Julian’s office was so quiet you could hear the damp wood of the desk warping under the humidity.
He kept his elbows planted on the scarred surface, his chin resting on his knuckles as his amber eyes tracked my every movement.
The initial shock of my corporate breakdown had faded, replaced by a dark, speculative amusement.
“Terms,” I repeated, pulling a rusty iron chair out from the corner and sitting down without being asked.
I crossed one leg over the other, smoothing the rough fabric of my canvas trousers.
“Excellent.
I prefer clear deliverables.
What is your asking price, Julian?”
“Protection,” Julian said bluntly.
He leaned back, the chair groaning in protest.
“And legitimacy.
My people are tired of living like rats in a flooded cellar.
Every month, the High Council increases the grain tax on the Silt District, and every month, more of our kids get hauled off to the labor camps because their parents can’t pay.
We want the tax codes repealed, the conscription quotas wiped, and official recognition as a sovereign merchant sector.”
I ran a quick mental spreadsheet on his demands.
*Repealing the grain tax would cut royal revenue by twelve percent in the short term, but it would instantly stabilize the lower-tier labor market.
Conscription quotas were a waste of human capital anyway.
Drafting starving peasants into the army just created inefficient, low-yield infantry.*
“Feasible,” I noted casually.
“But a sovereign merchant sector requires legal infrastructure.
You can’t just stop paying taxes and call it a business strategy.
You need a regulated trade agreement with the crown.”
Julian let out a sharp, barking laugh, his eyes flashing with that chaotic fire that made him look completely different from Kaelen.
“A trade agreement?
Listen to you.
You talk about a revolution like it’s a supply-chain issue.” He leaned forward again, his gaze dropping to my lips for a split second before snapping back to my eyes.
“But here’s the real bottleneck, Your Majesty.
Even if I agree to hold off on burning the upper levels down, how do I know you won’t just sell us out to the High Council the second you walk out of here?
Kaelen might trust you, but I don’t buy into the asset-management routine.”
“You don’t have to trust my character, Julian.
You just have to trust my math,” I said, leaning in so our faces were barely a foot apart.
“If I betray you, you leak the existence of those refined crest stones.
The High Council panics, deploys the military, and destroys the Silt District.
In that scenario, I lose my entire secondary workforce, my capital city becomes a war zone, and my stock value, spiritually speaking…drops to zero.
Betraying you is a net-negative transaction for me.
I don’t do bad business.”
Julian stared at me, completely speechless for the second time tonight.
He looked utterly bewildered, trapped somewhere between wanting to argue with my insane terminology and being hopelessly fascinated by the sheer confidence radiating off me.
“She’s…
something else,” Julian muttered, glancing up at his brother. Visit g.com for the full chapter.
Kaelen didn’t look amused.
He was still standing by the door like a dark monolith, his jaw clenched so tight a muscle was twitching in his cheek.
He hadn’t taken his eyes off Julian since we entered the room, his hand still resting heavily on the pommel of his sword.
“The Queen has given you a logical framework, Julian,” Kaelen said, his voice dropping into that low, dangerous register.
“Take the deal.
It’s the only way your people survive the winter.”
Julian’s eyes darted between the two of us, a strange, knowing smirk suddenly tugging at the corner of his mouth.
“You’re awfully protective tonight, Commander.
More than usual.
Is there something on the ledger you haven’t told me about?”
“Julian,” Kaelen warned, the air in the room turning noticeably heavier.
The temperature seemed to dip by a few degrees, a subtle echo of the pressure from the aqueducts.
“Alright, alright, don’t flex the catalyst,” Julian held up his hands mockingly, though a flicker of genuine caution crossed his face.
He turned back to me, his expression turning serious.
“Fine.
We have a conceptual agreement.
But if we’re going to take down the High Council’s monopoly, we need to strike their primary revenue stream.
Lord Silas is hosting a private auction at the obsidian docks in three days.
He’s selling off a massive shipment of illegal military-grade iron—iron he stole from the royal foundries by falsifying the shipping manifests.”
My corporate brain clicked.
Inventory fraud.
Silas was skimming assets off the top and liquidating them on the black market to fund his private security force.
“We intercept the shipment,” I concluded seamlessly.
“We catch him in a clear case of asset misappropriation, seize the inventory, and use the leverage to force his resignation from the council.”
“Exactly,” Julian said, his amber eyes glittering with excitement.
“My people will handle the muscle on the docks, but we need the royal clearance codes to get past the harbor gates without triggering the alarm bells.
Can you get them?”
“Consider it done,” I said, standing up and brushing off my cloak.
“I’ll run an internal audit on the harbor authority’s ledger tomorrow morning and extract the encryption keys.”
Julian stood up too, walking around the desk.
He stopped just a little too close to me, his eyes running over my face with an unvarnished, intense admiration.
“I have to admit, Your Majesty…
when Kaelen told me he was bringing the hollow queen to the slums, I expected a liability.
But you?
You’re the most dangerous investment I’ve ever made.”
He reached out, his fingers brushing against the edge of my hood as if he wanted to pull it down completely.
Before his fingers could even make contact, Kaelen moved.
With a speed that didn’t make any sense for a man his size, Kaelen stepped between us, his large hand clamping around Julian’s wrist mid-air.
A visible wave of raw, oppressive gravity rippled through the tiny office, causing the loose papers on the desk to violently flatten against the wood.
The glass inkwell on the desk cracked with a sharp *snap*.
Julian gasped, his knees buckling slightly under the sudden, crushing weight of the air, but he kept his eyes locked on his brother, a painful, triumphant grin breaking through his teeth.
“Let go,” Kaelen commanded, his voice a low, terrifying vibration that sounded less like a guard and more like a deity issuing a sentence.
His golden eyes were flaring with a bright, blinding light.
“Kaelen, stop,” I called out, my voice sharp and authoritative.
The moment I spoke, that strange, electric warmth flared violently behind my ribs again.
It wasn’t a trickle this time—it was a raging current.
For a fraction of a second, my vision went completely white, overlaid with a massive cascade of spinning, golden equations and risk metrics that seemed to stream directly out of Kaelen’s body.
My chest burned as if I had swallowed liquid fire, the energy inside me perfectly mimicking the exact frequency of Kaelen’s gravity field.
I gasped, stumbling backward against the wall, clutching my heart as the vision shattered and snapped back to normal.
The crushing pressure in the room vanished instantly.
Kaelen let go of Julian’s wrist, spinning around to face me with a look of absolute terror on his face.
He was pale, sweating profusely, his hands shaking as he reached out toward me.
“Evangeline!” Kaelen breathed, his voice breaking.
“Are you—”
“I’m fine,” I cut him off, my voice trembling slightly as I forced myself to stand upright.
I took a deep, shaky breath, my analytical mind frantically trying to process the data point I had just experienced.
*That wasn’t an adrenaline spike.
That was a resonance.
My body just reacted to his magic.*
I looked at Kaelen, whose eyes were wide with a desperate, silent plea, begging me not to ask questions in front of his brother.
Then I looked at Julian, who was nursing his bruised wrist, his amber eyes darting between the two of us with a look of profound, dangerous calculation.
He had noticed the reaction.
He had seen the resonance.
The audit was over, but the internal risk assessment had just become infinitely more complicated.
“We have our timeline,” I said, forcing my voice into a cold, flat neutrality as I pulled my hood completely over my face, hiding my pale features.
“Three days until the docks.
Let’s go, Kaelen.
We have a lot of data to process.”
Without waiting for a response, I turned on my heel and walked out of the suffocating office, my boots counting out a steady pace against the creaking floorboards to hide the fact that my knees were still trembling.
Kaelen fell into step exactly two paces behind me, his massive, silent presence radiating a thick, agonizing wave of tension as we stepped back out into the greasy, freezing fog of the Silt District.
But I wasn’t thinking about the harbor anymore; my mind was frantically spinning over the terrifying thing that had just happened inside my chest.
My heart still burned from the exact moment my own body had violently reacted to his gravity power, pulling and twisting as if his magic were directly connected to my own soul.
The logic didn’t make any sense.
A supposedly hollow queen with no magic at all shouldn’t be able to feel or mimic someone else’s power like that.
I wasn’t just reacting to a dangerous street drug; I was reacting directly to him, and that single, impossible moment changed everything I thought I knew about who I really was.