Chapter 716: The Goddess Owes Me A Correction

While a queen was establishing herself at a continental war council, the Alpha King she was standing in for was viewing his first life as a spectator. He had thought the situation was cosmically fucked. What he didn’t know was that the shitshow of a matebond reveal was only the goddamn warm-up and this was where the real fun was about to begin.

The first life wasn’t done with him.

???

TWENTY THOUSAND YEARS AGO - THE FIRST FAE KINGDOM - AELINDRIS PALACE

The door to King Atlas’s study opened, and the corridor outside was already occupied.

The Fae prince, Tristan Aelindor stood in the center of the marble hallway with his arms at his sides and his green eyes aimed at the two people walking out of his father’s study like a man who had been waiting for this exact moment and had used the waiting to build a fury so tall it touched the ceiling.

The dark veins on his neck were visible above his collar, branching upward towards his jaw in thin black lines that pulsed with a rhythm Lucian could track from six feet away. His skin was paler than it had been yesterday, the flush of a man whose body was at war with itself and whose body was losing ground by the hour.

He looked at Lucian first. Then at River. Then at the space between them, which was three feet and shrinking, and the shrinking was evidence, and the evidence was enough.

"Going somewhere?" Tristan asked, and the question was a blade wearing a question mark’s clothing.

Lucian stepped forward because stepping forward was what Lucian did when the air in a room got heavy enough to crush the people standing in it.

"Tristan, we already discussed this."

"You discussed it," Tristan corrected. "You discussed it at me on a terrace while my veins were turning black, and then you went to my father, and now you’re walking out of his study with my wife."

Fin pressed his back against the corridor wall and watched two brothers stand on opposite sides of a hallway that was wide enough for a parade and too narrow for the conversation happening inside it.

"Tristan, can I speak with you alone?" River asked softly, her pink eyes red from crying. "Please."

Lucian’s jaw tightened. Through the matebond, her request carried the emotional signature of a woman who knew what she was about to do and was terrified of doing it and was going to do it anyway because the doing was for him and the for him had always been enough.

Tristan looked at Lucian. The look said leave and the leaving isn’t optional.

Lucian held River’s eyes for one second. Through the matebond, he felt her resolve steady itself against the trembling underneath, the way a bridge steadies against a current that was trying to take it. He gave her the smallest nod, turned, and walked down the corridor.

He stopped at the corner. Far enough to honor her request. Close enough for wolf hearing to do what wolf hearing always did, which was operate without a conscience and deliver without a filter.

???

THE ALCOVE

River led Tristan into a recessed alcove off the main corridor.

White marble walls curved inward, and a window faced the sea, and the sea was doing the thing the sea always did during emotional destruction, which was existing peacefully and making the destruction feel lonelier by comparison.

Tristan stood with his arms crossed and his back against the opposite wall and his face wearing the expression of a prince who had decided this conversation was an ambush and was defending himself accordingly.

"Talk," he ordered, with his arms crossed.

River wiped her eyes with the heel of her hand. "I need you to hear something, and I need you to hear all of it before you respond."

"Oh, wonderful. A structured emotional assault. Let me brace myself."

"Tristan."

"I’m braced. Go ahead."

She took a breath so deep it moved her shoulders. "I am leaving because staying is killing you. Every day I am in this palace, every morning you see me, every time you choose me over the fated tie, the corruption gets worse. The healers confirmed it. Your father confirmed it. You already know it, even if you refuse to say it out loud. This is your life Tristan."

"My life is this palace and that throne and the woman standing in front of me who I chose before any goddess had a goddamn opinion on the matter."

River’s chin trembled. She pressed her lips together and held them until the trembling stopped, and the holding was a skill she had been practicing since she was six and was getting worse at instead of better because the things making her chin tremble were getting heavier instead of lighter.

"I am making your fated tie harder to honor. My presence here, my proximity, every time you fight for me, it feeds the corruption. I am so sorry, Tristan." Her voice cracked in the center of his name like a bone that had been carrying too much weight and had finally found the angle where the weight exceeded the architecture. "I am so sorry that I cannot fix this for you."

Tristan’s arms uncrossed. The uncrossing was involuntary, the reflexive response of a body whose defensive posture was being dissolved by the sound of a woman apologizing for something she had zero responsibility for and maximum grief about.

"Baby, I will find a way to break it." He stepped towards her. His green eyes, dimmer than they should have been, carried a conviction that was either beautiful or delusional and might have been both. "I will tear that fated tie apart with my bare hands if I have to. Give me time. Give me a chance. I will find someone a priestess who can sever this without the cost, and I will bring her to you on my knees."

"Tristan." She was crying now, the tears falling without permission. "It’s the Goddess’s will that you honor this. The fated tie exists because the divine chose it, and fighting it is the thing that’s destroying you. I have watched you deteriorate. Every day, the veins climb higher. Every day, there is less green in your eyes. I cannot stay here and watch the man I love disappear because he’s too stubborn to accept that the Goddess decided something he hates."

"The Goddess decided wrong."

"The Goddess doesn’t make mistakes, Tristan."

"Then I’m the first correction she owes."