says.
“You want the truth.
Your mother wasn’t just a True Luna, April.
She was heir to the fifth house, the branch of the royal bloodline the Council erased from every record the day she died.
That ring in your hand isn’t a keepsake.
It’s a claim.
Whoever wears it and survives the moon’s judgment becomes the rightful heir to a crown this kingdom has spent twenty years pretending never existed.”
“And you,” the Queen says, voice cutting cold and clean through the chapel, “have spent those same twenty years trying to make sure that claim died with her.”
“That’s not true.”
“Isn’t it.” The Queen finally moves, crossing the broken tiles toward us, gold ring catching moonlight with every step.
“You didn’t come to that tunnel to protect April.
You came to retrieve the ring before anyone else could.
The only reason she’s still holding it is because your accomplices moved faster than you could stop them, and Selene’s little rescue upended your timeline before you could finish the theft cleanly.”
My stomach drops.
“Were you trying to take it from me?”
For a long moment, she says nothing.
“I was trying,” she says finally, quietly, “to keep it out of the hands of people who would use you as a weapon rather than let you live as a person.
That ring doesn’t just prove your bloodline, April.
It activates it.
The moment you wear it under a full moon, the fifth house’s claim to the throne reawakens completely, publicly, permanently.
Every faction in this kingdom, the Council, the rebellion, the other royal houses, will spend the rest of your life trying to control you, kill you, or use you as a figurehead for a war none of them actually care about winning cleanly.
I wanted to take the choice away from you because I didn’t trust you to survive making it yourself.”
“That’s not protection,” Riven growls from the doorway, where he and Lucien have finally caught up, breathless, blood-streaked, having clearly fought their way clear of whatever chaos we left behind in the cell.
“That’s just a different cage.”
“Perhaps,” my aunt says.
“But it’s a cage that keeps her breathing.”
“She doesn’t need you to choose her cage for her,” Eryx says, moving to stand beside me, his voice steady even though I can feel the tension humming through the bond, every one of them braced for this conversation to turn violent at any second.
“She’s done enough of that tonight already, being chained to choices other people made in the dark.”
The Queen studies me for a long moment, something unreadable passing behind her silver eyes.
“There is a way to know the truth of all this without relying on anyone’s testimony,” she says finally.
“The rings answer to blood, not words.
Wear mine and hers together, April, under this moonlight, and they will show you exactly what your mother’s bloodline was, and exactly what waits for you if you claim it.”
“That’s insane,” Lucien says immediately.
“You don’t know what that kind of exposure does to an unstable bond.
She hasn’t even survived one royal trial yet, and you want her to trigger a second one in a ruined chapel with half the Council hunting her through the tunnels below us?”
“I know precisely what it does,” the Queen says.
“I watched it happen to her mother, in this very room, twenty years ago.”
The words land like a blow.
My knees go weak, and this time it isn’t the bond pulling at me.
It’s grief, plain and sudden and entirely mine.
“This is where she—” I can’t finish the sentence.
“Yes,” the Queen says, gentler now, though gentleness sits strangely on her, like a language she’s had to relearn.
“This chapel was sealed the same night she died.
I imagine that’s no accident, that your feet carried you here tonight of all places.
Some bonds outlive the people who first forged them.”
My aunt’s expression has gone pale, the calculating mask finally slipping to reveal something raw underneath.
“Don’t do this to her,” she says quietly.
“Not here.
Not tonight.”
“She has the right to know,” the Queen replies. Follow the newest chapters on g.com.
“As you were so quick to remind everyone in that tunnel.”
I look down at the ring in my palm, silver and split-crescent and warm now, warmer than it should be against my skin, like it’s been waiting all night for exactly this moment.
My hands are shaking, but underneath the fear, something steadier is rising too, something that feels less like panic and more like resolve.
“Give me the other ring,” I say.
“April—” Jodan starts.
“I need to know,” I say, cutting him off, my voice steadier than I feel.
“I’ve spent this entire night being told half-truths by everyone who claims to love my mother.
I’m done being handed pieces.
I want the whole picture, even if it breaks something in me to see it.”
The Queen crosses the remaining distance and places the gold ring in my other palm without hesitation.
The moment both rings touch my skin at once, the moonlight pouring through the shattered window seems to bend, gathering itself into a single bright column directly above me, and the split-crescent symbols carved into my palm’s ring and the queen’s unbroken moon symbol begin to glow, faint at first, then blinding.
The chamber fills with light.
I hear Riven shout something.
I hear Eryx call my name.
I feel Jodan’s hand close around my shoulder like he means to pull me back from whatever’s happening, but it’s already too late, the light has already closed around me like a fist, and for one suspended, silent second, I see her.
My mother.
Standing exactly where I’m standing, in this exact chapel, twenty years ago, wearing both rings, surrounded by the same blinding light, and beside her, close enough to touch, close enough that her hand rests possessively on my mother’s shoulder, stands a face I recognize instantly.
Not my aunt.
Not the Queen.
Selene’s mother, unmistakable despite the twenty years between then and now, the same pale hair, the same sharp chin I’ve seen echoed in Selene’s face a hundred times without ever once suspecting what it might mean.
The vision shatters as fast as it formed, and I stumble back into Eryx’s waiting arms, gasping, the rings burning hot enough now to leave marks on my palms.
“What did you see?” the Queen demands, urgency finally cracking through her composure for the first time all night.
I can barely get the words out.
“Selene’s mother,” I whisper.
“She was there.
The night my mother died.
She was there.”
Behind me, my aunt goes utterly silent, and when I turn to look at her, the color has drained completely from her face.
“That’s not possible,” she says, but her voice shakes on every word.
“She’s been dead for years.
I attended her funeral myself.”
“Did you,” the Queen says softly, echoing the exact question my aunt asked me in the tunnel, “or did you only attend what they wanted you to see?”