Chapter 9: Stolen Valkyrie
The watchtower loomed against the gray morning sky like a broken tooth, its stones weathered and pitted from centuries of coastal storms. Violet's boots crunched on frostbitten grass as she followed Evander up the winding path, Cassian close behind. Neither king spoke. Their silence had weight—something coiled and dangerous, waiting to strike.
The smell hit her first.
Iron and rot. The sickly sweetness of nightlock, cloying and wrong, tangled with something acrid that burned her nostrils. Wolfbane. Lots of it. Enough to kill a shifter twice over.
"Stay behind me," Evander said, his voice low.
"I'm not a child."
"You're a witch." He glanced back, eyes hard. "This was meant for our kind. Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing."
The tower door hung open, wrenched from its hinges. Inside, three bodies lay in a grotesque tableau—sprawled across the stone floor like discarded dolls. Two men. One woman. Their skin had gone the color of old parchment, mottled with black veins that spidered outward from their chests, pulsing with a sickly silver luminescence.
Violet's stomach lurched.
She'd seen death before. Three centuries of it, in various forms. But this—this was deliberate. Cruel. The kind of death designed to send a message.
Cassian moved past her, crouching beside the nearest body. A man, maybe forty in appearance, his face frozen in an expression of agony. His hands were curled into claws, as if he'd tried to tear something from his own chest.
"Lightning," Cassian murmured. "That's what it looks like."
"It's not lightning." Violet knelt on the opposite side, her skirts pooling in the dust. She didn't touch the body—not yet—but she let her senses unfurl, reaching toward the residue of magic that clung to the corpse like oil on water. "There's a spell woven into the poison. A curse. It's meant to look like a natural death, but it's not."
Evander stood at the window, his back to them, shoulders rigid.
"The message," he said.
"On the wall." Cassian jerked his chin toward the far side of the tower.
Someone had scrawled words in what looked like dried blood. The letters were jagged, erratic, as if written in haste or fury.
Two kings. Two packs. One rotting bond. The Thornhold alliance dies with your marriage. You are weak. You are divided. You will fall—and we will be there to pick the bones clean.
Violet read it twice. Then a third time.
"Whoever wrote this," she said slowly, "knows about the two of you. The estrangement. The tension. They're counting on it."
Evander's jaw tightened, but he didn't turn.
"They're not wrong," Cassian said quietly.
"Cassian."
"I'm not saying they're right to do this." He rose, brushing dust from his knees. "I'm saying they're not wrong about the fracture. Everyone can see it. We've been circling each other for decades, Evander. The packs feel it. The court feels it. And now someone's decided to exploit it."
Evander finally turned. His eyes were winter-cold.
"And what would you have me do? Pretend? Perform happiness for the masses?"
"I'd have you talk to me." Cassian's voice cracked on the last word. "Actually talk. Not just council meetings and formal dinners and fucking silence."
The air between them thickened. Violet felt it—the old wound, festering beneath the surface. Two hundred years of love and resentment and words neither of them knew how to say.
She opened her mouth to intervene—
And stopped.
One of the bodies was moving.
Not moving. Breathing.
"Evander." Her voice came out sharp. "The woman. She's alive."
Both kings snapped to attention.
Violet was already on her feet, crossing to the third body—a young woman with dark hair and skin the color of tea, her chest barely rising beneath her torn tunic. The black veins were thickest on her, crawling up her throat, but beneath them, Violet could see the faint flutter of a pulse.
"Barely," she said. "Her heart's working, but it's slow. The poison hasn't reached her brain yet. If I can—"
She checked the second man. He was younger than the first, barely more than a boy, his face still soft with youth.
Pulse. Faint. Threading.
"This one too."
Cassian was already shouting for the guards. Evander knelt beside her, his hand hovering over the woman's chest, his expression unreadable.
"What do you need?"
"Everything." Violet pressed her palms together, feeling her magic surge in response. "And a clear path to the infirmary. Now."
---
The infirmary at Thornhold was a long, narrow hall lined with iron cots and windows that let in weak, watery light. Violet had spent time here before—minor injuries, a fever outbreak among the servants two winters ago—but she'd never seen it like this.
She'd never been the one fighting to hold someone's life in her hands.
The boy went to the first cot. The woman to the second. Violet stood between them, her sleeves rolled to her elbows, her hair escaping its braid in wild curls.
"Seal the doors," she ordered. "No one in or out. I need silence and space and—" She looked at the crowd of healers and guards hovering at the edges of the room. "Out. Everyone out."
They hesitated.
"Now."
They scattered.
Only the kings remained. Cassian had shed his coat, his sleeves rolled up, his expression fierce. Evander stood at the foot of the woman's cot, arms crossed, a statue carved from stone.
"You two as well," Violet said.
"No."
"Cassian—"
"We're not leaving." He met her eyes, and there was something raw in his expression. Something desperate. "You said you'd do this alone. You always do this alone. Not this time."
Her throat tightened.
"I can't protect you if you're here. The magic—it's volatile. If I lose control—"
"Then lose control." Evander's voice was quiet. Steady. "We're not fragile, Violet. We're not strangers to pain."
She stared at them. Both of them. These two ridiculous, infuriating, beautiful men who had somehow decided she was worth fighting for.
"Fine," she said. "But if you get hurt, I'm not healing you."
Cassian's lips twitched. "Fair."
Violet turned back to the cots.
She started with the boy.
His name was Tomas. She didn't know that yet—she'd learn it later, from the healers, from the survivors when they woke. But for now, he was just a body on a cot, a life flickering like a candle in a storm.
She placed her hands on his chest.
The poison was a living thing. She felt it immediately—coiled in his veins, feeding on his magic, his life force, everything that made him a shifter. The nightlock was the poison. The wolfbane was the accelerant. But the curse—the curse was the real danger.
It was clever. Malicious. Woven into his blood like a second heartbeat, pumping through him with every pulse.
"I need to pull it out," she muttered. "All of it. At once. If I leave any behind—"
"It'll regenerate," Evander said. "You'll lose him."
"Yes."
She closed her eyes.
Magic was not gentle. The stories liked to pretend it was—all soft light and whispered words—but the truth was messier. Magic was the raw stuff of creation, the energy that had birthed stars and mountains and the first spark of life. It didn't care about small things like pain. It only cared about balance.
Violet reached for it.
The power flooded through her like ice water, sharp and cold and infinitely vast. It poured down her arms, into her hands, into the boy's body, seeking the poison, the curse, the wrongness that didn't belong.
Tomas arched off the cot.
His mouth opened in a silent scream.
"Hold him," Violet gasped.
Cassian moved immediately, pinning the boy's shoulders to the bed. Evander gripped his legs.
The poison fought back.
It writhed inside him, black tendrils lashing out, trying to find purchase in healthy tissue, trying to spread. Violet gritted her teeth and pushed harder, her magic cutting through it like a blade, severing the connections, drawing the infection toward her hands.
Silver liquid began to seep from Tomas's pores—beading on his skin, thicker than sweat, glistening with that sickly luminescence. It dripped onto Violet's fingers, and she hissed at the burn.
It hurt.
Not like fire. Like acid. Like something ancient and hateful trying to eat its way through her flesh.
She didn't stop.
Minutes passed. Hours. Time became a meaningless blur of pain and focus and the steady pulse of two failing hearts. The women—her name was Sera, Violet would learn later—required a different approach. The poison had spread further in her, reached deeper. Violet had to dive into her bloodstream, to trace the curse through every vein and capillary, to pull it out piece by agonizing piece.
Her nose began to bleed.
Then her ears.
"Violet." Evander's voice, distant. "Violet, you need to stop."
"If I stop, they die."
"You'll die."
"Then I'll die." She wiped her face with her sleeve, leaving a smear of red. "But not before I'm done. I promised them—" She swallowed hard. "I promised them I'd come. That I'd help. I didn't know what I was walking into, but I'm here now, and I'm not leaving until this is finished."
Cassian's hand found her shoulder.
"I'm not leaving either," he said.
She leaned into his touch, just for a moment. Just long enough to breathe.
Then she turned back to Sera and continued the work.
---
Dawn found her on the floor.
She didn't remember sliding down the wall. She didn't remember the exact moment when her legs gave out, when her magic finally sputtered and died, when the world tilted sideways and refused to right itself. All she knew was that one moment she was standing, and the next she was sitting in a puddle of her own sweat and blood, staring at the two cots across the room.
Two chests rising. Falling.
Rising.
Alive.
"You did it."
Evander knelt beside her. His face was drawn, his eyes shadowed, but there was something fierce in his expression—something that looked almost like wonder.
"You actually did it."
"I told you," Violet croaked. "I'm very good at my job."
Cassian appeared on her other side, pressing a cool cloth to her forehead. His hands were trembling. From exhaustion. From adrenaline. From something else entirely.
"You look like death," he said.
"Feel like it too."
"Can you stand?"
"Give me a minute." She closed her eyes. "Or an hour. Maybe a year."
Evander's arm slid around her waist. Cassian's hand found hers. Together, they lifted her from the floor, supporting her weight between them.
"The message," she said. "The one on the wall—"
"We've already sent riders to every corner of the territory." Evander's voice was grim. "Whoever did this won't get far."
"They knew about the two of you. About the—the fracture." Violet's head lolled against his shoulder. "They're trying to destabilize the alliance. Make you fight each other. They're counting on your division."
Cassian's jaw tightened.
"Then we'll prove them wrong."
Violet managed a weak laugh.
"That easy, is it?"
"No." He looked at Evander across her head, and something passed between them—a silent acknowledgment. A truce, fragile but real. "But nothing's ever been easy for us. Why should this be any different?"
They carried her to a cot in the corner of the infirmary, away from the blood and the chaos. Cassian pulled off his coat and draped it over her; Evander retrieved a blanket from somewhere, tucking it around her shoulders with a gentleness that made her chest ache.
"I need to sleep," she mumbled.
"Then sleep." Evander's hand brushed her hair back from her face. "We'll be here when you wake."
"Both of you?"
"Both of us."
She wanted to argue. Wanted to point out that they had duties, responsibilities, a kingdom to run and a threat to investigate. But her body was already sinking into the cot, her eyes already closing, her mind already drifting toward the dark.
"Stay," she whispered.
And as sleep pulled her under, she felt them settle on either side of her. Felt the warmth of their bodies, the weight of their presence, the quiet certainty of their promise.
They stayed.