Chapter 210: How bad do you want it?

EDELINA

I pushed myself to my feet.

For a moment, the conservatory tilted. The sunlight fractured across the glass panes, and I caught the edge of the table until the room settled back into place. I hoped Amaranthine had not noticed. When I looked at her again, she was watching me with an expression I could not quite decipher.

I crossed the short distance between us and perched on the arm of her chair.

"You have been robbed," I whispered.

She drew a careful breath.

"Think about it, Amaranthine. You were promised a place beside the future King. Your family entered into an arrangement with the royal house in good faith, relying on the late King’s word. Now a girl from the dirt has taken your place in Lysander’s affections, and the entire court has decided that her presence is proof of divine favor."

I watched her fingers tighten around the handle of her teacup.

"A girl who cannot even control her temper in a courtyard is now being treated as though the goddess herself placed her at his side. Meanwhile, your father sits in a cell, punished for daring to remind the new King of a promise made before he inherited the crown."

I leaned closer, lowering my voice until the words belonged to us alone.

"You will demand what you are owed. You will stand before the Circle and tell them how your father was wrongfully imprisoned for insisting that the King honor the late King’s decree. You will remind them that the promise was not his to break. It was the King’s, and it is Lysander’s responsibility to carry it forward."

I paused, letting her absorb the weight of it.

"And if he refuses?"

Amaranthine stared at me. I could almost see the pieces arranging themselves in her mind, each finding its place in the argument I had constructed for her.

"He would be disregarding the late King’s wishes," she said slowly.

"Yes."

"And disrespecting his memory."

"Precisely."

Her gaze dropped to her teacup. For a long moment, she said nothing.

Then she looked up at me, and I saw the first real spark of understanding in her eyes.

"If I bring this before the Circle, they would have to consider it."

"They would have to consider the law," I corrected gently. "And of course, enforce it."

"And?"

"And that will leave Lysander with some hard choices to make. Honor the late King’s decree and give you the position you were promised, or publicly defy the very man whose will gave him the throne."

I smiled and brushed a loose strand of hair away from her shoulder.

"That is... brilliant."

"Oh, I know." I patted her hand. "And it works beautifully because no one is a greater saint than a dead man. Trust me, my husband was loved by a great many people."

Amaranthine worried the corner of her lip between her teeth. Doubt moved behind her eyes, flickering across her face before she could smother it.

I waited.

There was little point in rushing a woman toward a decision when she could be persuaded to arrive at it herself. People trusted conclusions they believed they had reached alone. They guarded them, defended them, and rarely stopped to wonder who had first planted the idea in their minds.

"But Alpha Lysander did care about the late King," she said eventually. "He truly did. What if he agrees to the marriage out of respect for him?"

A low chuckle escaped me.

"Then you win. Do you not see, my dear? You win either way. You have nothing to lose."

I shrugged, reaching for my tea before remembering that I had long since lost my appetite.

"Though I doubt that proud fucker will ever bend the knee. I have known him since he was a boy, and defiance has always come to him more naturally than obedience. He is the sort of man who would rather break a thing than allow someone else to dictate how he should use it."

I tipped my head, studying her.

"Did you know he killed his own father?"

Amaranthine choked on a breath.

"Your Majesty!"

"It is true."

"It was Hazel Hughes," she protested quickly. "The demoted Luna. An Omega. Everyone knows that. She was the one accused of killing Wenzel."

"Accused," I repeated, my voice sharpening around the word.

She fell silent.

"That girl could never have ended the life of that bastard Wenzel." I leaned forward, my fingers tightening around the armrest. "It was Lysander. I know it was him."

"How can you be certain?"

I almost laughed at the question.

"Because I have watched that boy grow up, Amaranthine. I know what he is capable of."

I held her gaze for another moment before turning away.

"Of course, the kingdom would sooner believe an Omega capable of murder than consider the possibility that their future King had killed his own father. That is the beauty of a society built on prejudice. You do not need to prove a thing when everyone has already decided whom to blame."

I rose from my chair and drifted toward the glass wall, trailing my fingertips along the broad, waxy leaf of a fern. Beyond the panes, the gardens shimmered beneath the afternoon sun, peaceful enough to make the ugliness of the world feel like a distant rumor.

"The weak resent the strong," I said. "They envy them, fear them, and sometimes, when the opportunity presents itself, they hurt them. We have spent generations teaching ourselves that Omegas are beneath us, that they are too weak to be trusted with anything of consequence. And yet, look around you."

I glanced toward the corner of the conservatory, where an Omega stood beside the door with her eyes fixed obediently on the floor. She had been silent throughout our conversation, but I knew she had heard enough to understand that speaking would be a mistake.

"They prepare our meals. They raise our children. They dress us, clean our rooms, and pour our tea. They are woven into every corner of our lives, and still we insist on treating them as though their existence is an inconvenience."

I looked back at Amaranthine.

"We need them to survive, and we despise them for being necessary. We fear what they might do if given the chance to stand beside us, yet we cannot imagine a kingdom without someone standing beneath us."

My lips curved.

"Tell me, what is a master without slaves?"

Amaranthine had gone very still.

"And what is a god without worshippers?"

The question lingered between us.

I watched her shoulders, the faint tremor in her fingers, the way she held herself so carefully that she seemed afraid even to breathe too deeply. She was beginning to understand that our conversation had moved beyond the matter of her father’s imprisonment. I was asking her to look at the world as it truly was, stripped of the comforting lies people told themselves about virtue, justice, and the rightful exercise of power.

Whether she liked what she saw was another matter.

"Do not disappoint me," I said.

I crossed the room and rested my palm against her shoulder. Her bones felt small and delicate beneath the lavender silk, but she did not shrink away from my touch.

"You must want this, Amaranthine. Not because your father expects it of you. Not because your family has spent years preparing you for it. You must want it with every part of yourself."

"I do."

"Say it again."

She lifted her eyes to mine.

"I do."

"Convince me."

Something shifted in her expression. For the first time since she had entered the conservatory, she seemed to forget her manners, her carefully measured posture, and the tears she had shed over her father.

"I want nothing more than to be Queen," she said. "I have built my entire life around it. I have been trained, groomed, and polished for that position since I was old enough to curtsy. Every lesson, every expectation, every sacrifice my family has made has been in service of that future."

Her fingers curled into the fabric of her dress.

"I know what is expected of me. I know how to behave in court, how to speak to the elders, how to recognize an insult disguised as a compliment, and how to smile at people who would gladly see me ruined. I have spent years learning how to become the woman this kingdom would accept as its Queen."

Her chin rose.

"I must have it."

I studied her for a moment, searching for hesitation and finding none.

"In that regard," I said, "we are alike."

She waited, perhaps expecting me to explain.

"I will destroy myself for my ambitions if I must. I will wager my life, my reputation, and whatever remains of my conscience to achieve what I have set out to do. I have done it before, and I will do it again." I reached out and tilted her chin upward with two fingers. "I will not allow fear to make my decisions for me, and I will not turn away simply because the price has become unpleasant."

I let her go.

"Can you do the same, Lady Amaranthine?"

She did not answer immediately.

The silence stretched between us, and I felt my patience begin to fray. I could almost taste the disappointment before it arrived, bitter at the back of my tongue. I knew that hesitation. I had seen it countless times in the faces of people who wanted power until they understood what obtaining it might demand of them.

They wanted the crown, but not the blood on its jewels. They wanted the throne, but not the enemies who came with it. They wanted the authority to command without ever having to make a decision that would leave them unable to sleep at night.

They always said they were willing.

Until the moment came to prove it.

For one brief, unpleasant instant, I wondered whether Amaranthine would disappoint me in precisely the same way.

Then she smiled.

It was a small, peculiar smile, nothing like the polished expression she had worn when she first entered the room. Her eyes had sharpened, their blue turning cold and bright as glass.

"I do not intend to lose," she said. "And I do not intend to sacrifice anything either."

I raised an eyebrow.

"I beg your pardon?"

"I know what I want, Your Majesty, and I want all of it." She settled back in her chair, her earlier tension giving way to a confidence I had not seen in her before. "I am greedy. I have always been greedy. I want the crown, the power, the position, and everything that comes with them. I want to walk into a room and have people rise because they know exactly who I am. I want the authority to make decisions that cannot be overturned by someone who thinks himself more important than me."

She paused, and her smile widened.

"I want to have my cake and eat him, too."

For the first time that afternoon, I had no immediate response.

Amaranthine held my gaze without a trace of embarrassment.

"I will have everything I want, and I will lose nothing to get it. If there is a way to keep my father alive, claim my place beside Lysander, and come out of this with my ambitions intact, then I will find it. I refuse to believe that the only way to win is to accept a loss before I have even begun to fight."

She tilted her head.

"So perhaps we are not as alike as you thought."

For a moment, the conservatory was silent except for the distant trickle of water from the garden fountain.

I looked at her, really looked at her, and felt something inside me shift.

I had expected desperation. I had expected tears, pleading, perhaps a promise to do whatever I asked if I would only help her save her father. I had expected to find a frightened young woman who could be led by the nose toward whatever future I chose to offer her.

Instead, I had found someone who wanted the same things I did but refused to accept the same limitations.

She did not want to prove how much she could endure for power. She wanted to discover how much she could obtain without paying the price everyone insisted was inevitable.

It was an audacious ambition, perhaps even a foolish one.

But it was an ambition all the same.

And I had always preferred ambition to obedience.

A smile slowly spread across my face, genuine enough to surprise me.

"Perhaps not," I conceded.

I reached for my teacup and lifted it toward her in a small, informal toast.

"But that, my dear, is more than enough."